The Democratic Alliance’s (DA) Marian Shinn, MP and shadow minister of telecommunications and postal services, has issued a scathing indictment of minister Siyabonga Cwele’s department’s handling of South Africa’s continued stumble towards migration of terrestrial television broadcasts from analog to digital format. Shinn issued the following media statement covering her thoughts on the issue.
Several delays in the regulatory process necessary to rollout government’s subsidised television set-top box (STB) indicate continuing indecision and possible manipulation by the broadcast industry players, individuals in state entities and deployed ANC cadres. The international deadline for switchover to digital broadcasting is mid-2015, yet South Africa is nowhere close to meeting this deadline.
Two non-events of the past week caused alarm bells to ring on this issue:
Firstly, Minister of Telecommunications and Postal Services, Mr Siyabonga Cwele, cavalierly responded that “The Broadcasting Digital Migration (BDM) policy will be finalised after it has been approved by Cabinet” in response to my recent parliamentary question asking when the Policy will be presented to Cabinet and why it is being so delayed. South Africans deserve more than this dismissive response on a policy that was ready for Cabinet approval before the May 2014 General Election.
Secondly, the qualifying criteria for STB subsidies were due to be published in the September 26 Government Gazette. They did not appear, inexplicably. Subsequent responses to my enquiries as to why they did not appear, revealed that the Director-General of the Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services, Ms Rosey Sekese, had asked for them to be held back, pending approval of the revised BDM Policy by Cabinet.
This raises very serious questions about who is pulling the strings to delay the rollout of digital television. I urge Minister Cwele to come out from the shadows to give a comprehensive clarification on the state of play and who is contesting for control of the lucrative and dynamic broadcasting market.
At a gathering in September Minister Cwele made, according to an industry analyst, “a lot of noncommittal noises and promised that the whole broad policy would be announced before the end of the financial year”. The deadline the Minister has given himself is just two months before the digital switch-on deadline. This is surely not the time to re-do the policy?
His predecessor, Mr Yunus Carrim, was frank and open about the challenges facing the digital migration strategy, the competing interests and the hard choices he was having to make. And the sector started to trust him because he was prepared to break the impasse.
In presentations made on DTT progress to Parliament’s portfolio committee on Telecommunications and Postal Services last month, all the entities involved left more questions unanswered than answered. Particularly about the full extent of costs, identification, training and management of STB installers, the logistics and support infrastructure of the rollout phase and responsibility for ongoing support, answers were not forthcoming.
The digital broadcasting strategy seems to be gathering a perfect storm of misguided policy, government ineptitude, meddling by self-interested players, unrealistic expectations of STB beneficiaries, and spiralling costs in a climate of economic meltdown.
The Cabinet needs to make the courageous decision to prune the scope of the STB manufacturing and subsidy scheme to exclude the enrichment of politicians, state employees, connected cronies and influential private sector players, and deliver digital television on time, with no further delays.
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