MASHILE’S MESS
South Africa’s broadcasting and telecommunications regulator is in crisis. Serious questions are being asked about the management ability of Paris Mashile, who chairs the powerful decision-making council of the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa). And senior staff are leaving faster than they can be replaced.
The ability of Icasa to do its job matters a great deal to individual South Africans as well as to the broader economy. Without it, consumers can expect to continue to pay exorbitantly high phone bills, businesses will stay locked out of expanding into ventures such as business process outsourcing and call centres, and there won’t be any new offerings in radio and television broadcasting. President Thabo Mbeki has identified high telecom prices as a brake on economic growth and job creation.
Icasa’s current woes couldn’t have come at a worse time.
The Electronic Communications Act, which will have a far-reaching impact on the telecom, IT and media industries, will be promulgated soon. With it will come an enormous additional workload for Icasa. In addition, the crisis could stall new regulations Icasa is putting together in an effort to rein in high telecom prices.
In the space of a few months, the authority has lost four of its five general managers, who oversee projects and develop recommendations for Icasa’s council. Many more senior managers have left. Its CEO, Jackie Manche, has been suspended since November and acting CEO Eric Nhlapo, who is also GM of broadcasting, has resigned. Three out of seven councillors – they write regulations – are leaving when their terms expire at month-end .
On top of all this, the credibility and competence of chairman Mashile has been questioned.
One former senior staffer, who asks not to be named, says he sees little hope for Icasa. "I can’t see that the regulator will recover without significant intervention, given the number of vacancies," he says. "Consider that virtually all institutional memory has been lost and that there remain few, if any, senior managers in the legal, broadcasting and telecom divisions."
Democratic Alliance MP Dene Smuts says the industries that Icasa regulates are "really, really worried" about its capacity problems. "There is clearly a loss of confidence, both in the ability of Icasa to regulate effectively and in its administration."
Manche argues that Icasa "has always had a lot of challenges". But, she believes, "this is the worst crisis in the two years I’ve been there".
Fears that the regulator is imploding have been fuelled by damaging allegations against Mashile. The most serious of these have come from his former personal assistant, Shameen Naidoo, who left Icasa recently to take up a post at IT group Dimension Data. In an exit interview that was leaked to the press, Naidoo accuses Mashile of incompetence and gross neglect.
Though it could be argued that Naidoo’s views on Mashile are tainted because of the bad relationship she had with her boss, she’s not alone in questioning the chairman’s leadership ability.
A former senior Icasa official says Mashile has not demonstrated the leadership needed to manage an organisation as complex as Icasa.
Manche agrees. "[Former Icasa chairman] Mandla Langa was able to rein in some of those challenges. I’m not saying there weren’t challenges under Mandla, but he was able to handle them."
The former Icasa official says Mashile is too mistrustful of those around him. "He thinks the world is out to get him."
In fact, Mashile believed that there was a plot to discredit him and hound him out of the chair. He told the FM that not long after his appointment as chairman he was approached by a senior employee he won’t name who warned him of a plot to have him removed from office. He says he was told that some people with vested interests in the industries Icasa regulates had taken umbrage at his appointment and were working to unseat him. "I wonder if I was welcome here in the first instance into this organisation," he asks . "I wonder how much worse it became when I was appointed chairman ."
Worried about what his informant had told him, and acting on this person’s advice, Mashile cancelled a trip to Europe so that he could investigate the allegations. He says he spoke to Manche and she told him: " Chairperson, it’s so bad, heavy guns are ranged against you. I would advise you to resign.’ She said, You won’t win this battle.’ I asked , Where is it coming from?’ She said, It’s obvious’, without saying more."
Mashile dismisses his former PA’s allegations. The most damaging of these was that he was often asleep on the job and would come to work late. "He would come to work whenever he felt like it, take off his shoes and on many occasions fell asleep ," Naidoo says in the exit interview.
Mashile says Naidoo’s claims are damaging and untrue. He takes his shoes off, he says, because he has diabetes and the condition causes his feet to swell. As for coming to work late, he says: "The only way to dispel that mythical lie is for me to submit my electronic access control card and let anybody run a print-out."
