“The DOC [Department of Communications] is in a mess and morale is low because no one knows who else is now in the firing line,” says its sacked director-general Mamodupi Mohlala.
Mohlala was reacting angrily today to comments made in Parliament yesterday by her acting successor, Harold Wesso, who described the DOC as a sinking ship to the parliamentarians.
“I was summarily dismissed in a shoddy process and this would naturally affect staff morale. Instead of reassuring staff, the minister [Siphiwe Nyanda] got on a flight to China,” she says.
Nyanda dismissed Mohlala on 23 July with him citing a breakdown of trust as the main cause. She had been in office for barely 10 months.
Mohlala says three people she had appointed since during her term had been dismissed since her firing.
“Two of the people I appointed and the third was appointed by me on the instructions of the minister,” she says.
Wesso also told the MPs yesterday that he was still struggling to come to grips with what was going on in the DOC, and was busy with an investigation to work things out.
“Of course he doesn't know what is going on. I left without even having time to prepare a handover report, and now he has been catapulted into this position,” Mohlala says.
Mohlala asserts that during her tenure as director-general, the DOC was at probably its most productive in years.
“We managed to draft three Bills of law, deliver a number of policies and hold a number of colloquiums,” she says.
The draft laws were the ICASA Amendment Bill, the Public Broadcasting Services Act, and the Post Bank Bill. The latter is currently being debated by Parliament, and the ICASA Amendment Bill will come before the communications committee in a month's time.
Policies that were drafted during her tenure included the Broadband Policy, the Cyber-Security Policy, and a policy on the scheme of ownership.
Mohlala says her own performance measurements were based on five things, namely reducing the cost to communicate, promoting the roll-out of broadband from 2% to 5% of the population, the issue of the cyber-security policy, starting an investigation into digital terrestrial TV standards, and the issue of a policy on set-top box manufacturing (which is still being worked on).
The digital TV migration investigation centres on whether the country should use either the Brazilian version of the Japanese standard ISDB-T or the European DVB-T standard.
Industry speculation was that Mohlala, on a trip to Brazil in February, had signed a deal that committed the country to the ISDB-T standard - a notion that she outright denies.
Wesso told the parliamentarians yesterday that the DOC was also being hampered because Mohlala had placed a number of key and competent people on suspension.
“Those people were suspended due to issues picked up by the Auditor-General that prompted me to institute a forensic audit and irregularities were then uncovered,” Mohlala says.
Mohlala has instituted legal proceedings against Nyanda to declare her dismissal unlawful. The case is due to go before the Labour Court on 26 August.
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