Toby Shapshak: Pattern Recognition

officer and BT’s regional director before that, alone knows more about managing a modern telecom company than all the combined head honchos from Solidarity, the Communications Workers Union and the Communications Union, who sought the court interdict.

Turning any business around is hard enough, especially when it’s a state-owned behemoth with a declining monopoly on voice calls, something that is now so commoditised that cellular operators offer all-youcan-eat packages for reasonable rates.

Maseko, remarkably, seemed to have the backing of Telkom’s largest shareholder, government, when he announced the job cuts last month.

Telkom has too high a ratio of staff to customers — despite arguments that it needs such a large workforce for the size of the country — and is already, as Maseko says, “being attacked from all flanks”.

Cellular is stealing Telkom’s voice and data customers, while new fibre players are eating Telkom’s lunch by dealing directly with irate residents’ associations who want decent broadband and have given up on Telkom’s delayed fibre plans. Meanwhile, there’s the delicious irony of perpetual offender Telkom taking Vodacom to Icasa over its planned purchase of Neotel. Delaying tactics, much?

As we’ve seen with the platinum industry, the scorchedearth strategy used by the Association of Mineworkers & Construction Union might’ve resulted in the increases it was seeking, but this was at the expense of the industry and the companies employing its members.

It’s bad enough that government doesn’t understand that telecoms are the lifeblood in this new Internet-enabled era of global e-commerce. Now we have telecom companies being dictated to by aggrieved minorities in a way that is not constructive for anyone’s long-term interests.