Mashile says Naidoo used her exit interview to get back at him. He had earlier filed a complaint against her and his former adviser, Sean Rankin. Both had been suspended for using Icasa letterheads – imprinted with the words "Office of Councillor Mashile" – to nominate former Icasa councillor Gerhard Petrick to parliament. Three council seats were being vacated in 2004 and Rankin and Naidoo wanted Petrick back. Both had worked for Petrick during his previous tenure as a councillor. Their letter, Mashile says, caused him great discomfort. "I was approached by MPs who said how dare you involve yourself in the nomination of a councillor’."
Rankin and Naidoo had been assigned to Mashile, who had taken over Petrick’s old office. This happened before he had an opportunity to object, he says. "I would have loved to have had the opportunity to determine what my own needs were. That was not the case." Advisers, Mashile says, are optional, not mandatory, and he felt he didn’t need the services of one. He says there was no hostility, at least initially, between himself and Rankin and Naidoo. He just didn’t talk to them.
In a letter dated June 3 2005 and sent to Manche, Mashile said it was an "understatement to say that my personage has been tarnished and the fall-out is incalculable. I am now in a damage control mode exercise and fighting fires in order to recoup what is left of my integrity."
The letter also alleges that Naidoo and Rankin could not be trusted and were "pining for a glorious past they had in this office before I came on board". In her exit interview, Naidoo accuses Mashile of racism for writing this.
Mashile brought his objections to the council, which in turn ordered an investigation. Mashile says he did not interfere or even ask for their suspension, just that they be deployed elsewhere in the organisation . The decision to suspend the two was Manche’s, Mashile says.
Naidoo and Rankin were cleared of wrongdoing and reinstated. By this time, though, Mashile had been appointed chairman and had moved out of his old office. Rankin remains at the authority as an adviser.
Mashile’s biggest challenge is to
find competent people to fill vacant posts. The most urgent are four GM posts: broadcasting (held by the outgoing Nhlapo), telecoms (previously held by Peter Hlapolosa); finance (formerly Bridget Mohlala) and legal, communications, customer protection and council support (formerly Jayshree Naidoo).
A new position, that of human resources, must also be filled. Engineering head Wojtek Skowronski is the last remaining of the GMs. Acting GMs have been appointed to the vacant positions.
Also pending is an investigation into Manche, who was suspended in November last year on full pay for alleged breaches of the Public Finance Management Act, the Icasa Act and Icasa policies and procedures. The investigation relates to the alleged disappearance of R110 000 from a safe. Manche says she is planning to take Icasa to the CCMA for unfair suspension.
Then there are the councillor positions: the terms of three councillors, Nadia Bulbulia, Mamodupi Mohlala and Lumko Mtimde, expire on June 30 and, because of delays in the promulgation of the Icasa Amendment Bill, it is highly unlikely that new councillors will be appointed to replace them in time.
The amendment bill was delayed after Mbeki referred it back to parliament to have certain clauses rewritten. In a letter to the speaker of parliament, he expressed concern that the bill could have been open to constitutional challenge.
Departing councillors can stay on for a period of not more than 45 days after their terms expire, if asked to, but none of the three that are leaving has been approached. One of them, Mtimde, has been appointed CEO of the Media Development & Diversity Agency and says he is not able to extend his term at Icasa as he starts his new job on July 1. Mohlala and Bulbulia say they will consider staying on if asked.
Not everybody is pessimistic about Mashile’s ability to pull a rabbit out of his hat. Councillor Tracy Cohen believes the problems can be addressed. She says interviews are being conducted to replace the people who have resigned. "There is definitely a problem . . . but it might not be such a problem in 10 days ," she says. According to her, the bigger challenge is securing the funding Icasa needs to give effect to the Electronic Communications Act. Processes are in place to handle the workload, despite the skills crisis.
Councillor Bulbulia agrees that the skills issue can be resolved fairly quickly. "We have received some amazing CVs," she says. Still, it’s no secret, she says, that Icasa is seen as a training ground for the private and public sectors. People come to work at the authority because it gives them good insight into the sectors that it regulates.
Parliament, which is responsible for appointing and removing councillors, has called a meeting with the authority to explore the reasons behind the flight of skills. Icasa’s council will meet parliament’s communications portfolio committee next Tuesday.
"The intention," says the DA’s Smuts, "is to get a sense of what is wrong. This will be an attempt to find out from the sitting councillors what in their view has gone wrong."
