Homo Naledi is “a dinosaur for grown ups” as I explained to a friend’s young child why last week’s ground-breaking discovery had the adults so excited.
If only us grown ups could find a way to explain how the economy works – and why telecoms is so important – to the ANC leaders who seem blithely unaware that our economy is circling the toilet bowl.
The World Bank says for every 10% penetration of broadband access, you get a 1.38% increase in GDP. It’s an old figure, quoted (and misquoted) for years. How hard can that be for a telecoms minister to interpret?
To use an analogy even government officials could understand: As humanity’s hands and feet evolved, we no longer climbed trees and began walking upright and using our thumbs. We now live online. We’ve become Homo Internetus.
Instead of telecoms being an afterthought in this age where mining is under pressure (from militant labour, investors scared away by the government’s high-handed and moronically knee-jerk response to crises it has failed to acknowledge have been coming for years, and the global economic spiral), this vital sector could provide a fillip for all those lost jobs and advantages. If the government understood, and was willing to do something about it.
As much as I want to be excited that Telecommunications and Postal Services Minister Siyabonga Cwele finally admitted his own department is “dysfunctional” (you need only look at its name), he’s been in charge since May 2014. After being in office for nearly a year and a half, he’s only just worked it out?
The deadline for switching over to digital terrestrial television (DTT) has already passed and South Africa is years away from meeting it because we still haven’t resolved the basics of the decoder and whether it’ll be encrypted or not.
Cwele has promised to fix it and even appointed the Public Service Commission to investigate blah-blah-blah.
“We need a functional department, a department that assists with driving the economy,” he told that excellent technology journalist Duncan McLeod, adding it was plagued by “a general lack of accountability and a failure to meet deadlines”.
If only we could believe him. This is the same Siyabonga Cwele who, as Minister of State Security (previously known more honestly as Intelligence Services, an oxymoron of the highest order given recent disclosures), pushed through the Secrecy Bill. The ANC heavyweight responsible for this ham-fisted attempt at controlling free speech and limit critical reporting of the government’s ongoing incompetence, is now responsible for providing internet access. Remember internet access was classified by the UN as a basic human right.
I used to think it was government incompetence that caused us to be so far behind the curve, preventing us from using the abundant economic activities that real broadband speeds enable for today’s video-rich, data-hungry internet.
But it seems more and more likely that the criticism-averse ANC might be doing this deliberately, keeping us in the digital dark ages so that it can control what its citizens can or can’t access.
Totalitarian regimes are broadly similar in how they restrict free speech and access to information. President Jacob Zuma – whose flunkies in legal and policing positions are “deployed” for loyalty over merit – has been trying to limit the media’s ability to cover the rampant corruption (see Nkandla, Arms Deal, new Russian nukes) and wholesale inefficiency of his various departments and parastatals (see education, Eskom, SABC, SAA).
Perhaps we’ve all missed it, Zuma and his cronies are applying the Secrecy Bill by stealth; limiting our internet access to restrict people reading critical articles even if it restricts the economic growth that the World Bank’s calculations have demonstrated in so many other developing countries.
Is it so unlikely, now that we know so many Eskom and Prasa decisions seem to have been made to favour Zuma Inc & Associates?
How else do you explain such ongoing incompetence in the telecoms sector which is so vital for our economy survival, and which could be a financial driver in this otherwise bleak economic period?
I hope I’m just being paranoid.
