Cape Town - Parliament will re-advertise three of the vacancies at the troubled SABC board, including that of former chairwoman Ellen Tshabalala, despite having previously shortlisted five candidates for her position, the chairwoman of the portfolio committee on communications confirmed on Tuesday.
“We do need a re-advertisement and that advertisement will be running from the end of the month to mid-October. That is the positions of Ellen Tshabalala, Bongani Khumalo and Thembinkosi Bonakele,” Joyce Moloi-Moropa said.
The decision was taken in June after the committee was disappointed by the quality of the applications it received for the three posts.
“We now need to go ahead,” she said, before the committee again descended into a shouting match when Democratic Alliance MP Gavin Davis raised the issue of three other vacancies on the board - those left by the contested removal of Hope Zinde, Rachel Kalidass and Ronnie Lubisi.
Davis insisted that it was pointless advertising board memberships until the committee had resolved a bitter political row over their removal, embroiling Communications Minister Faith Muthambi.
“We need to clean up the mess created by the removal of these three. We cannot seperate the two issues. We will again not get good candidates because people know that they will have no security of tenure if they can be removed at a whim by the board, with the backing of the minister,” he said.
Moloi-Moropa implored him to drop the issue, saying he had no right to introduce something that was not on the agenda.
“You are now taking us in circles… I will not allow it,” she said.
At issue is a parliamentary legal opinion requested by the committee that held that the Broadcasting Act was the applicable legislation and that therefore only the president could remove SABC board members.
But Muthambi was unrepentant, terming the legal opinion “very wrong” and insisting the removal of the three was lawful.
Moloi-Moropa has since refused to discuss the issue.
“Please, I don’t want to go there,” she told ANA on Tuesday.
The heated row between the ANC and Davis about this continued into the parliamentary corridor and elevator.
ANC MP David Kekana said even if the legal opinion were correct he believed the removal of the three remained lawful because none of them had objected within the given timeframe.
However, this is contested as letters have been leaked to show that Zinde did write to Moloi-Maropa to object. Her correspondence suggested that board members were being purged because they had dared oppose SABC chief operations officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng.
ANA