The Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA) has appealed to government for an additional R80 million over the next three years, as the historically hamstrung entity struggles to fulfil its wide-ranging mandate to oversee SA's broadcasting, telecommunications and postal sectors.
The regulator presented its three-year strategic plan at a joint meeting with Parliament's portfolio committees on communications and telecoms and postal services, respectively, on Friday - where ICASA CFO Clarinda Simpson outlined the entity's budgetary needs and constraints.
ICASA is funded from fiscal allocations, with all funds it collects going to government - which, in turn, allocates a budget each financial year.
According to ICASA's 2014/15 expenditure budget, it has been granted a sum of R376.2 million for the current financial year, a 3.7% drop compared to the previous year.
Outlining both infrastructural needs (capital expenditure) and non-infrastructural needs (operating expenditure) last week, Simpson presented a case for an extra R38.1 million from government over the coming year. Additional funding of R21.5 million and R21.7 million was requested for financial years 2015/16 and 2016/17, respectively.
Infrastructural needs identified by ICASA include additional vehicles for quality of service surveys, geographic mapping infrastructure and fixed monitoring sites for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), while non-infrastructural needs include SKA site rentals and staff, complaints and research staff, quality of service staff, and staff for its frequency planning and research department.
"Underfunding hamstrings the regulator to execute its statutory mandate as contemplated by the Electronic Communications Act," says ICASA.
Goals and objectives
In its last three-year strategic plan, ICASA outlined eight outcome-oriented goals, which the regulator has now whittled down to five:
1. Promote competition
2. Promote the digital agenda
3. Promote efficient use of spectrum resources
4. Protect consumers
5. Modernise ICASA
The four priority programmes and issues on the regulator's plate are the Cost to Communicate Programme, the allocation of high-demand spectrum, a high-level ICT competition inquiry and digital migration.
Lingering uncertainty
The regulator's strategic plan and budget proposal comes in the midst of an air of uncertainty around president Jacob Zuma's new split ICT ministry, comprising a Department of Communications (for state information dissemination) and a Department of Telecoms and Postal Services. ICASA now falls under the former - a move that has been questioned and criticised by industry observers.
Democratic Alliance shadow minister for telecoms and postal services Marian Shinn says government entities have no choice but to pass budget this month, to get the required money in, but plans and strategy might well change when government clarifies the reconstituted ministries.
"Right now we have to just carry on as if everything is the same [as before the elections and new Cabinet], but we are voting money into a void, because we don't know if things are going to change."
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