By: Kaya 959 News
The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) will lay off 621 staff members at the end of March.
This comes after the public broadcaster announced that it has concluded its Section 189 process and will transition into the new fit-for-purpose structure from April 1.
The retrenchment process began in June 2020.
“Subsequent to the conclusion of the resourcing of the new structure, the total number of employees who will leave the organisation at the end of March 2021 is 621,” SABC said on its website.
It announced that 346 employees opted for voluntary severance packages, while the other 275 employees are those who occupied positions that have become redundant.
A difficult process
SABC’s CEO Madoda Mxakwe said the retrenchment process was “extremely difficult”.
He added that “the Section 189 process was a necessary component of the SABC’s turnaround plan to ensure the public broadcaster’s long term financial sustainability and capacity to fulfill its extensive public mandate. The process was necessary to preserve and reposition the SABC as a resilient and viable public broadcaster and public media organisation.”
Mxakwe said the SABC will continue to provide the public with content that will be in all the South African languages.
“The SABC will continue to diligently serve the tens of millions of South Africans who rely on it for education, sport, news and entertainment, in all our languages. We remain committed to transforming the SABC and taking its content everywhere, across platforms, on all devices and in all our languages. We want to be part of preserving this national treasure which has the public interest at the very heart of its existence,” he concluded.



