What should Telkom do to make more people like them?
When asked to write a story on the things a monopolistic monolith like Telkom can do to make people like them, the easiest answer is to simply say the company has no chance of ever being liked by the people of South Africa, since it has spent far too long having its way with consumers who never really had a choice anyway.
However, hypothetically speaking, if the company decided that since it is the Season of Goodwill, it would acquiesce to requests by people to turn over a new leaf and become a likeable entity in the local ICT space (and of course if that WERE to happen, Nationwide Airlines would have a new problem, since pigs would’ve also sprouted wings), what would be on the list of things it would need to do in order to achieve this?
A snap poll suggests that the single most important thing the company could do in order to make itself liked by the man in the street would be the ICT equivalent of ‘war reparations’ – namely, for Telkom to refund the enormous amounts of money it has acquired through being a controlling monopoly.
After all, one could make a case that such an environment has effectively allowed Telkom to steal or extort billions of rands over the years from South African businesses and consumers, through using its monopoly to artificially maintain prices at a ridiculously high level. In fact, one could make a strong case that they continue to do so.
Another action the company could take to get into people’s good books would be for it to finally follow through on and actually implement those social goals for which it got its monopoly in the first place.
Then there is the contentious issue of its ongoing obstructionism and litigious behaviour. Telkom is well-renowned for taking ‘competitors’ to court over the slightest perceived infractions, and yet is the first one to cry ‘foul’ when something goes against it.
And it could also refrain from trotting out the tired cliché of ‘we welcome competition, as it only makes the market stronger as a whole, which ultimately benefits us’: We all know that Telkom fights tooth and nail to prevent any semblance of competition ever gaining a foothold in the market.
Lifting its bandwidth caps would go a long way to getting into consumers’ good books too, as would supplying upstream bandwidth at reasonable rates.
Of course, when one looks at the list of things that it could do to make itself likeable, there is absolutely nothing on it that Telkom would ever actually do.
A colleague of mine pointed out that ultimately, it is the government that is to blame for the debacle we are now faced with, but Telkom has no right to claim that it is hated unfairly, given that not only is government a major shareholder, but that it has consistently lobbied to this conflicted shareholder for favourable deals that are against the interest of the entire South African economy.
Those of us who have spent our time in the trenches of ICT journalism have always referred to Telkom as ‘the monopoly’ for a very good reason, and there is – unfortunately – very little hope of things changing for the better in the near future.
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