Disingenuous statements, selective fact-picking and obfuscation are the hallmarks of politicians around the world, but the recent Parliamentary Communications Committee debates have taken this to a new low.
If the Parliamentary oversight committees are supposed to be the public's watchdogs over the executive arm of government and the private sector, then they have to get their facts right, their comments straight and really represent the interests of all.
Unfortunately, the communications committee has not lived up to this recently, and it is time questions are asked of those who are supposed to ask the questions on behalf of the public.
After all, it is they who also have to pass the laws that set the playing fields. They must remember the recent history that led to the current situation of high telecommunications costs and poor connectivity penetration.
Tragicomedy
The debate around communications minister Siphiwe Nyanda's budget vote speech all but degenerated into a farce. This was largely due to the Democratic Alliance (the official opposition) totally misstating its facts about the unfortunate Sentech chairperson. It then talked about irrelevant nonsense on philosophy and ideology. Neither Niekki van den Berg nor Lindiwe Mazibuko covered themselves in glory here. It is just too embarrassing to elaborate more on this point.
Ismail Vadi and Johnny de Lange (ANC) both delivered entertaining and hard-hitting speeches; unfortunately, I don't think either contributed much to the overall debate.
The less government interferes, the better it is for the sector.
Paul Vecchiatto, Cape Town correspondent, ITWeb
Vadi was correct in citing Sentech as disobeying Cabinet's instructions about its undersea cable investments, but his statistic about government spending R5 billion on ICT is somewhat misleading. Yes, it may seem to be a lot of money, but Cell C, the smallest of the three cellular operators, is spending that amount on upgrading its own network alone. Five billion rand does not go a long way these days.
De Lange was right to point a finger at the private sector for making excessive profits. Unfortunately, the majority of those companies that are growing the sector are not making a profit. These are the SMEs that are struggling - without government aid or grants - but are contributing to our connectivity.
The only two politicians who got to the point were Independent Democrats leader Patricia de Lille, who spearheaded the interconnection debate, and Cope MP Juli Kilian, who pointed out that government's role is to mitigate risk and so encourage the private sector to invest.
The facts
So here are some statistics for these politicians to chew on. The telecommunications sector, according to Telkom, accounts for 7% of the country's R2.4 trillion GDP. In the Western Cape, the ICT sector, plus those in the BPO industry, employ about 50 000 people, and is the province's largest full-time employment sector. Last year, the country graduated 1 000 undergraduate IT students, a drop in the ocean compared to India's 250 000.
Research firm World Wide Worx says there are about 5.2 million Internet users in the country. But the nub of its findings is that the rate of those beginning to use the Internet grew at 12% in 2008, and at 15% in 2009, after having hovered around 7% since 2002.
The reason for the sudden spurt in Internet access is despite policy and not because of it. This is the time when the policy of “managed liberalisation” became unravelled and was finally buried by the Altech court case.
If politicians had to be very honest, they would see that the less government interferes, the better it is for the sector. And then they wonder why they are not taken that seriously.
Nikita Khrushchev, former USSR leader, said: “Politicians around the world are the same. They promise to build a bridge even when there is no river.”
We need to bridge the digital divide, and if the politicians cannot find the divide, then there are plenty of people who would gladly show them where it is, if not throw them into it.
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