Technology

R23bn. That's the total of uncollected TV licence fees since 2019 – 84% of the total billed, and 45% of the SABC's entire nominal revenue. Any for-profit corporation facing that kind of shortfall would have been forced to shutter its operations years ago, but the SABC hobbles along from year to year with no concrete plan to extract itself from this morass.

The per-TV licence funding model is decades out of date. Most middleclass South Africans feel no compunction about refusing to pay licence fees because they don’t watch any of the public broadcaster's channels. The broadcaster is generally viewed as yet another failing state-owned enterprise – a money pit into which taxpayers are obliged to pour endless bailouts with no expectation of future improvement. To its credit, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies recently appointed independent research firm BMIT to explore alternatives to the current funding model.