Johannesburg, 13 Aug 2008
A number of international media representatives in SA, including Sky News, BBC and the Deutsche Presse Agentur, are up and running again after being cut off from the world at the weekend by cable thieves.
The press bodies, whose regional offices are in the same building in Johannesburg, went quiet on Friday as their telephone lines and ADSL connections died.
The South African Press Association reported that cable thieves were to blame, as they had allegedly made off with a piece of copper cabling.
Despite reporting the problem immediately, representatives from the agencies, who asked not to be named as they are not international spokesmen, say the problem was only tended to on Monday, and only resolved yesterday.
"For the entire weekend we could do nothing," said one representative. "This is the hub for the region and for three days nothing came out of Johannesburg."
The power-sharing talks between the ruling Zanu-PF and opposition Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe was one of the topics these media outlets were prevented from reporting on over the weekend.
Telkom had not responded to media queries about the incident by the time of publication.
Over the 2007 financial year, Telkom lost at least R571 million to cable theft. In response to a question posed in Parliament, communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri recently revealed the dual-listed telco spent R197.5 million on replacing copper cables, and a further R5.5 million on fibre cables. The revenue loss of this theft was estimated at R368.1 million.
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