Two sitting Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA) councillors, Brenda Ntombela and Kobus van Rooyen, were forced to justify their reappointment to the communications regulator yesterday, before Parliament's communications committee.
They were among a total of 14 candidates who were called before the politicians to fill the four ICASA council seats that are due to become vacant from June to September.
Ntombela was questioned about her role in the Vodacom listing fiasco, which resulted in an 11th hour withdraw of the regulator's approval for the network operator's JSE debut, in May 2009.
“We were right in our decision [to withdraw the approval],” Ntombela said. “We had to make a decision based on the facts that we had.”
Communications committee chairperson Ismail Vadi asked why the decision was left to the last minute, as it was announced on the Friday, 48 hours before the listing.
“We had to gather all the facts before us and, no, it was not at the 11th hour,” she stated.
Ntombela said it was a collective decision.
ICASA councillors took the last-minute decision in the absence of ICASA chairman Paris Mashile, as they suddenly appeared to support Cosatu's attempt to stop Vodacom's R2 billion public offering, following its unbundling from Telkom.
Van Rooyen, who was not present at the council decision, said he had often recorded minority votes where he had dissented from the majority of the council.
A professor of law, a senior state council and one time an acting judge, Van Rooyen was questioned about why ICASA appeared to keep losing its court cases when it had a person of his legal experience on council.
“I am just another vote on council. I am not their legal advisor. Often I have given some quick legal opinion, but the legal department's opinion is considered to have far greater weight than mine,” he said.
Van Rooyen noted that the reason for his apparent absence from participating in many of ICASA's committees is because he was heavily involved in setting up and running the authority's Complaints and Compliance Committee. This is the organisation set up within ICASA to hear and rule on licence complaints by members of the public.
He also said he was involved in a number of other cases, such as the Cell C licence issue, which took two years to complete because of the “tricky” legal issues involved.
“One of the problems is that ICASA's legal division is too small to work through everything as quickly as people would like. I really would like to see it expanded. I believe that ICASA should hire a full-time state council and pay him R2 million a year so it can get it its legal work done,” he told the committee.
The communications committee is scheduled to meet on 18 May to finalise the six names it will present to communications minister Siphiwe Nyanda, to select the four people he wants appointed and then revert back to the politicians for final approval.
Related story:
ICASA trips up Vodacom listing
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