The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications is spending much of this week listening to industry and civil society gripe about the Electronic Communications and Transactions (ECT) Bill.
The number of parties clamouring for a chance to have their say apparently surprised the committee, which must have reasoned that the Department of Communications had spent more than a year in discussion with industry before drafting the Bill, so all the major concerns would already have been addressed by this time.
Why the rush to get the Bill into law, when electronic communications and transactions are going on every day without it?
Phillip de Wet, news editor, ITWeb
But the committee is badly mistaken, mostly because of the remarkably mysterious way in which the department goes about public and industry consultation. But that is another story altogether.
So now everyone from banks and the JSE, to telecoms and pay-TV operators, are bending the parliamentary ear, and the many clever lawyers they hired are asking familiar questions, the ones that have cropped up again and again throughout the last year but have never been answered satisfactorily.
Why did the Department of Communications draft something that falls under the jurisdiction of the Department of Trade and Industry? Why the rush to get the Bill into law, when electronic communications and transactions are going on every day without it? Is government pushing so hard to encourage e-commerce because it is still stuck in 1999 and never progressed through "clicks-and-mortar" thinking, to make it to "e-commerce is just another sales channel"?
To date, the Department of Communications has efficiently pooh-poohed all these questions, because the answers could prove to be damning.
The answers
The Department of Communications constructed the Bill because, thanks to its collective ego, it believes all things electronic should be under its control. Not under its management or direction, but control. The word "communications" may have been slipped into the title, but in truth it is an e-commerce Bill that grew from an e-commerce Green Paper and the Department of Communications has no place in commerce. Only a politician would try to alter reality through semantics.
The Bill is being rushed through Parliament with unseemly haste because the department has a lot of ground to make up. Communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri desperately needs a victory, and she needs it now. Not only is it budget time, but a general election looms.
Government is most certainly still stuck in 1999, in more ways than one. It and many others were completely taken in by the hype and the promise of a new world where the normal rules of economics do not apply. But while the rest of us have come back to earth, our rulers still have their heads in the clouds. Not that you can blame them - with the problems they face, any easy way out is worth clinging to. However, the longer they take to come back to reality, the harder the landing will be.
For once the solution is clear, as long as you remove political agendas from the picture. There is more work to be done on the ECT Bill than the Portfolio Committee could manage before it is due to be signed into law in July. Either vast sections of it must be scrapped and taken up in separate legislation, as some are suggesting, or it must be re-written by the Department of Trade and Industry.
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