Does broadband mean anything to Zuma’s cabinet?
Minister is making the right noises, but Pretoria may not take his pitch seriously, writes Chris Barron
THE question being asked as Communications Minister Yunus Carrim prepares to present his framework policy to the cabinet on Wednesday is: How serious is it? Not the policy, but the government.
Carrim has made a significant impact in the five months since he was appointed to replace the disgraced and ineffectual Dina Pule, and there is little doubt that his framework will go further to address the needs of South Africa than any of the previous policy frameworks we have seen.
But everything will depend on the buy-in of cabinet, and here there are doubts.
“The real underlying problem is that those who hold power in South Africa don’t see the internet as a priority area but as a luxury,” says Arthur Goldstuck, head of information and communications technology research organisation World Wide Worx.
“They might speak the language of broadband boosting GDP and so on, but fundamentally they don’t believe in it.”
“You are so utterly wrong,” Carrim expostulates when I put this to him.
He says the economic cluster ministers “reached out” to him after his appointment. “They each said the same thing — broadband, broadband, broadband.”
Whenever senior ministers and ANC officials engage with the private sector, the message they hear is the same, he says. “The cost of communications has to come down. Please get broadband going.”
After appointing him, President Jacob Zuma said: “Hey, just get this broadband sorted out”.
Zuma and his government must have seen the light very quickly, because there is no indication of the significance of ICT in his state of the nation addresses over the years. Even in Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s annual budget speech there is nary a mention of broadbanddriven economic growth. Even if this does not reflect Gordhan’s own attitude, it is at least an unconscious nod to the attitude of his cabinet colleagues.
Whenever senior ministers and ANC officials engage with the private sector, the message they hear is the same: ’The cost of communications has to come down. Please get broadband going’
“Perhaps it is true to say that we didn’t take broadband sufficiently seriously in the past,” Carrim concedes. But no longer.
He quotes figures from the World Bank and other agencies showing the impact of cheap and fast broadband on the economic growth of developing countries, but it is his cabinet colleagues who need convincing, not the rest of us.
Nor other countries on the continent that have moved ahead of South Africa in terms of broadband.
Carrim concedes that this has been bad for the government’s self-image and suggests that injured pride as much as the maths has persuaded it to take ICT more seriously.
“We are partly driven by the fact that other countries on our continent, which are less developed economically, have moved further ahead with broadband.”
The other major reason for the mind-set change, he says, is that “there has been a much greater focus on the economy. Look at our growth rate against what was projected. Experts have been telling us that if you want the economy to work, then let your ICT grow.”
So the government has finally got the message, then?
Carrim, 57, is unusual among his cabinet colleagues not only for being extremely hard-working and a great listener, but also because he is selfdeprecating.
“Ideally it should have been someone with a more technical background,” he says of his appointment, “but here I am.”
And so, while acknowledging that the government has indeed got the message, he objects to the word “finally”.
That implies that the credit is his, he says. And the last thing he wants is to be portrayed as “some kind of knight in shining armour”.
“The jury is still out on me. These [appreciative noises from the industry] are a lot of words.” The “real test” will be implementation and results.
The government may or may not have got the message, with or without his help. But speaking to Carrim, it becomes clear that the follies of the past will not easily be relinquished.
The two greatest challenges his policy framework will have to address if broadband’s potential to raise GDP is to be fully realised are digital migration and spectrum allocation.
Both have been disaster areas because of the government’s insistence on prioritising transformation above getting the job done.
The road map for digital migration was announced with great fanfare in 2008, but empowerment imperatives have left us in a situation where, as Carrim admits, the June 17 2015 deadline may be missed.
There is a crucial need for set-top boxes to be rolled out as quickly and cheaply as possible by those with the capacity to do it. Carrim acknowledges this, but equivocates.
“We have to give significant space for market forces to operate,” he says. “But we have polices and we must implement those policies. We need to give space to emerging entrepreneurs. There needs to be a balance between transformation and efficient delivery.”
Is this not why we are about to miss the deadline? “Why don’t you give us a chance?” You have had five years? He says for 18 months the process has been held to ransom by competing parties threatening to take it to court, but in spite of this he accepts that “as government we could have worked faster”.
The focus on empowerment rather than delivery impacts directly on spectrum allocation, because digital migration will free up high-demand spectrum, which right now is harder to get than gold dust.
Spectrum allocation is another political hot potato that Carrim may lack the clout to handle the way he perhaps would like to.
Spectrum needs to be given to those with the ability to use it for the benefit of the largest number of con- sumers. This means the big players, Vodacom, MTN and Cell C. If they get more spectrum, we get more bandwidth and the economy grows that much faster.
But here, too, a focus on empowerment and transformation has hindered a critical process. To what extent Carrim’s policy framework will resolve the issue needs to be seen. But again, for political reasons, he has no choice but to balance the need for the efficient allocation of spectrum with the political demand for transformation.
The policy of handing spectrum to emerging entrepreneurs has been a disaster and we have all paid the price.
In spite of the evidence, Carrim insists that “a balance must be struck between ensuring the average consumer benefits by handing spectrum to the relevant private sector parties and emerging entrepreneurs”.
He admits that the issue is “a political hot potato”.
The real test of how serious the government is about ICT will be whether Carrim keeps his job after the 2014 elections.
There is a strong feeling in the industry that he will not, and a palpable sense of despair and frustration at the prospect of losing someone who has injected so much new energy and vision into ICT in such a short time.
Goldstuck is one who believes that, despite pious protestations to the contrary, the cabinet does not take ICT seriously.
“The moment they see a Carrim come along who can knock a department into shape and start delivering, they say ‘let’s deploy this truly effective minister to an area where he is really needed’.”
Carrim, who leaves one in no doubt that he would love to stay and implement his framework policy, says it is not the individual but the policy itself that counts.
No doubt we will see.