A few months ago, I updated a four-year-old prediction that the government's decision to build the set-top boxes which are required for the migration to digital terrestrial television locally, would guarantee a project that is both late and over budget.
I called it the Rooivalk Set-Top Box Project, after the super-expensive military helicopter that South Africa developed and first flew in 1990. It failed to sell any of them to anyone. Eventually, more than 20 years after its first flight, our own South African Air Force used our own money to buy a dozen of the helicopters that our own state-owned arms manufacturer, Denel, used our own money for to build in the first place. With this crude sleight of hand, the government propped up Denel by moving its development losses to the Air Force, while the Rooivalk can now finally be listed as being "in service" since 2011.
The digital set-top box is going the same way. Like Rooivalk, it is turning out to be a bigger disaster than even the most cynical among us dared to anticipate.
In the latest news, the sticker price of the boxes has skyrocketed, from a reasonable R400 per unit, to a spectacular R960. Including the other bits and pieces, like aerials, distribution - via the Post Office, of course - and the total cost per household could reach R1 500, according to Butch Steyn, the Democratic Alliance's shadow minister of communications.
As if this news isn't bad enough, it seems the Department of Communications only has enough funding for a mere 500 000 units, while it needs at least three times that much, per year, for the next three years, if it doesn't want the roll-out process to take a decade.
Meanwhile, you can pop off to Amazon.co.uk, and pick up a digital set-top box, with bells and whistles, starting at about R350. If you're in the UK, they'll deliver by tomorrow.
And here's the problem with all this. South African taxpayers - a category that includes the ordinary poor who pay VAT, pay fuel levies, and pay for higher rent and inflated prices that come from other rates and taxes - will cough up for the massive amount it will cost extra to have these boxes made by local manufacturers on a government tender.
All that such central planning ever achieves is to demonstrate, spectacularly, why a government should limit itself to protecting life, liberty and property.
And while I won't begrudge local manufacturers an opportunity, their opportunities should not include ripping us all off by overcharging the government for perfectly ordinary devices they can pick up much more cheaply somewhere else. If they want to compete, compete on price, just like everyone else. The industry will flourish if it is able to do so, without any need for corporate welfare handed out by government to its favourite cronies.
The money the DOC proposes to lavish on set-top boxes is money that could be spent on something else. Taxpayers themselves could have spent it on business investment (which creates jobs), or consumer spending (which creates jobs and raises living standards). The government could have spent it on essential services like education, healthcare, sewerage and running water. Services that, judging by the frequency of service delivery riots, are desperately needed in many parts of SA.
In short, this debacle is not making anyone richer, other than the cronies who get the tenders. On the contrary, it is making everyone poorer.
And even then, we didn't get our set-top boxes by 2008 (which was the original promise), or 2010 (which was the revised estimate). Analogue signals were meant to have been switched off in 2011. It is now the end of 2012, and still, there's nary a set-top box in sight, and the plan now is to get them delivered by 2015 or so.
And that's assuming everything goes right, according to the latest plans and timelines.
Which it won't. We'll pay even more for these set-top boxes, and it will take even longer than planned. Because that is what happens when the government decides it is better at establishing a manufacturing industry than the people in the private sector who do it for a living, under true, tough, market conditions.
All that such central planning ever achieves is to demonstrate, spectacularly, why a government should limit itself to protecting life, liberty and property, and providing a limited set of public goods that for technical reasons are better provided communally. All it ever does is to prove that the private sector, on which we rely for essentials like food and clothing, would also be better at supplying just about everything else the government tries to supply.
Already, there's only enough money available to switch off the analogue signal and free up all that lovely - and much-needed - radio frequency spectrum by 2022. So already, not everything is going right.
This is all so easy to predict. One sometimes wishes, for the sake of the country's long-suffering citizens, government would one day, just once, prove the cynical predictions wrong. And failing that, that the government would just once, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, further an enterprise by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.
But it won't. Because it can't in the first instance, and gives up opportunities for patronage and corruption in the second. More's the pity.
Would that the whole inept lot had resigned in disgrace a long time ago, as I proposed when I last wrote about this. But, as Cosatu secretary-general Zwelinzima Vavi memorably said at The Gathering, Daily Maverick's recent conference - these days, ANC stands for "absolutely no consequences". How right he is. No wonder they call him "a problem child".
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