ICT charter nears completion

By Itumeleng Mogaki, ITWeb junior journalist

Johannesburg, 13 Aug 2004

The long-awaited fourth draft of an empowerment charter for the ICT industry will be issued before the end of this month.

This follows a series of meetings between the ICT Empowerment Charter Working Group and the American Chamber of Commerce in a bid to reach agreement on critical issues such as equity ownership.

The final document will be completed before the end of the year, says the working group, after which an ICT BEE council will be appointed to take over the administration of the charter.

The charter is expected to be operational by March, and will feature adjusted targets and no blanket exemptions.

Empowerment Charter Working Group chairman Dali Mpofu says the fourth draft was not completed in June, as was initially hoped, because negotiations between the working group and chamber, which represented the multinationals, took much longer than anticipated.

Another reason for the delay was the large number of submissions received from the industry in response to the third working draft.

"It was decided to initiate the discussion with the government and parties in parallel with finalising outstanding issues within the industry. Since July, the working group has held five fruitful meetings with the minister of communications and senior government officials," says Mpofu.

"We received late responses mostly raised by the industry players in response to the third working draft, and had to deal with a lot of input which took us beyond the intended release date. I`m glad to say we`ve finally reached a milestone in this process," he says.

"The fourth draft will contain areas of agreement with the relevant stakeholders outside the industry. It will also state adjustments to the targets released in May, following sometimes robust input from the constituency."

The government has engaged the working group on the contents of the draft charters and has established a joint working group that meets periodically to look into issues of government interest.

"We are working together with the working group to make sure that the provisions of the charter are not contradictory to other government policies and regulations, that there is consensus on most issues, and that work is going on trying to resolve all outstanding issues," said communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri at yesterday`s press briefing.

She said the process of developing the ICT charter had been going on for almost a year, and added that she was proud of the stakeholders` achievements and of the consultative approach undertaken.

Both the government and the working group have expressed confidence that the intended commencement date of the charter, 1 March 2005, will be "easily achieved".