No meeting has taken place between National Treasury, the Department of Communications (DOC) and Sentech to unblock the funds the national signal distributor needs, says ANC MP Kgotso Khumalo.
The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications, of which Khumalo is the ruling party's chief whip, first suggested such a meeting in March. This followed a bitter interchange between the three government departments over funding.
“The DOC were supposed to convene the meeting, but they have not done so, and no reason has been given,” Khumalo says.
However, DOC spokesperson Joe Makhafola says the issue of Sentech's funding has been resolved. But the national signal distributor is still not allowed to raise its own funding, “...because that issue had not been discussed,” he says.
Whittling away
In March, Andrew Donaldson, a deputy director general within National Treasury, said Sentech should stick to its core funding and had depleted R500 million that should have been used on maintenance for its TV signal network.
Donaldson added that, in terms of Sentech's mandate and funding model, the tariffs it charged broadcasters to carry their signals included the cost of the maintenance of the system, which he asserted had been whittled away on the MyWireless service instead.
Earlier this year, Sentech CFO Siddique Cassim stated before Parliament that the state-owned enterprise had only received R500 million of the total R4.4 billion it needed. It said it required this sum to provide wireless broadband to the Dinaledi schools (those earmarked by the Department of Education with particular emphasis on teaching maths and science) and to meet the other government broadband requirements.
The required tranches were R912 million in the 2007/8 fiscal year and R666 million in the next year, until the R3.1 billion that National Treasury was expected to fund was met.
Half measure
Originally, 500 Dinaledi schools were supposed to be networked by Sentech, but this was halved due to the lack of funding. In the adjusted estimates of national expenditure issued last week by finance minister Trevor Manuel, it was pointed out that so far none of the schools have been networked.
The issue of Sentech's funding still rankles Manuel and communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, who, according to weekend newspaper Business Times, engaged in a war of words about it.
Manuel asserted National Treasury was not tight-fisted. Matsepe-Casaburri countered by accusing Manuel of telling Sentech, which is structured as a business, to top up state funding from other sources, but said he had refused to give the company the right to borrow from the private sector.
Mr Moneybags
Business Times reported that Matsepe-Casaburri said Manuel had made Sentech pass up an R800 million loan which, she said, had caused the company to miss the 3G bandwagon and let private-sector companies reap the profit from wireless connectivity.
“We're wrong if we do and we're wrong if we don't. I don't know what else I was supposed to do. What other Mr Moneybags was I supposed to go to?” Matsepe-Casaburri is reported as saying.
Khumalo says the lack of funding for Sentech is a mixture of strong financial control and the lack of capacity in both the DOC and the national signal distributor.
“The DOC has not helped Sentech refine its plans and neither has National Treasury,” he says.
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