If you want to see what a completely useless government department looks like, look no further than South Africa\u2019s Department of Communications.<\/p>\n
If it was not for the department, we would all have enjoyed faster, cheaper, and more pervasive broadband years ago.<\/p>\n
The ANC-government-run department has been at the forefront of stifling telecoms innovation and ensuring we lag behind the rest of the world.<\/p>\n
It started before the ANC took power, when it threatened<\/strong><\/a> to revoke the cellular licences granted to Vodacom and MTN.<\/p>\n While this did not happen, the government did provide Telkom with a decade-long monopoly in the fixed-line market.<\/p>\n When self-provisioning was set to kick in, former Minister of Communications Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri\u00a0<\/strong>would have nothing of it<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n It took a legal battle by Altech Autopage Cellular to force the government to allow companies to build their own networks.<\/p>\n It did not stop there. Matsepe-Casaburri\u00a0announced in 2007<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>that all undersea cables landing in South Africa must be majority-owned by SA companies.<\/p>\n This would have blocked the SEACOM and EASSy cables, and protected Telkom\u2019s SAT3\/SAFE monopoly on international bandwidth.<\/p>\n This failed, SEACOM landed, and international bandwidth prices plummeted.<\/p>\n These actions, however stupid, can at least be attributed to\u00a0a misguided belief that the state should do everything for its citizens and make money from it.<\/p>\n But when it comes to the government\u2019s handling of\u00a0digital migration – and handing spectrum to operators – its\u00a0incompetence is staggering.<\/p>\n A process which should have been completed in 2011 is still dragging on, with\u00a0no end in sight.<\/p>\n The breakdown below clearly shows how useless the South African government has been over the past 16 years:<\/p>\n The digital migration process is an absolute mess, delaying the availability of faster and cheaper broadband in South Africa.<\/p>\n The reasons for the mess are numerous, including:<\/p>\n A major contributor to the mess was President Jacob Zuma replacing the most competent communications minister we’ve had – Yunus Carrim \u2013 in 2014.<\/p>\n If you ask the Department of Communications about the delay, it will tell you \u201csupply chain management irregularities\u201d and \u201ccollusion issues\u201d are to blame.<\/p>\n Whatever the reason, this utter mess is a case study on the effects of an incompetent government.<\/p>\nDigital Migration Mess<\/h3>\n
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