Markets could do Cwele’s job better

IT’S been a year since President Jacob Zuma shocked South Africa’s communications technology industry by announcing he was splitting the communications department in two — creating a new Department of Communications and, reversing the trend of convergence, renaming the old one the Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services.

If it was Zuma’s intention to split the department to speed up policy implementation, the experiment has been an abject failure. The telecoms department under Siyabonga Cwele has achieved little in the past 12 months. And consumers and the telecoms and IT industry are suffering for it.

Cwele has plenty on his plate, if he could just be bothered to get to it. His department needs to issue a raft of policies to speed up the delivery of broadband. By not doing so, he is standing in the way of the government’s professed desire to expand affordable access to the internet, including to the rural poor.

His budget speech vote in parliament was devoid of action plans. All he did was repeat the same tired promises. Frankly, it was a snooze fest. A sector that should play a key role in growing the economy deserves a political leader who understands the issues and acts as a champion for what the sector is capable of achieving. Cwele is not that person.

Perhaps it’s not fair to pin all the blame on Cwele, who is just the latest in a long line of telecoms ministers — the fifth under Zuma’s presidency alone after Siphiwe Nyanda (what happened to him?), the late Roy Padayachie, the disgraced Dina Pule and the hard-working and widely admired Yunus Carrim.

Each inherited a dysfunctional department, where infighting seems to be the order of the day.

A powerful director-general, Rosey Sekese, is said to be at the centre of the paralysis; policies, even urgent ones, take years to produce and often don’t see the light of day.

The government, for example, should have published its policy on high-demand spectrum years ago. Only now is it (apparently) going to be sent to the cabinet for approval.

And a policy on the rapid deployment of network infrastructure — needed to allow telecoms firms to build networks faster — is missing in action. These “rapid deployment guidelines” will assist operators by getting rid of the red tape that holds up applications to build infrastructure, if only they were published. The list goes on. Instead of being seen to press his department to get a move on with these crucial projects, Cwele seems more interested in visiting post offices (more so than actually fixing the broken institution), schools and police stations to assess their connectivity needs.

And he had the temerity, in March, to accuse the market of failing to deliver broadband to all South Africans when justifying the government’s decision to intervene by naming Telkom the lead agency for the roll-out in underserviced areas.

That project, on which Telkom has begun work, looks designed more to allow politicians to boast how they have brought infrastructure to rural schools, clinics and other facilities than to have an impact on millions of rural people’s lives.

The fact is, the government hasn’t given the market the chance to prove itself. If anything, there has been a failure of government rather than a failure of the markets.

If Cwele genuinely wants to get the internet into the hands of everyone (and I believe he does), he should get the private sector to do it, using a carrot-and-stick approach, for example, in allocating new spectrum.

ANC politicians need to (but probably won’t ever) get over their manifest ideological distrust of the market economy. This distrust is holding back South Africa’s development in too many ways.

Even if Cwele believes the government needs to play a central role in expanding digital access to the poor (it doesn’t), that’s no excuse for retarding private sector growth by dawdling over the crucial policy work his department is there for.

Let’s hope he does more — a lot more — in his second year as minister.

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