Government’s in no rush to bring SA up to speed

AFTER years of inaction and delay in resolving some of the big policy bottlenecks holding back South Africa’s communications technology industry — a sector that has the potential to underpin economic growth and lift countless people out of poverty — one would have thought that it would be an area where President Jacob Zuma’s administration would have expended particular effort after the May general election.

The opposite has happened. Since May, when Zuma decided, apparently at a whim, to split the Department of Communications into two new departments, one looking after telecommunications and postal services and the other effectively acting as a propaganda ministry that houses the SABC and Government Communication and Information System, policy formulation and decisionmaking have gone into stasis.

Nothing that needs the urgent attention of either Telecommunications Minister Siyabonga Cwele or Communications Minister Faith Muthambi has been dealt with resolutely. Indeed, the two still seem to be warring over which of them will manage South Africa’s already embarrassingly late project to migrate

The country still hasn’t even begun the process of ‘dual illumination’

broadcasters from analogue to digital technology.

There are only seven months to go if the government is going to keep its promise to the world that it will complete the project on time (it won’t). Yet the country still hasn’t even begun the process of “dual illumination”, where analogue and digital signals coexist so that consumers can buy the set-top boxes they’ll need to continue receiving terrestrial broadcasts. Dual illumination takes years.

Instead, South Africa is engaged in an ill-thought-through project to try to build a black-owned industrial electronics base on the back of a settop box tender, hoping that somehow, beyond this one government tender, local businesses will be able to compete with the Chinese. The only way that could happen is through hefty state grants that the national fiscus can ill afford and through the sort of foolish protectionism that is the antithesis of the free market system.

Almost a year has passed since former communications minister Yunus Carrim presented what should have been a final policy on digital migration to cabinet. Since then, little has happened.

There’s no resolution to the war between MultiChoice and e.tv over whether the set-top boxes should contain an encryption system. And there’s no sign of political leadership on the issue. Instead, little if anything is happening regarding an issue that has crucial implications for the broadcasting industry and the broader economy, which will benefit when incumbent and yet-to-be-licensed telecoms operators are given the spectrum they need to extend wireless broadband networks more broadly across South Africa.

Policies dealing with the rapid deployment of telecoms infrastructure — crucial for allowing mobile and fixed-line operators to build networks quickly with as little red tape as possible — are gathering dust. The same goes for a policy dealing with the allocation of the spectrum the telecoms operators need so that they can build strong 4G networks, instead of reallocating bits of voice spectrum so that they can offer rudimentary 4G access today.

Then there’s the South Africa Post Office, which, by all accounts, will collapse if it doesn’t receive a government bailout soon. The government appears to have dawdled, even as the crippling strike has dragged into its fourth month.

On broadband there has been little activity since the election.

At a recent press conference, Cwele said no decisions had been made about what role Broadband Infraco and other state-owned companies would play in the government’s plan to reduce the digital divide. He said there were “intense” discussions in the government on various options for those stateowned entities to cooperate with one another and with the private sector in extending broadband.

“From our side, there is no rush,” he said. That, I would submit, is the problem.

McLeod edits TechCentral.co.za. Find him on Twitter @mcleodd