By Solly Mapaila

Like its Broederbond founders, MultiChoice seeks to defend the indefensible over its exploitative contract in which it assumes virtual control over much of the SABC`s news. In its contract with the SABC, MultiChoice also takes over the SABC`s priceless national cultural heritage, its archives.

MultiChoice executive chair, Mr Nolo Letele, insists that anyone who disagrees with him is a victim of "lies that have been repeated so often" (Sunday Independent, 19 April 2015). He also, bizarrely, suggests the MultiChoice-SABC deal "is no secret".

Both statements are less than honest, and as chair, Letele knows it.

The version of the SABC-MultiChoice contract signed by Hlaudi Motsoeneng on 3 July 2013 is unambiguous: MultiChoice gets control over all material broadcasts on the pay-TV channel made up of content drawn from the SABC`s entertainment archives. The SABC has since announced that the channel is to be called "Encore" when it launches next month.

The contract states categorically that once a TV production has appeared on "Encore", it may never again be used by the SABC on its free-to-air channels or licensed to any other broadcaster by the SABC.

That can only be described as "control" being exercised by MultiChoice – particularly as reports from unhappy SABC production staff indicate that the material is moving from the Auckland Park SABC archives to be digitised at MultiChoice`s Randburg headquarters in vast quantities. The SABC is not keeping copies in Auckland Park, so once it is in Randburg, the material is lost to the South African public. It is in the hands of a company that has demonstrated that all it cares about is profit maximisation – if necessary by taking from the South African working class and poor and selling (at inflated prices) to the rich. Who is financially benefitting from this secret deal?

The country is losing a priceless heritage, sold at bargain-basement prices, in terms of a contract that blatantly breaches the Broadcasting Act, the SABC`s enabling statute.

The Sunday Independent allowed Letele to repeat the standard MultiChoice response that its contract with the SABC "is not a secret … rather it is a standard commercial agreement between two television channels". This is a graphic example of Lenin`s dictum that "a lie told often enough becomes the truth".

What the SACP finds most distasteful in this unholy deal is the inevitable marginalization of African languages on channel 404, in direct breach of the SABC`s own language policies and public mandate.  It even gives MultiChoice some discretion over what can be defined as an "event of national interest". Sadly this represents a recapture of the SABC by Naspers, an agenda we thought we defeated in 1994! And the SABC has indeed become a post-1994 bantustan.

The deal also compels the SABC to support MultiChoice`s commercial drive to keep all competitors out of the South African pay TV market, thus maintaining Naspers` (MultiChoice`s controlling shareholder) pay-TV monopoly established in the last decade of apartheid and maintained with such aggression ever since. MultiChoice`s monopoly and its unhealthy influence over government policy and broadcast regulation are, incidentally, the reasons South Africans pay so much for subscription TV. All our major sports codes – football, rugby, cricket, boxing and so on - are held hostage by this monopoly. Opposition to encryption of the set-top boxes is based on only one consideration, keeping the monopoly of Multi-Choice in South Africa`s pay TV market and its fat profits.

Back to the statement that the SABC-MultiChoice agreement "is no secret". Members of the SABC Board – current and recently removed – may beg to differ. They did not see the contract until months after it was signed – making it illegal on the date of signing. The first time several of them saw it was a copy leaked from within their own organisation, and covertly passed back to them. The SABC board discussed it for the first time in September 2013 – three months after it was signed, and the SABC received its R30-million "advance". It is not clear that the board ever formally approved the agreement. We are told that this is also "commercially sensitive information" and thus not to be released to the public whose money keeps the SABC alive.

Neither the SABC nor MultiChoice has even formally released the contract. If it is a "standard commercial agreement for the supply of two television channels" they could do so fairly easily, particularly as it deals with publicly-owned assets in the form of the archive. They can protect their interests by excising the payment parts of this agreement.

But in papers currently before the Competition Tribunal, MultiChoice maintains that the contract has been amended several times since it was first signed, and that the amendments are subject to commercial confidentiality requirements. Translated, that means MultiChoice and the SABC won`t let us see them. But Letele insists the contract "is no secret".

Finally, it is worth mentioning that a judgment released by the Competition Tribunal on another Naspers subsidiary contains the chilling finding: "Has Media24 been transparent and honest about the locus of control of Novus? Unequivocally, no". Presumably Letele, as executive chair of another subsidiary, shares a corporate culture with his colleagues managing Media24 and Novus.

There is no doubt that the contract gives MultiChoice "control" over the SABC`s entertainment archives, and that the contract has been and remains shrouded in secrecy. Letele can deny it as much as he likes, and may even have come to believe what he says. What he is telling the public is a lie!

The SACP, and no doubt the majority of the workers and poor of our country, remain resolutely opposed to this blatant privatisation of the SABC. We call upon the SABC to release this contract in public, and we challenge both MultiChoice and the SABC to a public debate on this matter.

Solly Mapaila is second deputy General Secretary of the South African Communist Party

To the courtesy of the Sunday Independent, 26 April 2015 which first published the piece; this is the edited version.