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COMPENSATE CONSUMERS BY BRINGING BACK SPTC’S ‘ONE’

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Perhaps Minister for Information Communication and Technology, Dumisani Ndlangamandla is happy with himself now that he has ordered the newly-appointed Board of Directors for the politically besieged Swaziland Post and Telecommunications Corporation (SPTC), to explore ways and means of compensating the public for the ‘One’ mobile and wireless fixed phones that were shutdown under the watch of government.

Has Minister Ndlangamandla paused long enough to consider the possibility that consumers might in fact want the services to be restored, owing to their affordability and sustainability? But then again we are talking about the people who apparently are at the bottom of government’s priority list!
As I see it, only the blind – who would include the sycophants and bootlickers of the obtaining political system – would pretend not to be privy to the causal factors behind the shutting down of SPTC services. Of course government would rather have us believe that these services were undone by the so-called joint venture agreement between SPTC and MTN Swaziland, on the strength that this position was also upheld by the courts. Yet that is further from the truth.
In fact the undercurrents leading to SPTC being forced to shutdown the services in question make the so-called State capture in neighbouring South Africa look like a children’s drama.

In this country there is nothing to capture because it is open season to ransack for the politically and socially privileged.  
It is common cause that at the time SPTC introduced its affordable and easily accessible mobile communication services the JVC, which initially was also in contravention of the then SPTC Act of 1983, whose tenure was for 10 years, had expired in 2008. The court challenge by MTN was but a farce also considering that in the middle of the case SPTC was ordered to withdraw its defence. And who could have ordered the parastatal not to defend the action except government. It is purely on the grounds of an undefended court action, certainly not on merit, that MTN won the case wherein the court upheld the subsistence of the JVA. This farce also played itself out when the matter went to international arbitration.

As I see it, it cannot be that a gentleman’s agreement between two parties, in this instance the JVA between SPTC and MTN, could be superimposed over statutes, as well as the Constitution that supposedly should be the supreme law of the land. Yet this is the reality of what unraveled even under a new legal framework. Yet government could have simply unburdened SPTC by relocating its MTN shareholding to free the parastatal to compete in the communications industry. This did not happen even when the one-man Cabinet of Prime Minister Sibusiso Barnabas Dlamini in 2013 revived the National Industrial Development Corporation of Swaziland (NIDCS), that is essentially government’s investment arm and a warehouse for all its investments.

It is also no secret why government behaved and acted in the manner it did – simply protecting the investments of the high and mighty within the political echelons of the Kingdom of eSwatini who, not surprisingly, include the incumbent PM. In protecting the accruing dividends from MTN on behalf of a powerful minority, government sacrificed national interests and, indeed, the nation itself.
Now we are expected to celebrate that government has sanctioned compensation for those who had purchased SPTC’s hardware for the abandoned mobile communication services. Compensated for what? Compensation is incalculable in the circumstances when one factors in economic losses occasioned by the shutting down of these services, on one hand and, on the other hand, MTN’s highly exorbitant and exploitative charges resulting in constrained and restricted economic activity.

Equally hypocritical is the comment on this matter attributed to the one-man Swaziland Consumer Association. The chairman of the one-man association, Bongani Mdluli, is quoted by the press as welcoming the initiative to compensate consumers. This is the same man who when approached at the time about the association becoming a vehicle for a class action in the courts to challenge the very legality of the JVA, made himself scarce while muttering about people who allegedly wanted to use the association for their own ends. In the circumstances if any crime has been committed against the people, Mdluli is complicit to the fact just as the media is failing to interrogate his and the association’s bona fides. In any event, is the association that he has methodically engineered as his personal legacy, the same one established by the late Dumisani Masango, may his soul rest in eternal peace?   As I see it, the befitting compensation to consumers in this case is bringing back SPTC’s mobile telephony services. The new Board would do well not to pursue Minister Ndlangamandla’s parochial agenda but pursue a cause of action that will strengthen the hand of SPTC in the communications industry, instead of playing second fiddle to interests of those who have abused the public’s trust by using their political positions to enrich themselves. 

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