SABC “disingenuous” about Thursday outages, says CWU
The Communication Workers Union (CWU) says the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) is dishonest about the real reason that led to the disruption of several radio stations.
The public broadcaster issued a statement following disruptions of broadcasts twice in the week before Easter.
According to the SABC it was due to the continuous power outages in the area.
However, the CWU believes that the statement by the SABC management is aimed at watering down the actual crisis at the national public broadcaster.
The union’s Aubrey Tshabalala alleges the disruption was caused by incompetence by the broadcaster to do adequate planning
Tshabalala has lashed out, saying it is disingenuous for the broadcaster to hide behind power outages.
The SABC entered its new structure on 1 April, with 621 employees working their last day at the office on 31 March.
"The fact is that it is not the first time that the SABC experiences power cuts in its entire life span, the latest being Monday and Tuesday of this week, and in all these encounters there was no such disruption.
"It is clear that SABC management had no contingency plan to bed down the transition challenges and the first critical point is that there was no Head of IT on site during this period to date.
"The absence of the IT resource is directly linked to the recent retrenchments," says Tshabalala.
Tshabalala says the second issues with the entity is the depleting infrastructure.
He says the State Owned Entity was granted bail to improve on the infrastructure, instead; workers were retrenched.
"The “Thursday disruption” was informed by many factors such as the Reuters system which feeds the Public broadcaster trading economy news that was not functioning.
"Another important system that was down is the NPS which is used as an editorial system.
"This meant that there could be no editing of news hence we were fed with some stale news.
"The SAP and the internet; both systems had never been disrupted by power failure before," adds Tshabalala
The union also alleges that the broadcaster has no plans to cover the upcoming local government elections.
