The SABC board has moved to suspend CEO Solly Mokoetle, it emerged on Tuesday after the Western Cape High Court overruled attempts by Parliament to hold a briefing on the latest trouble at the public broadcaster behind closed doors.
"They have served him with a legal letter with the intention to suspend him and he has been given an 'x' number of days - exactly how many days I don't know - to respond to the letter to explain why he should not be suspended," said Ismail Vadi, the chairperson of Parliament's portfolio committee on communications.
Vadi was speaking to reporters after the media won an interdict preventing the committee from continuing with an in camera meeting with the SABC on renewed strife at the broadcaster, a mere eight months after Mokoetle and the new board took up their positions.
The ruling was handed down as an interim order shortly before noon by Acting Judge Sven Olivier, following an urgent application by the South African National Editor's Forum (Sanef).
'Dysfunctional' board
The order came after the committee allowed SABC chairperson Ben Ngubane -who has fallen out with commissioners - to deliver a submission defending his position.
"He expressed very serious concerns about the disfunctionality of the board and he cited a whole number of examples which he had experienced which contributed towards the state of disfunctionality."
Following the court order, Vadi decided to suspend the meeting with the SABC indefinitely, rather than proceed and allow the press to attend.
He said he needed to discuss the way forward with Parliament.
"I think we still need to confer with the Speaker's office and the leadership of Parliament about the implications of the judgment because this has a bearing on the functioning of Parliament as a whole and on other committees."
Vadi said the meeting remained urgent, because members of the legislature were perturbed by the problems besetting the ANC.
Closed meeting
These were brought to a head by Mokoetle's decision to name Phil Molefe as head of news without the agreement of the board. Ngubane's backing for the appointment further soured relations between him and commissioners.
"It is a matter of very serious concern to the committee, that is why we summoned the board to appear before the committee," Vadi said.
He decided last week to close most of the meeting to the press, for fear of the legal implications of having somebody's reputation and position challenged in public.
Sanef had on Monday through its lawyers asked the committee to open the meeting, but the committee decided on Tuesday morning that the session would stay closed.
Sanef lawyers were in the Western Cape High Court as the meeting got under way with some 15 journalists from local and foreign news organisations staging a sit-in outside committee room V475 in the legislature in protest at being excluded.
When the committee failed to give an undertaking to suspend the meeting while the application was being heard, they asked acting Judge Sven Olivier for the order.
Lawyers pressed ahead with the application even though Parliament's counsel Willie Duminy told the court that the committee had just decided that though it would continue in closed session, all documentation would be released to the media.
In his ruling handed down just before noon, Olivier ordered that the committee not proceed with any sitting from which the public, including the media, were excluded.
This order would be valid until "the final determination of this matter".
Tense standoff
The ruling came amid an increasingly tense standoff between the media and government over a perceived attack on media freedom, weighted around the Protection of Information Bill and the ANC's proposal for a media tribunal that reports to Parliament.
In an affidavit filed in support of Sanef's court application, the forum's secretary general Gaye Davis said there was a clear public interest in the meeting.
"The SABC is resourced with public funds, and the public has a clear interest in its functioning and a right to information concerning the affairs of the SABC," she said.
"As a corollary, the media has a right and indeed an obligation to report on the functioning and affairs of the SABC."
She said a dangerous a precedent would be set if the meeting was held behind closed doors.
It could become "a frequent resort by chairpersons of committees confronted with difficult issues that are potentially embarrassing for persons occupying public office".
