Poison Ivy and Stockholm Syndrome

• This column was first published in Brainstorm magazine, South Africa, on 1 September 2007. They keep me in bread, beer and bacon, so I’d appreciate it if you’d consider subscribing.

There are finally signs that the long-frozen telecoms sector is thawing. Now everyone’s thanking the government. That’s twisted.

A celebratory message arrived recently: one side of a particular road was being trenched by Neotel, while the other was being dug up by MTN. Great news indeed, if only because it proves that the space-time continuum doesn’t implode when two competitors dig up the same road.

Similar good-news stories appeared elsewhere. A company named Seacom is building a new undersea cable. Vodacom says it wants a meerkat in every telecoms hole it can find. Every second VANS operator is swindling reporters into believing it’s a historic first, the next-big-thing in infrastructure. Talk of new interconnect regulations, industry consolidation, self-provision and new pay TV licences spices up dinner parties, and pundits get drunk on the heady mead of price wars and dark fibre.

The cause is the new Electronic Communications Act, which though still a vague piece of legislation is making it possible for some enterprising companies to squeeze through some gaps. So we find ourselves celebrating – finally – the culmination of “managed liberalisation”.

But why? There’s something deeply pathological in our reaction.

In May 2003, the “light at the end of the tunnel”, according to a senior manager connected with what is now Neotel, was that it could be “up and running by the end of the year”. It didn’t happen. Just like a dozen other supposed landmarks on the road of “managed liberalisation” didn’t happen. The industry has hardly been liberalised, and its management has been disastrous.

Maybe we’ve been looking at that light so long, we’ve become blinded by it. Maybe now that it appears close, we’re too afraid it will go away again.

It’s as if we’re suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, the curious psychological phenomenon that hostages, or victims of abusive relationships, form an unnatural attachment to their captor. The term was coined when hostages in a Swedish bank robbery in 1973, having been held for days in a vault with dynamite strapped to their bodies, perversely sympathised with their captors and viewed their rescuers as the enemy. One victim became engaged to one of the robbers, and another started a legal defence fund for them.

A battered victim often feels relief, and even gratitude, when her abuser grants small favours or bare essentials, or agrees to stay punishment. Pscyhologist Dr LF Lowenstein, describes the reaction of a child that was abducted: “A combination of fear, indoctrination and ‘learned helplessness’, promoted the total loyalty and obedience of the child to her captor. This captor was no longer viewed, as was the case initially, as evil but as necessary to the child’s well-being and her survival.”

Like hostages, we’ve been infantilised. We feel dependent on the blessing of Poison Ivy for even the most meagre of priviledges. Consequently, when they do appear, we instinctively attribute them to the benificence of the captor that held the telecommunications industry hostage for so long.

Do we not recognise that those Sandton trenches should have been dug ten years ago, and that if they had simple margin pressure would have forced the competing operators to seek to expand their revenue base by trenching the roads of Kliptown or Diepsloot or Polokwane or Beaufort West? Don’t we realise that it shouldn’t be up to municipalities to finally say they’ve had enough, and build their own fibre or wireless networks? Do we not hear reports that say internet access will grow by only three percent this year, despite the fact that fewer than one in ten South Africans have access today? Over all the marketing hype and sycophantic reporting about price reductions, do we not hear when analysts call the cost of connectivity in South Africa “outrageous”? Why do we read columns that admonish us not to complain so much, but to get some perspective?

Are we so traumatised by Poison Ivy and “managed liberalisation” that we’ll grovel with gratitude for any unanticipated concession or slight relaxation in the captor’s rules?

If the recent flashes of good news are a sign of anything, it’s what individuals can do given even the slightest liberty and independence. That big-bang liberalisation should have happened long ago.

It should still happen. Do away with restrictive licencing and state-owned infrastructure monopolies. Abolish the regulator and handle spectrum ownership like land.

What we’ve seen to date is not liberalisation. It’s not freedom. Acting as if we’re lucky suggests we need counselling.