Ask for help, get hijacked
What is it about governments that they talk endlessly about market failure, and when the private sector does create competition in an effort to improve service and lower prices, they hijack the process in the interest of nice-sounding but misguided goals, such as “open access”? Don’t they realise that by denying private investors their rightful profit opportunity, those investors simply won’t invest? That they’ll take their capital somewhere they can earn a return safe from expropriation?
No wonder Africa is so woefully underserved by telecommunications infrastructure. The biggest undersea cable (SAT3/SAFE/WASC) is, in most countries it serves, owned by a state-owned or state-protected monopoly incumbent. Now that private investors are proposing to lay a new cable along the east coast of Africa (called EASSy), half the governments that were asked for help to make this legally possible have decided that it really should be their own little socialist tea party.
Duncan McLeod, the Financial Mail’s point man on everything telecoms and technology, has an excellent column on this latest interventionist disaster. It shows, as if more proof was needed, that the root of all evil is unnecessary government intervention. Perhaps governments should focus on things they can do, such as combating corruption, fighting crime and lowering the trade barriers that have ensured that Africa remains largely unmolested by the last few decade’s rising prosperity and decreasing poverty worldwide.
