Are you fed up with poor service from Telkom? If you are then you're not alone.
This time, however, Telkom let down a Cape Town-based non-profit organisation and now Ikamva Youth is planning to fight back with a protest march through the streets of Cape Town.
Ikamva Youth is a non-profit organisation focused on the empowerment of youth through education, e-literacy, training and career guidance. The organisation works mostly in Makhaza, Khayelitsha in the Cape Town area and have installed a tuXlab computer lab at the Nazeema Isaacs library in Makhaze.
In May 2007 Ikamva Youth ordered a DSL line from Telkom for the centre and paid a deposit. Telkom informed them that the DSL line would be installed the following month. This, however, didn't happen.
They were then told, each month, that the DSL line would be installed the following month. Until, in September, Telkom sent Ikamva Youth a letter to inform the organisation that Telkom did not have the the infrastructure to provide the centre with Internet access.
The lab is used by surrounding schools, community members, business owners, students from tertiary institutions, job applicants and more. This was not acceptable to Ikamva Youth and, with the help of the community, they have organised a protest march from parliament in Cape Town to the local Telkom offices in St George's Mall.
Ikamva Youth's Joy Olivier says that the organisation believes that it is the right of the Makhaza community to have access to cheap, reliable and fast Internet access and so they organised the march.
"We're calling on everyone who's sick of Telkom's bad service to join us," says Olivier.
This is our "last resort," says Olivier. "We've spent months calling Telkom, and they kept telling us they'd come do the installation at the end of the following month. Eventually, our learners and members of the community wrote letters to complain, and they said that they would do the installation at the end of September.
Then we received the letter saying that they don't have the infrastructure to provide us with access, and can't accept it. 3G doesn't reach us (only GPRS), wireless doesn't reach us, and we can't afford a satellite dish.
"We have huge plans for the sustainability and roll-out of our project ... and need the Internet in order to do this, so we simply can't let Telkom get away with this."
The protest march will start on Friday 12 October at 14:30. A bus will be leaving from Nazeema Isaacs library at 13:00. If you would like to make use of the bus, please contact Brenda on 0833517374.
Ikamva Youth urges you to sign their online petition, you can also confirm your attendance on Facebook.
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