In the venerable tradition of nicknaming communications ministers, the new appointee, Radakrishna Padayachie, has earned the hopeful moniker of Jewelweed. This is another name for Indian Balsam, which is reputedly a cure for Poison Ivy. Read the column.

As of this week, I will be writing a weekly column on technology and telecommunications for old friends at ITWeb — a top technology news site in South Africa with readership that slightly exceeds that of this blog, albeit by only a few orders of magnitude. The idea is to comment on issues that come up in ITWeb news stories, through my usual political or economic policy lens. It will initially be published on Thursdays. I’ll still write a separate monthly column, “Backbite & Sneerwell”, in Brainstorm magazine (link for subscribers). After all, it dates back to 2001, and is my longest-running effort at commentary. I will also continue to write columns on topics other than technology in Maverick magazine.

Last week I wrote a trial run for the new column, on the monstrously bad idea of having the state establish a local set-top box industry for digital television because “we’re loathe to rely on foreign suppliers”. This week, The Spike proper begins, with a final stab at one of cabinet’s most deserving members, Poison Ivy.

• This column was first published in ITWeb Brainstorm, a South African business technology magazine, on 1 October 2007. Do subscribe, if you prefer to read it the way it was intended to be read: in print.

In March 2003, this column was headlined Root out Poison Ivy. It wasn’t the first call for her dismissal, but it did coin the now-famous nickname for our Minister of Communications. It’s time for an escalation.

This magazine has documented every step in the failed politics of telecommunications reform in South Africa. Now the entire sorry saga is retold in a paper co-authored by Willie Currie of the Association for Progressive Communications and Robert B. Horwitz of the Department of Communication at the University of California in San Diego.

The ten-year retrospective makes for sobering and intensely depressing reading. The authors interviewed everybody who was anybody during this time. In its 44 pages are collected, with academic rigour, failure upon failure, which makes the most cogent case yet for the dismissal of the current Minister of Communications, Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri.

Moreover, I contend that it justifies the abolition of the ministry itself.

The headline of the report, “Another instance where privatisation trumped liberalisation,” perceptively highlights the core philosophical error underlying the policy of “managed liberalisation” that South Africa followed since Telkom was first granted its monopoly in 1997.

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In this country, the notion of private companies risking their capital on infrastructure projects is a no-no. While it complains about “market failure” and high prices, Duncan McLeod reports that the government has just decided to spend $2 billion (!) on its own undersea cable project. It’s no surprise that foreign investors are being chased away. It’s no surprise the World Bank is perplexed.

Clearly, our government’s idea of a New Partnership for Africa’s Development is central control over all major projects. It is to crush private competition, and stubbornly forge ahead with state-led development. We don’t need neo-colonialist exploiters, we’ll lay our own damn cables, is what Poison Ivy, the communications minister, appears to be saying.

There’s a wealth of evidence that Keynesian or socialist state-led development has failed for decades to lift poor countries out of poverty. Those countries in which significant economic development occurred achieved this by encouraging private investment and free markets.

In addition to the statistical evidence, the theoretical problem is that state competition scares off private investors, without which there will be no competition, whether on service quality or price. The state can only solve problems in series, trying one possible solution after another. When it does appear to solve it, there is no way of knowing if it did stumble on the best solution, whether supply actually meets demand, or whether the price is right. Besides, to date the government’s record at telecoms development has been atrocious.

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Dene Smuts, the official opposition party’s spokesperson on communications, sure knows how to get quoted. Witness:

[Minister of Communications Ivy] Matsepe-Casaburri is simply not implementing recommendations. She seems to act as a law unto herself and an unguided missile. I intend to ask the committee to attend to this. The department is expected to appear before us this month and I intend to use this as an opportunity to tackle the matter and take it forward.

This was in response to the minister’s reported statement that said a Public Service Commission report which found “sufficient evidence” of several irregularities in the appointment of staff in her department was “incorrect”, and that she would take no action on its recommendations. This report lends support to recent allegations about fraud and corruption in the hiring practices of the Department of Communications (DOC).

The most elegant solution to these problems would be to fire the minister — you could pick from a smorgasbord of reasons — and merge her portfolio with that of the Department of Trade and Industry. Then require all current employees of the DOC to re-apply for positions in the new department. Two birds, one stone.

• 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.

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Duncan McLeod, the Financial Mail’s technology editor, has an excellent column up on the nasty business of capping the bandwidth usage of “broadband” consumers.

Though the cost of broadband has been falling steadily over the past few years, telecommunications service providers in SA continue to impose severe restrictions on how much bandwidth consumers can use. It’s harming innovation and development.

He concludes:

Then there are plans, by both government and the private sector, to construct new international submarine cable systems to link SA with the rest of the world. Despite the feckless department of communications, which has threatened to block majority foreign-owned cable systems from landing in the country, it’s unlikely that the projects will be barred. After all, one has to believe that government ultimately has the interests of its citizens at heart and won’t chase away hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign investment in an area where investment is so critically needed. Right?

An incurable optimist, is Mr McLeod.

Duncan McLeod at the Financial Mail yesterday once more made a cogent case for firing Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, South Africa’s misguided and downright incompetent telecommunications minister. I couldn’t agree more. In recent weeks, I’ve written here about the idiocy surrounding private undersea cables, in Brainstorm magazine about the policy to create a national mobile broadcasting monopoly, and last week suggested the Department of Communications might as well be abolished. The latter was republished on Monday on Thought Leader, the Mail & Guardian Online’s new opinion pages. I’ll be making a more elaborate case for this proposal in the October 2007 issue of Brainstorm.

Duncan tells me that the World Bank has taken an interest in the issue, and certain members of the Presidential International Advisory Council on Information Society and Development are also keeping an eye on developments. As he points out, editorials in the media, however rationally argued, have never had much influence with president Thabo Mbeki. The chances that reason will trump loyalty this time remain remote. It would be a wonderful day for South Africa’s ill-served citizens, rich and poor, if this would change. Just don’t hold your breath.

• This column was first published in ITWeb Brainstorm, a South African business technology magazine, on 1 July 2007. They pay me for this stuff, so you’d do me a great service if you’d consider subscribing.

This wasn’t intended as a column extolling the virtues of reading history. Yet if only Poison Ivy¹ would do so, she might actually “connect us to the future”, to use her words.

There she goes again. After eight years in office, and all those nice things they said about encouraging competition, technology neutrality and managing liberalisation, minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri is proposing to drive us up another dead end.

“I have taken the policy decision,” she dictated in her Department of Communications budget speech, “that Mobile Broadcasting Services will be provided on a single network with national coverage, using the DVB-H standard. The network … will be operated on the basis of open and non-discriminatory access principles.”

She’s proposing yet another monopoly, presumably to be run by government, and limited to a single choice of technology. Oh yay!

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1. Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, South Africa’s minister of communications. [↩]