Fibre27.08.2024

Vumatel’s construction mafia headache

Vumatel’s rollout and maintenance operations in the Khayelitsha township in the Western Cape have been on pause for over nine months due to violence against its contractors.

In addition, the fibre network operator (FNO) has halted the same activities in another township — Delft — next to the Cape Town International Airport — for roughly four months.

MyBroadband first reported on the issues in Khayelitsha in March 2024, after noticing that prominent Internet service provider Afrihost had posted a message from Vumatel concerning “challenges” in Khayelitsha.

The notice has remained on Afrihost’s network status page since mid-December 2023 but was altered in April 2024 to include Delft as an area impacted by the same problems.

“Due to increased violence in Khayelitsha and Delft, our contractor partners are not able to freely access the area to work,” Vumatel said.

“All maintenance and installation activities in this area will be on hold until further notice. The safety of our contractor partners remains our priority.”

Vumatel is targeting lower-income neighbourhoods as its next major growth driver through its more affordable Vuma Key and Vuma Reach products.

Over the past few years, affluent and middle-class suburbs have become saturated with connectivity options, including fibre-to-the-home (FTTH), fixed-LTE, and fixed-5G.

People in townships and informal settlements might not have the financial means to afford the packages available to conventional FTTH customers.

However, several FNOs have explained that rollouts in lower-income areas can be more cost-effective due to their higher population densities.

Dewald Booysen, the chief operations officer at Vumatel holding company Maziv, previously told MyBroadband that crime and violence had become an increasing challenge in underserved regions facing general service delivery issues.

“We view this as part of a broader challenge to enhance infrastructure and service delivery for underserved communities,” Booysen said.

At the time, Booysen assured that Vumatel was still generally able to maintain its services on the impacted network.

Dewald Booysen, Maziv chief operating officer

In more recent feedback, Vumatel said that Khayelitsha has been an ongoing challenge due to criminal elements operating in the area. 

“We have engaged both the City of Cape Town and SAPS for assistance in finding a way forward,” the company said.

“While we work on finding solutions through engagement with authorities, we will continue to engage the communities to find sustainable solutions to benefit all stakeholders.”

Vumatel said the issues were affecting several thousand customers.

South African law enforcement and property developers have had their hands full in dealing with construction mafias preventing the rollout of key infrastructure, commercial, and housing projects.

These criminals threaten violence or disruption of construction activities unless they are paid “protection fees”.

Another related issue is community “business forums”, which demand that the developers or infrastructure installers employ people from their areas, requiring time-consuming and costly training and significantly slowing down project timelines.

The Cape Chamber of Commerce and Industry recently said that the issue has eaten into an unnamed FNO’s already small profit margins because it required that each neighbourhood be assigned via a request-for-quote process.

The chamber also revealed that an “up-and-coming” telecoms company was forced to move its office from Khayelitsha to Belville due to extortion threats.

Other major FNOs — including Frogfoot, Metrofibre, and Octotel — have acknowledged construction mafias and business forums as major challenges to the success of their businesses.

Stopping infrastructure expansion “treason”

According to a recent Daily Maverick report, 91 cases of construction-related extortion were under investigation in South Africa, although the actual number of incidents is likely to be far higher.

Sunday Times has also learnt that one of Cape Town’s largest civil engineering companies would no longer work in the city’s crime hotspots due to severe extortion, theft, and violent attacks in these areas.

That particular company saw one of its employees killed and another wounded in separate shootings involving construction mafias.

Western Cape Property Development Forum chair Deon van Zyl has labelled the crime as “treason” because of its devastating impact on service delivery.

“When criminal elements undermine the government’s ability to serve its people through infrastructure delivery, those criminals are causing social unrest,” said Van Zyl.

“If the actions of the construction mafia are not treated as treason, then law and order agencies are, through non-action, supporting the possible implosion of government.”

The fight against the construction mafia in Cape Town cost at least one city official — Wendy Kloppers — her life.

Kloppers was gunned down at a housing development in February 2024 after the city refused to give in to demands from gang members who wanted to work on the project.

Outside of the Western Cape, construction mafia activity has also been rife in KwaZulu-Natal, where public works and infrastructure MEC Martin Meyer has received death threats for his efforts in dismantling the crime.

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