The government wants another giant, nationalised monopoly able to generate even more irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure, writes Leon Louw executive director of the Free Market Foundation.
‘To boost our national pride, the Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services (DTPS) published a White Paper which proposes the nationalisation of private telecommunications infrastructure and the creation of a spendthrift “digital development fund”. Emergent and emasculated private operators will suck previously private spectrum from the teat of the state. Stripped of techno-speak, the 177-page Integrated Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) White Paper is simple enough for ordinary folk to understand. And oppose’.
ICT infrastructure plan could take irregular spending to new heights: Leon Louw in BusinessLive published by Business Day today.
Further excerpts
“Spectrum” is the range of wave lengths used to transmit information through the air – to your mobile phone, TV, radio and wifi device, for instance. “Broadband” spectrum is what cellphones use. Think of communication via air waves as people walking back and forth in the same airspace on different floors of a building. “Telecommunications infrastructure” is mainly underground cables which, like phone lines, carry information to transmission towers (“base stations”) or via “landlines” to buildings and homes. Spectrum is also used for police and emergency vehicles, planes and ships, and localised gate and car remotes, security guard walkie-talkies and the like.
South African cellphone calls, messages and data would be much cheaper had officialdom allocated spectrum efficiently to cellphone companies (“network providers”). Insufficient spectrum forces companies to raise prices. They must “refarm” old (2G) towers for use by modern (4G/LTE) smartphones. Instead of extending coverage (“roll-out”) to new areas and communities, they must build duplicate towers where one should suffice.
The proclivity for irregular spending in government suggests that the proposed ICT boondoggle will take “irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure” to new heights, literally and figuratively. But we need not worry, says Mzwanele (Jimmy) Manyi, president of the Progressive Professionals’ Forum. He assured us in a recent SABC debate that irregular spending is no problem because it funds regular stuff like bridges and clinics. He is right. About purely technical “irregularities”. And wrong about waste, corruption, patronage and inefficiency.