Local telecoms disaster
COMMUNICATIONS Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri came in for a well-deserved verbal mauling at a conference staged by MyBroadband, an online telecoms industry forum, last week.
She won a prize for doing the most harm to the industry, and panellists debating industry progress tore her policies to shreds.
Telecoms lawyer Dominic Cull said the communications department was incompetent, lacked leadership, had created a policy vacuum and failed utterly to take telecoms services to poor or rural areas.
But the future could be just as gloomy as the past. Asked if the industry might fare better under the Zuma-induced change of political leadership, Cull replied: “I don’t know where you would find grounds for optimism.”
Nobody in the political ranks really understood the telecoms sector, he said, although if the deputy minister, Roy Padayachie, took over, things might improve.
“If it’s a political employee, to reward someone from the Zuma camp, perhaps we will go backwards,” he warned. “If we get another 10 years of the Ivy factor it’s going to be a disaster.”
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