<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by CreepyCrawley</i>
<br />Thing is Turtle... lots of people are trying to improve things. Many people have tried to improve things over the last few years. And it has accomplished squat.
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Well I can't say I agree that nothing has been accomplished, but I know you won't be convinced by anything less than <i>tangible</i> results so I'm not going to argue that point. The fact is though these things move slowly even under the best of circumstances .. if you want 'instant results' then, well, this might not be the place for you. I know we're all extremely impatient for results, I mean I want cheap broadband *yesterday*, but generally "country-building" is measured in decades, not years or months. In the broader scheme of SA's history the past five years or so is only a tiny 'bump' (although that's not an excuse) .. but since you use the US as an example, let's put things in perspective: The US suffered under a telecommunications monopoly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T) for basically over <b>60 years</b> in the previous century, and through the 60s and 70s and early 80s they basically had the situation we have now with with Telkom: very high prices, bad service, and no choice. A 1974 anti-trust suit took <b>eight years</b> just to reach a decision, and took a *further* two years after that to only *begin* to implement the solution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_bells) in 1984. So it took the US over a decade just to respond to their "Telkom". Seemingly you hold our government to far higher standards than the US government .. I wonder if your opinion would be as low if you had been living in the US in the '70s. We've only really suffered very badly under Telkom for about five years.
Don't get me wrong though, I'm not making excuses for our governments' inability to act speedily in this sector. And in many ways this issue is more pressing today because telecomms has become so much more important to economies than in the previous century, mainly due to the Internet. But one has to keep things in perspective, these are 'setbacks' in a longer-term goal and not evidence of some lack of future of SA. IMO though, we shouldn't compare ourselves to the US, we should compare ourselves to a country like South Korea (but Lord knows Ivy Matsepe is no Chin Daeje) .. basically they took the attitude "let's stop being followers of technological trends, let's become world leaders" and with good leadership it worked, they're way ahead of anyone else in telecomms. (Main problem with SA IMO is we're still stuck in a "catch-up" mindset. We're followers .. we see ourselves as "consumers" or "users" of technology, not creators thereof. You can never get ahead by aiming to be "as good as" any developed country is now. You have to aim to be better than everyone else. Very few SAns think like this, least of all our politicians.)
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