Take Telkom, which has spent years honing its litigation skills, and now is so good at it that even junior clerks can make entirely convincing cases against both the regulator and the Competition Commission's jurisdiction on matters of anti-competitive behaviour. That they're contradictory is the beauty, because while ministerial minions throw the hot potato of who is responsible for writing such contradictory law from one department to another, Telkom simply blunders ahead with whatever new corporate strategy it found in its spam folder this month.
One would think that politicians would be smarter than this. Especially ours, all of whom seem to be Marxists, Stalinists, Maoists, Leninists or Castroists, or some super-intellectual combination of the above. Perhaps that's what Afrikaners used to mean when they railed against "die Engelse".
Aren't communists supposed to aim for the inevitable withering away of the state?
So why is it that it took the government twelve years to even begin to address the concurrent jurisdiction problems between an under-resourced telecoms regulator and the Competition Commission? Why do we have ever-more complex regulations, and regulations to fix broken regulations, and new laws to replace dysfunctional ones, and bureacrats determined to establish entire industries, apparently at the cost of the private entrepreneurs who risked capital and put decades of work into establishing a market niche for themselves?
Why should anyone care who has the jurisdiction to determine what Telkom charges for ADSL, and whether that is consistent with its other data services? Why should it be the government's job to lower communications costs? More than a decade of busybodying has not achieved this laudable goal. Why should Multichoice have to sit on its hands, waiting for "specifications" from government for its new products?
Having time to waste should be the goal of any smart worker. What makes politicians think that this is a bad idea?
Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist and columnist.
Why is it necessary to call the Presidential National Commission on Information Society and Development before the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications so it can clarify whether or not it is part of the Department of Communications? Or explain whether this monstrosity of a sentence actually hides some productive work done by some commission, committee or department or other?
The result is that many South Africans do not have even basic connectivity and access to the online information resources that constitutes today's competitive edge. Most of those who do, do not have sufficient access cheaply enough to use the new types of application that the internet is making possible. Our companies block all the sites and applications that elsewhere are sparking entirely new ways of working, making money, relating to customers, or collaborating. Sure, people waste time, but they can waste just as much time playing a local computer game, flirting, whittling a stick or doodling on the telephone message pad. The real reason those applications are blocked is that bandwidth is prohibitively expensive even for the supposedly rich "first economy".
Besides, having time to waste should be the goal of any smart worker. In the private sector, managers like to say they want to "work themselves out of a job". What makes politicians think that this is a bad idea? Get an expensive 4x4 paid for with taxpayer money, for as little work as possible. Seems like a fair deal, does it not?
As long as the portfolio you're responsible does no harm, who cares? Seriously, no journalist is going to hunt you down and file access-to-information petitions for your time-sheets or budgets, if the equivalent of Eskom or land reform or ADSL services under your department works like a charm. They won't even notice you exist.
If the state didn't interfere in everything private citizens did, politicians could take those 4x4s to where they belong: out of the public limelight, in the bush. Then the lazy managers of profit-seeking companies could do for themselves what the state has made illegal for so many years. Profit-seeking companies could gamble on where profits might be made, and either lose their own money or produce something for which their customers are willing and able to pay. Entrepreneurs can seek out where excess profits are being made, so they can grab themselves a slice of the action and compete that profit away.
If the communists in government took Engels and his ilk seriously, they'd make more of an effort to facilitate the withering away of the state. They'd campaign on how lazy they are.
* Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist and columnist, who blogs at http://ivo.co.za/. He likes communists as much as the next man, but then, he likes monkeys too.
Share