A signal boost for telecoms
New minister Stella Ndabeni-abrahams has her work cut out to reinvigorate this essential part of the economy
It was easy last week to focus on the failure of President Cyril Ramaphosa to fire SA’S two most incompetent ministers, Bathabile Dlamini and Nomvula Mokonyane, but we should be heartened by our new communications minister.
It might be facetious to say Stella Ndabeni-abrahams is infinitely better than her more recent predecessors, because they were such a bunch of useless and corrupt Zuma-ites who did more to advance state capture than the country’s interests. None more so than Faith Muthambi, who, according to the Gupta leaks, forwarded cabinet minutes to the Saxonwold Shebeen owners about the critical switchover to digital terrestrial television (DTT). Her predecessor, the late Roy Padayachie, tried to influence coverage of the Guptas, among other things.
Yet another “Gupta minister” — as former National Treasury directorgeneral Lungisa Fuzile put it at the Zondo commission last week — was “Weekend Special” David Des van Rooyen, whose four-day stint as finance minister in December 2015 after Nhlanhla Nene was sacked cost the economy an estimated R500bn.
It’s improbable that an analysis will ever be done of the economic cost of the long delay in switching to DTT. It is designed to free up valuable spectrum in the 700MHZ and 800MHZ range from the outdated broadcast of analogue TV signals so that it can be used by cellular operators. This spectrum is so valuable and so useful for making wireless broadband more efficient and cost-effective that it’s called the “digital dividend” by the GSM Association, which oversees the cellular industry.
It’s worth remembering that the global deadline for DTT switchover was June 2015, set by the International Telecommunication Union. The lost opportunities are unlikely ever to be calculated, but “the internet could transform sectors as diverse as agriculture, retail, and health care — and contribute as much as $300bn a year to Africa’s GDP by 2025”, according to a 2013 Mckinsey Global Institute report, which projected “$75bn in annual e-commerce sales”. You can imagine how much of that would have accrued to SA, Africa’s most digitally connected economy.
Ndabeni-abrahams will head both the communications and the telecoms & postal services ministries, which will be reintegrated after next year’s elections and were split only to allow former “presidunce” Jacob Zuma to hire more acolytes.
Ramaphosa called the move part of the plan for a “realigned government”. He said the merging of the two departments “is the first wave, but it is also to help with the realignment process which we need ... to put into effect the transformation [of] economic management”. We can only hope telecoms will get the due consideration it needs to drive the economy.
As testimony at the Zondo inquiry has shown, public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan has emerged as arguably SA’S most effective bulwark against the looters. Hopefully Ndabeniabrahams can follow his example.
We can only hope that telecoms will get the due consideration it needs to drive the economy