SECTOR 3 A panellist said that as a public broadcaster, the SABC was required in terms of its editorial policy to broadcast in all of the country’s 11 official languages, as well as in sign language, but that it was failing in this regard ‘because there is not sufficient money for this’. SABC TV news is broadcast in English, with two other shared evening bulletins in Siswati/Ndebele and Xhosa/Zulu on SABC One, while SABC Two has Venda/Tsonga and Setswana/Sesotho news and SABC Three broadcasts news in English. The broadcaster does, however, have 21 radio stations, which among them broadcast in all official languages: • • • • • • • • • • • • English (SAfm, 5FM, Metro FM) isiZulu (Ukhozi FM) Afrikaans (Radio Sonder Grense) isiXhosa (Umhlobo Wenene) Sesotho/Southern Sotho (Lesedi FM) Sepedi/Northern Sotho (Thobela FM) Setswana (Motsweding) siSwati (Ligwalagwala) Xitsonga (Munghana Lonene) isiNdebele (Ikwekwezi FM) Venda (Phalaphala FM), and !Xu, Khwe/Khoi and San indigenous languages (XK FM). One panellist noted positively that, ‘in many areas of the country, the SABC does offer a service that you cannot get otherwise.’ It was noted that TV licence fees alone were not enough to sustain the SABC and the fact that the public broadcaster had to ‘outsource its licence fee collection department to attorneys was a sign of how much people had lost trust in the SABC’. In March 2018, the Minister of Communications, Nomvula Mokonyane, told Parliament that the public broadcaster was owed 25.5 million ZAR (1,700,000 USD) by people who had not paid their licence fees. Only onethird of people with TV sets had actually paid their licence fees. A panellist noted that the fact that the SABC also admitted publicly to facing liquidity challenges indicates the severity of the problem. ‘They have been technically insolvent for a long time but to publicly announce it for the first time indicates the severity of the problem.’ The Auditor-General, however, had noted a year earlier that the broadcaster was insolvent during the tabling of the SABC’s 2016-2017 annual report, which recorded a loss of 1.1 billion ZAR (69,000,000 USD) versus 593 million ZAR (41,000,000 USD) in the previous financial year. The SABC’s audited statements from 2015/2016 showed that the public broadcaster had made a profit of more than 800 million ZAR (55,000,000 USD) before it began its rapid financial decline under former COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng. 43 AFRICAN MEDIA BAROMETER SOUTH AFRICA 2018