Although the digital broadcasting migration plan is not as advanced as it should be, communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri and her deputy Roy Padayachie are confident that the 1 November switch-on date will be met.
The two ministers yesterday briefed the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on progress made since Matsepe-Casaburri's 2007 budget speech, in which she made a number of announcements.
Committee chairman Ishmail Vadi (ANC) emphasised at the start of the meeting that it was about what had been achieved over the past year, rather than try to determine what would be announced in the communications budget speech due to be delivered in May.
The important issues for most of the members of Parliament were the migration of the country's broadcasting system to digital terrestrial TV and the related topic of national signal distributor Sentech's funding, or apparent lack of it.
Matsepe-Casaburri told the MPs that she was also frustrated that Sentech did not seem to be getting the funding it needed, and said her department had been working with the National Treasury and the distributor to resolve the issue.
No Sentech confidence
Democratic Alliance communications spokesperson Dene Smuts asked the minister if reports that the National Treasury had no confidence in Sentech's senior management were true and suggested that perhaps it was time to consider opening up the national signal distribution network to private enterprise.
Matsepe-Casaburri replied that the private sector had shown a preference to work with the state-owned enterprise and that private signal distributor Orbicom was working with Sentech to install transmitters.
Vadi pointed out that Sentech and National Treasury officials were due to brief the committee on the funding issue on 7 March.
Kgotoso Khumalo, the ANC's communications whip, emphasised that his party had decided that Sentech must be empowered to enable it to build this transmission network.
"As the majority party, we took the decision in Polokwane that government must either fund Sentech fully, or its scheduling must be changed to allow it to raise its own capital from the private sector," he said.
Migration readiness
The MPs questioned the readiness of the DOC's migration strategy, that included an awareness campaign, the cost and the specifications of the set-top-boxes (STBs) that will be needed to allow a TV set to receive the digital signals, and the committee set up to oversee the process.
Matsepe-Casaburri said the gazetting of the migration strategy, which was supposed to have been published in June last year, had been delayed to take cognisance of the World Radio Conference's decisions on frequency allocation. However, she expected it to be gazetted this week.
Norman Munzhelele, acting DOC deputy director-general for ICT policy development, said that STB specifications should be finalised at a meeting with the South African Bureau of Standards next week.
"Usually it takes up to four years for the SABS to finalise standards. However, we have approached the Department of Trade and Industry as part of 'Business Unusual' to speed up this process," he said.
Padayachie said: "We must acknowledge that the department is not as far along with the migration process as we would have liked to have been. However, I can assure all that the executive is seized with the urgency of the matter."
The committee to oversee the migration process, called the "Digital Dzonga", had only one member, the chairman, the MPs heard.
When Khumalo questioned what the word "Dzonga" meant, Matsepe-Casaburri berated him for not being able to understand all 11 official languages and then said it was a Tsonga word, meaning "South".
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