If ever you needed confirmation about the lack of common sense in how government departments approach practical problems, the analogue TV signal switch-off debacle is it.
The international deadline for this was July 2015. SA is a full decade overdue in releasing these useful frequencies to cellular operators. The opportunity losses for the industry are incalculable, caused by simple incompetence.
Now, with just 67,943 households remaining, the department of communications has asked parliament for another R803m to finish a job it says has already cost R2bn. Nearly R1bn to connect just 68,000 households? It beggars belief, as they say in the classics, or as the kids text, “WTF?”
The decades-long process, through six communications ministers, is a “national embarrassment”, as the Sunday Times aptly described it. An amount of R803m to install 67,943 decoders equates to R11,818 per household, with R850 of that going to the installer.
What is this wondrous installation that costs R10,968, and what does it do that an e.tv Open View decoder (which costs R800 and includes all three SABC channels) can’t do? Who does these calculations, the National Energy Regulator of SA (Nersa)?
How is that possibly considered value for money? You can get Sixty60 to deliver the decoder (R730), while Open View uses the same satellite as MultiChoice DStv (Intelsat 20 in the northeast sky). Such dishes and installations start at about R1,000.
So, for R2,000, a problem-solving small-business owner could save the government about R9,000 per installation. Then, those people who no longer receive the outdated analogue TV signal – and the very outdated, decade-old set-top box — will be able to get a satellite signal. All you need is a DStv satellite dish.
You don’t even need Eskom, as we all discovered in the (literally) dark days of load-shedding. There’s a glut of portable power stations sitting in warehouses all over the country since the bottom fell out of that backup power market last year.
When you see pie-in-the-sky, throw-money-at-the-problem thinking like this, you wonder why there isn’t a common-sense supervisor for the country. A sort of director-general of common sense. A non-aligned career diplomat who runs the rule over government plans or tenders for these often obvious (to anyone not in government) problems.
I envisage Hugh Laurie as the acerbic Doctor House sarcastically dismantling these proposals with a verbal tongue-lashing in parliament. But I suspect it is merely liberal wish fulfilment that such idiocy would be punished with sharp wit for the enjoyment of downtrodden citizens standing in home affairs queues.
One can only dream of such justice, but as always with civil servants, they will escape without as much as a dressing-down.
The questions this common-sense DG could ask are not things like “how did you think you’d get away with awarding a police tender to Thembisa tender don Vusimusi Matlala?”, but “how did you think you would not get caught?”
South Africans learnt a long time ago that appealing to the ANC and its deployed cadres’ sense of what’s right is a lost cause. The rest of the country knows this, but the dominant party in government just doesn’t. It needs someone to point out the most obvious and venal of its underhanded patronage in a language it understands.
As has been repeated often in SA, the best disinfectant for corruption is sunlight. Luckily, we live in an age of access to information like no other — and, sadly, as much disinformation and hate-mongering. Who makes children’s cartoons into kiddie porn? It beggars belief.
The owners of social networks drop content moderation, allowing misinformation and child porn to go wild, because it costs too much to check everything users post — and the president of the US has given all his tech bros a free pass.
The real problem is that the internet companies that publish user-generated content (when’s the last time you heard that?) are shielded by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. This is the get-out-of-jail-free card Silicon Valley’s elite firms have used to get away with two decades of damage to the world’s idea of free speech. Speech is free — and very profitable — if you’re Big Tech.
The EU is the only significant force pushing back on this unfettered destruction of people’s privacy and, well, common decency. No tech CEO would allow their kids to work in the content moderation hubs where employees often suffer mental distress, PTSD and other awful side effects from watching the gore and horror of what humans do to each other. This unspeakable filth is then allowed free access across innumerable social platforms.
Facebook is the “largest marketplace for predators and paedophiles globally”, according to New Mexico attorney-general Raúl Torrez, who sued Meta in 2023. Remember that the next time your company advertises with Facebook and Instagram.
The company knew there were some 100,000 children using both services who were being sexually harassed every day, according to internal documents in another lawsuit filed by Torrez in 2023. One of them was the 12-year-old daughter of an Apple executive via an Instagram direct message. “This is the kind of thing that pisses Apple off to the extent of threatening to remove us from the App Store,” wrote one Facebook staffer in the internal documents.
As whistle-blower Frances Haugen correctly pointed out, the world’s largest social platform “prioritises growth over safety”. Remember that too, the next time your company advertises with Facebook and Instagram.
The world also needs a common-sense DG.
• Shapshak is editor-in-chief of stuff.co.za.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.