The stand-out point of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet reshuffle was his decision to prioritise the telecommunications sector, elevating it as a priority of his government.
Presidents always balance their cabinet choices, and in making his on Thursday, Ramaphosa said he had decided to take skills, competence, gender and age into consideration. But just as he did in February, he did it with an eye keenly fixed on the needs of the economy.
Regulation of the telecoms sector and policy that can create the right environment for investment and development is among the top five priorities for the economy right now, if not at the very apex. Importantly, it is an area where government action can unlock growth with the stroke of a pen, making it the lowest hanging fruit of the list of structural reforms that everyone agrees must be carried out.
Ramaphosa’s new minister, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, is to head two ministries — postal services & telecommunications and communications — a preface to the re-integration of the departments after the elections. Ndabeni-Abrahams has what her predecessor in telecoms Siyabonga Cwele did not: agility, youth and energy.
The re-integration makes perfect sense as the splitting of the department into two by former president Jacob Zuma was never informed by rational policy decision-making in the first place. Zuma made his cabinet choices by shifting around players on a chessboard, all part of a very well-orchestrated plan to control key procurement opportunities and manipulate ANC dynamics through patronage.
The upshot of the last five Zuma years during which Cwele looked after telecoms and Zuma’s most dedicated acolyte Faith Muthambi was in charge of communications, was to put SA years behind in digital and technological development.
Motivated by, among other things, a desire to control the procurement of set-top boxes — devices which are necessary to convert digital signals for reception by analogue TV sets — Zuma and Muthambi subverted ANC policy on the encryption of the boxes, which had the effect of stalling the process of digital migration for years.
Migration is essential to free up the high value spectrum the industry needs to roll out services based on next generation technology. With one person now in charge of both digital migration and the release of the spectrum, SA can start to make progress.
Thanks to pressure from Ramaphosa, Cwele had finally begun to move the telecoms regulation forward. He will no doubt be surprised and annoyed that the job has now been taken away from him. In the last few months, he settled a court dispute with regulator Icasa and launched a consultative policy process with the private sector on the model for the licensing of spectrum. After sticking rigidly to a model condemned by the private sector, he had begun to shift towards a more investor-friendly alternative.
But it took some pushing and he can never be described as agile or flexible. Ndabeni- Abrahams is both. She caught the attention of Zuma in his first administration, becoming a deputy minister while exceptionally young. (She is only 39.)
At the time, the SACP’s Yunus Carrim was communications minister and was locked in a fierce battle with Zuma over the set-top box issue. Ndabeni-Abrahams played the conflict both ways, successfully enough not to get fired by Zuma and to be later chosen as key ally by Ramaphosa.
That took the kind of political skill that is certainly worth noting.
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