SABC left in lurch
Minister has spectrum success, but analogue failure
Communications minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni is, I am told, one of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s favourite ministers.
A relative youngster in Ramaphosa’s cabinet (she’s 46), she managed last year to get the long-overdue broadband spectrum auction over the line, something her many predecessors in the portfolio were incapable of doing. In this way, R14bn was raised for the fiscus.
She achieved this by getting out of the way and not trying to use the licensing process as part of a grand ideological scheme to re-engineer a sector that has succeeded despite the ANC, not because of it.
The minister has also taken a more pragmatic approach than her predecessors; instead of treating companies such as Vodacom and MTN, which together invest about R20bn in telecommunications infrastructure each year, like the enemy, she has shown interest in addressing their often valid concerns.
Unlike one of her recent predecessors, Siyabonga Cwele, she did not take communications regulator Icasa to court to try to stop it from licensing new spectrum to mobile operators. Instead, she actively supported the process
key to its successful conclusion.
Cwele wanted to license all available broadband-suitable spectrum to a wireless openaccess network an unproven concept that failed in other places it was tried, including Rwanda and Mexico.
Instead of opening the market further by allowing spectrum trading (bizarrely, this is still unlawful) and other procompetitive measures, Cwele wanted to impose ANC central planning with the aim of forcing a radical overhaul of the sector.
In short, Cwele wanted to recreate an infrastructure monopoly a bit like the Telkom of old that would have punished Vodacom and MTN for their market successes. In doing so, he threatened to kill the geese that laid the golden eggs. Ramaphosa, who chaired the MTN Group board for many years and knows the sector, put a stop to this anti-investment nonsense in 2018, soon after becoming president. Cwele was quickly shifted out of the communications portfolio, and out of the cabinet less than a year later.
When it comes to digital migration the still-to-becompleted project to move South Africa from analogue to digital terrestrial television the list of ministerial failures is even longer. It includes names such as Cwele, Stella NdabeniAbrahams,
Nomvula Mokonyane, Faith Muthambi, Yunus Carrim, Dina Pule, Roy Padayachie and Siphiwe Nyanda. (Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri is not included in this list as she died in office before she could meet a self-imposed deadline of November 2011 to complete the migration project.)
These former communications ministers were in over their heads, incompetent or simply allowed themselves to be swayed by commercial interests or, as was the case with Muthambi, went to bat for the Guptas and their criminal state capture enterprise.
Ntshavheni, despite her desire to get things done, may still find herself joining the long list of ANC communications ministers who could not accomplish the move to digital television.
She’s certainly more determined than many of her predecessors to see the project through and no doubt has Ramaphosa breathing down her neck about it but she is nevertheless at risk of failing, mainly due to her apparent unwillingness to engage with key sector role players, including the broadcasters, about matters that have a direct bearing on them. This is even after she was ordered by the Constitutional Court last year, in a judgment in a case brought against her by free-to-air broadcaster e.tv, to do just that: consult.
Ntshavheni insists she has consulted thoroughly and is not in breach of the Constitutional Court judgment. Yet key roleplayers tell me there has been little by way of consultation. And it must be asked of the minister how exactly she has managed to consult with the SABC (which stands to lose millions of viewers if digital migration is mishandled) given that the public broadcaster has
scandalously not had a board of directors since October. That’s more than four months, and counting.
As former SABC board member Michael Markovitz now head of the Gordon Institute of Business Science’s new Media Leadership Think Tank
said in a tweet last week (edited): “The shareholder compact [with the SABC] states that the minister must engage via the board chair. It is a big concern that [the] government is proceeding with analogue switch-off without an SABC board in place.
“Government’s plan is to switch off millions of analogue-only households in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, the Western Cape and the Eastern Cape on March 31. Is the SABC being sacrificed on the altar of R14bn from the telecom companies for spectrum?”
The SABC is unlikely to take the minister to court over its concerns about how the process, if rammed through, could harm it financially heck, it won’t even criticise the minister publicly. E.tv, on the other hand, doesn’t share such reservations and has made it clear it is prepared to head back to court if it feels aggrieved.
While Ntshavheni is right to want to get digital migration done, and done soon, she also cannot use this urgency to ride roughshod over the broadcasting industry. South Africa is still a democracy, after all, not an authoritarian state.