Communications & digital technologies minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams is planning to take her department and state-owned entities such as the SABC and Post Office into a new digital future in SA, freeing them of historic state capture baggage and their continuing drag on SA’s finances
The minister’s portfolio is the result of the consolidation of the departments of communications & telecommunications and postal services in 2019.
She said this consolidation indicates a shift in the department's mandate, through building from what came before.
“The added responsibility of co-ordinating the fourth industrial revolution, tells you that we need new skill sets and it tells you that there is a need for us to reconfigure the entire portfolio.
“Key to that is to relook at the entities that we have — the value that they are adding, the mandate that they are driving.”
Ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service, which last week downgraded SA to junk status, said the country’s debt burden will rise over the next five years, reaching 91% of GDP by 2023, including the guarantees to state-owned enterprises. That would be up from 69% at end of 2019.
The SABC, after years of mismanagement and allegations at the state capture commission regarding its dealings with MultiChoice, has found itself on the brink of bankruptcy and job cuts over the past year. The government has set aside R3.2bn for 2019/2020 for the broadcaster to pay its bills.
To start with, she said Sentech, which provides broadcast transmission services to all SABC radio and television stations, and telecom networking player, Broadband Infraco, together with certain components from the State Information Technology Agency (Sita) “will be clubbed [together] under the state infrastructure company”.
Sita will no longer be just the IT procurement agency for the government but move to being as a fully fledged state IT company. She said the aim to “drive local innovation” by having experts in-house that themselves build applications or contract work going to mainly local technology providers.
The Universal Service Access Agency of SA (USAASA), which is in charge of the country’s digital migration from analogue to digital broadcast services, will be done away with completely, the minister said. Some services such as broadband provision by USAASA will be moved to the infrastructure company, while digital migration is to be fast tracked.
“We’re going to establish the Digital Development Fund,” she said, adding that the name is still under review as it may have implications on its mandate and funding. Ndabeni-Abrahams said her department was working with the Treasury to put together a business case for it.
“We are repositioning Post Office to be an e-commerce platform. They have lots of properties, therefore they are bigger on logistics. We just need to improve here and there because I know people are complaining about the pace of delivery.”
Key to improving this is skills development around drone piloting and drone programming, she said. Soon “you’re going to the see the introduction of drone deliveries from the Post Office”.
Ndabeni-Abrahams said the creation of one large technology, media and telecommunications regulator, effectively collapsing all the different regulatory authorities into one, was being explored.
The minister's department houses telecoms and broadcast regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa); content-classification regulator the Film and Publication Board; and the .za Domain Name Authority, which manages and regulates the .za namespace online.
Ndabeni-Abrahams said efforts were been made to ensure the national broadcaster the SABC taps into digital platforms and over time offers services as an over-the-top provider, such as Netflix and Showmax.
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