According to feedback from Ellipsis Regulatory Solutions, a telecoms sector specialist, South Africa’s proposal to replace the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s TV licence fee with a broadcasting tax will take more than five years to implement.
Recall that the country’s governing party’s (the ANC) national executive committee first discussed a household levy to replace TV Licences in December 2020. This followed the publication of a draft white paper in October 2020 that called for fundamental changes to the SABC’s funding model.
The white paper proposed, “There will be a comprehensive overhaul of the SABC’s funding model based on international best practices to ensure that the public broadcaster has adequate funds to meet its public mandate.”
The SABC brought the proposal to public hearings of the SABC Bill in September 2021.
In simple terms, the broadcaster wants TV licences to become a tax that households and businesses must pay, irrespective of whether they consume the SABC’s content or own a TV set.
Recently, Communications minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni announced that the ANC supported dropping the licence in favour of a household levy.
Ntshavheni said that TV licences were not a sustainable mechanism for funding the public broadcaster and confirmed that the government had started drafting the relevant framework for a household levy.
However, Ellipsis Regulatory Solutions says the minister’s 3–5 year timeline to scrap the TV licence fee was too short.
The company explained that the process would require intensive engagement with other departments, such as National Treasury, to allow the levy to be incorporated into the government budget.
In addition to the drawn-out legal and financial processes, Dominic Cull of Ellipsis Regulatory Solutions maintained that there would be fierce public resistance to the household levy.
Commenting on the new model, Former SABC board member Michael Markowitz said it did not make sense to scrap TV licences.
Instead, he believes that government should fix the “broken” methods for collecting licence fees.
