Tshabalala quits as SABC board chair

Johannesburg - Ellen Tshabalala has resigned as chairperson of the SABC board and also quit the board, the presidency announced on Wednesday.

"The President thanks Ms Tshabalala for her contribution to the public broadcaster and wishes her all the best in her future endeavours," the presidency said in a statement.

University of South Africa (Unisa) executive director for legal services Jan van Wyk told a Parliamentary inquiry last week that though Tshabalala had registered for her BComm degree in both 1988 and 1996, she failed to obtain the qualification, Sapa reports.

According to Unisa records, she had also registered for a diploma in labour relations in 1995.

During the academic year, she passed two, failed two, and did not write two of the modules.

In January 1996, she was allowed to rewrite the two she could not write the previous year. She obtained a score of 13%for her human resources module, and a score of 35% for labour relations.

Unisa then wrote to Tshabalala informing her she would not qualify to redo the course.

Accusations

The committee found Tshabalala guilty of two counts of misconduct last Wednesday.

One for claiming she had obtained the two qualifications on her CV when she applied for the job as SABC chairperson. The other charge relates to an affidavit she submitted to Parliament stating that her qualifications had been stolen during a burglary at her home.

Following the inquiry's decision, Tshabalala accused the committee of deciding her fate before its inquiry was completed.

She said the committee had requested Zuma suspend her prior to the decision made last Wednesday.

"That says it all. Their decision was taken long ago before the inquiry," she told reporters in Johannesburg.

She argued, through her lawyer Michael Tillney, that the committee's decision to recommend that she be removed from office was "procedurally unfair".

Tshabalala rubbished Van Wyk's testimony as "hearsay", saying that Unisa had been having problems with its records and computer system, and they could not be trusted.

She said she had tried numerous times to get a copy of her qualification from Unisa, but had failed because of its computer problem.