Smuts says it is critical that parliament get to the bottom of the crisis. "[The Electronic Communications Act] depends on having a strong and shrewd regulator," she says. "The councillors must tell us what in their view is wrong and why people are resigning."
The most obvious way of dealing with the crisis, Smuts says, is to appoint strong people to the council. Candidates need to be found not only to replace the three departing councillors but also to fill two new council seats that will be created in terms of the Icasa Amendment Act.
"If you could get three or four strong people in there, you could turn this thing around," Smuts says.
Icasa councillors offer a range of views for the skills exodus. But the consensus opinion is that many senior staff are leaving because of the uncertainty created by legislative changes.
But one former senior staffer says the councillors are being disingenuous. Legislative changes do lead to uncertainty but senior managers are leaving for other reasons, the former staffer says. One of these is the way they are allegedly treated by councillors. Their views are often disregarded, he says. An example was the decision to grant an FM licence to Talk Radio 702, a Gauteng-based radio station that broadcasts on medium wave. This was apparently contrary to the recommendations of senior management.
Other managers have resigned because of political interference. Matsepe-Casaburri’s last-minute "clarification" of her 2004 policy determinations, one day before they were due to come into effect on February 1 2005, resulted in deep unhappiness among many senior Icasa employees. Icasa had interpreted her determinations to mean that value-added network service (Vans) licensees – these are mainly Internet service providers – could build their own networks independently of Telkom. Matsepe-Casaburri said this was not her intention and that it would lead to an "absurd result".
Former Icasa chairman Langa told the FM at the time that the dual regulation of the telecom sector, where the minister approves (or rejects) telecom regulations drawn up by Icasa, had at times given rise to "real and serious concerns, as happened when regulations were not [ratified by the minister] in good time and Telkom took the gap and increased its rates [in a regulatory vacuum]."
The FM is aware of at least one senior official who resigned because of the minister’s last-minute clarification on Vans.
Councillor Mtimde says this is not the first time that Icasa has faced an exodus of the kind it is dealing with now. There was also a flight of top managers when the SA Telecommunications Regulatory Authority and the Independent Broadcasting Authority were merged, in 2000, to form what is now Icasa.
Councillor Mohlala echoes this view. She says it is uncertainty that has led to the resignations. She says the industry has also taken advantage of the situation to lure away key staff members. "If you can’t provide certainty, people will pack up and leave," she says. Mohlala says it’s unfair to lay the blame on poor management by the council or Mashile. "Yes, there has been a change in chairman but that’s not the key issue. The key issue is that there’s been a change in the legislative environment."
Some of the legislative changes have proved highly controversial, not least the contentious Icasa Amendment Bill.
Matsepe-Casaburri applied political pressure, through a proxy, to ANC MPs in the national council of provinces to have a compromise version of the bill, hammered out in the national assembly, changed to more closely reflect the original bill. The net result was to give the minister greater control over the appointment and removal of Icasa councillors. A new panel would be created, most of whose members would be handpicked by government, to oversee the hiring and firing process.
Industry lobbyists and opposition parties cried foul, accusing the minister of trying to take control of the regulator. They argued that the bill was unconstitutional because Icasa, as one of the independent institutions listed in chapter nine of the constitution, is protected from interference by government’s executive arm . Mbeki agreed and referred the bill back to parliament.
The communications department had insisted that the change was ne
eded to simplify the process of appointing and dismissing councillors. It argued that the process was flawed in that the selection of candidates often degenerated into political horse-trading which resulted in the appointment of people who were not up to the job.
But Smuts says poor-quality appointments only started happening when the ANC began driving through its majority choices rather than engaging in consensus politics.
Many have views on the current crisis at the regulator. However, the hard part is figuring out what needs to be done. If the authority is to meet its mandate of regulating in the public interest and protecting consumer rights, it needs to pull itself right – and soon. MPs need to grill the council when they meet on Tuesday. They need to ask hard questions about how the crisis has been allowed to spiral and to investigate the management of the organisation.
If necessary, parliament should conduct a formal investigation to get to the bottom of the problems. It’s not the first time the authority has faced a crisis. Unless the root causes are identified, there’s every reason to believe crises like this will happen again.
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