Kenya's drive towards a complete digital switch from analogue broadcasting has produced its own unlikely victim. The Kenyan government has often found itself on the receiving end of vicious propaganda campaigns by media houses.
Sensing a potential standoff, the government has said it will float a tender for a third digital distribution licence.
Ken Macharia, ITWeb
Lately, the government has been bullied into a corner by several industrial strikes, inflationary pressures, attempts to comply with an increasingly complicated new Constitution, and the war on al-Shabaab.
The government has been on a collision course with media owners in Kenya since 2009, when the country started a pilot of the migration process by launching a digital signal distributor.
Signet, a division of state broadcaster, the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC), has been distributing digital signals in Nairobi and its environs along the traditional analogue signal.
Dr Bitange Ndemo, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Information, has promised that 60% of the Kenyan population will be covered by January 2012, and 80% by June 2012. Other licensees will supposedly cover the remaining 20%.
The government has set a deadline of June 2012 to fully comply with the International Telecommunication Union's 2015 worldwide deadline. The fact that the government has some control over Signet makes Ndemo confident it will beat the deadline. But he has to deal with vested interests in the private sector, while maintaining control of the airwaves.
The Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK), through the Digital Migration Committee, had offered broadcasters the second licence, an offer they rejected because they could not agree between themselves on how to share the resource. They opted for the competitive bidding system.
The CCK rejected a joint bid for the second digital signal distribution licence by two of Kenya's leading private broadcasters. According to the CCK, the consortium's bid did not meet the 120-day bond threshold, leaving Pan African Network Group (PANG), a Chinese company, the winning bidder.
In response, media houses spread scathing propaganda purporting corruption in the tendering process. A more grave accusation was the claim that awarding the licence to the Chinese firm was a plan by the government to control the media.
Ndemo rubbished the accusations, insisting the tendering process was transparent and fair. He clarified that the licence was for backbone infrastructure and not content generation.
An appeal by the two broadcasters was rejected by the Procurement Appeals Tribunal, which upheld the decision of the tendering committee.
Kenyan broadcasters, through the Media Owners Association (MOA), have, on several occasions, threatened to pull their content from Signet.
Earlier this year, the MOA took Signet to court over irregular allocation of frequencies to Smart TV, a Swedish broadcasting company.
The court case and negative publicity forced Smart TV to rethink its decision to invest in Kenya.
If MOA members pull their content, Signet and PANG will either have to buy from the broadcasters or source from other content suppliers, making it difficult to broadcast free-to-air channels.
Sensing the potential standoff, the government has said it will float a tender for a third digital distribution licence. The CCK has advised media owners to form a consortium with more players in the broadcasting sub-sector to bid for the licence.
The digital migration process can borrow a few lessons from the broadband connectivity industry - if only the government and private sector can agree on a common approach.
Otherwise, Kenya is in danger of running into the same bottleneck problems it faced with broadband connectivity. While fibre cables criss-cross the towns and cities, the traffic and content carried by the massive infrastructure network remains limited. This is in spite of the millions of dollars spent on laying the backbone fibre infrastructure by multiple players.
Perhaps a mix of government, foreign players and the local private sector is the perfect recipe to achieve sustainable growth and balance in the ICT sector - something that can be replicated in other sectors, if successful.
But one thing is for sure; the fierce competition between major players can only mean good tidings for the end-user, as evidenced by the mobile operators' voice and data turf wars.
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