Listening to President Cyril Ramaphosa State of the Nation Address I wondered if this is the year we can take his promises seriously. It was, as usual, filled with all the right pledges and a key admission: “We all know that government does not create jobs. Business creates jobs”.
I’m using the quote in full to highlight his first words “we all know”. At least we know that government knows. It hasn’t seemed the case, nor have any of our recent ANC leaders seemed to understand it – not least coal-mining recidivist Gwede Mantashe.
The next part is what I really want to take him at his word on – but this is the same president who has made innumerable unfulfilled promises, not least to bring the 12 masterminds of last July’s “failed insurrection” to book. His words, nobody else’s.
“One of the greatest constraints on the technological development of our economy has been the unacceptable delay in the migration of broadcasting from analogue to digital,” he said from a makeshift venue because the police were asleep when a mentally unstable homeless man wandered around Parliament and allegedly set it alight.
Meanwhile, over in Sona reality, South Africa is on track… “The switch-off of analogue transmission has been completed in a number of provinces,” Ramaphosa said, including a reminder that he told us this would happen in last year’s Sona, with the digital switchover set for March 2022.
The agreed international deadline for this was July 2015. By ANC standards, we’re moving at the pace of the Amathuli municipality.
“Our communications regulator, Icasa, will commence with the auctioning of the high-frequency communications spectrum in about three weeks from now. This will unlock a new spectrum for mobile telecommunications for the first time in over a decade.”
This is fantastic news. Except he said pretty much the same last year – and the original auction was scheduled for March 2021 until the mostly state-owned Telkom conspired to thwart that procedure with ill-timed court action.
Amazingly, despite having the same shareholder as the president, Telkom, bizarrely, filed another injunction to halt this year’s auction.
And then a fascinating thing happened: Ramaphosa ordered the Special Investing Unit to investigate the 15-year-old investment in Nigerian telecoms firm Multi-Links and other foolish investments. It was a hare-brained scheme that smacked of a lack of business awareness (if not situational awareness) as a massive 419 scam. Telkom paid $280m for 75% in March 2007 and then a further $130m two years later. It invested over R10bn before it collapsed and Telkom wrote off its debt.
Ramaphosa has very curiously resurrected this bizarre transaction, some like TechCentral’s Duncan McLeod believe, as a way of punishing Telkom for not towing the party line, literally, on the spectrum auction and refusing to back down again. After R1bn was wiped off its share price by its own largest shareholder, Telkom (coincidentally) withdrew its urgent legal application. The other part of its lawsuit will only be heard in April, after the auction, but could still upset the applecart.
Of course, Ramaphosa is expecting his compromised Communications minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni to deliver these broadband dreams. She is the latest ANC deployed cadre to make waves in the Zondo catalogue of sleaziness and corruptibility having sat on the board that decimated Denel. Now she is in charge of the country’s broadband rollout. What could go wrong?
This article first appeared in the Financial Mail.