Regulating Telecommunications in South Africa

Universal Access and Service

Charley Lewis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030435264
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030435271
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides the first full account of the 20-year story of universal access and service in South Africa's ICT sector. From 1994 the country's first democratic government set out to redress the deep digital divide afflicting the overwhelming majority of its citizens, already poor and disenfranchised, but likewise marginalised in access to telephone infrastructure and services. By this time, an incipient global policy regime was driving reforms in the telecomms sector, and also developing good practice models for universal service. Policy diffusion thus led South Africa to adopt, adapt and implement a slew of these interventions. In particular, roll-out obligations were imposed on licensees, and a universal service fund was established. But an agency with a universal service mandate was also created; and licences in under-serviced areas were awarded. The book goes on to identify and analyse the policy success and failure of each of these interventions, and suggests some lessonsto be learned. 

© The Author(s) 2020

C. LewisRegulating Telecommunications in South AfricaInformation Technology and Global Governancehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43527-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Digital Donga

Charley Lewis¹

(1)

Fish Hoek, South Africa

Charley Lewis

End Abstract

In 1990, when Nelson Mandela walked out of Pollsmoor Prison and stood before the people of South Africa, he faced a country starkly divided by years of racial oppression and economic exploitation. White minority apartheid rule had ensured that ‘white’ South Africans prospered, with access to the best housing, the most well-resourced schools and hospitals, the best-paying jobs, whilst the country’s ‘black’ majority were systematically excluded and deprived in every facet of life and society. It was a society deeply divided along the sharp lines of racial categorisation in respect of almost every socio-economic indicator: income, education, employment, health, housing and telecommunications.

1.1 1990: Two-Tier Telephony

Access to telephony¹ was one amongst many socio-economic divisions afflicting South Africa under apartheid. Both academic literature and common parlance use the term ‘digital divide’ to refer to the division—between those who have access to telephony and those who do not. Commonly, the ‘digital divide’ reflects differential access to telecommunications and other information and communications technology (ICT) services. Its fault lines run along key demographic categories, such as income level and geographic location, but also extend into gender, linguistic, educational, literacy and disability. In South Africa, however, it was the racial categorisations imposed and fostered by apartheid that were the prime predictors and indicators of lack of access to telecommunications and other ICTs.

In 1990, access to telephony meant access to fixed-line telephones, provided over copper cables to black bakelite handsets, by a single state-owned entity, South African Posts and Telecommunications (SAPT). Mobile telephony was still in its infancy globally and had yet to arrive in South Africa. Email was still the playground of academics and geeks, and the concept of the Internet had only just been born.

In 1990, the overwhelming majority of ‘white’ South Africans had such a telephone in their homes; less than one in a hundred of their ‘black’ fellow countrymen enjoyed this privilege (ANC, 1994, Section 2.8.1). The first proper national census, conducted a few years later (when there were already two mobile operators in the market), underscores the point. It reports that 88.5% of ‘white’ South Africans had a “telephone in dwelling/cellular phone”² compared to a mere 11.3% of ‘black’ South Africans (Stats SA, 1996, p. 80). Only 0.8% of ‘white’ South Africans had “no access to a telephone” compared to 24.4% of their ‘black’ counterparts. Further, access was heavily skewed in favour of the more urbanised economic centres of the country, with many homes in the Western Cape (55.2%) and Gauteng (45.3%) reporting a “telephone in dwelling/cellular phone”, while high proportions of homes in provinces containing former bantustans had no access to telephony (45.3% in the Eastern Cape and 30.5% in the then Northern Province).

It was this stark divide—this yawning chasm between affluent, mostly suburban, ‘whites’ with easy access to telephone services, and the ‘black’ majority, economically disadvantaged and largely consigned to urban ghettoes and rural slums—that confronted the African National Congress as it contemplated what policies and practices to adopt in the lead-up to South Africa’s first democratic general election in 1994.

Mandela would have been familiar with the dongas that scarred the brown hills where he grew up in Qunu, deep red scars slashed across the landscape, angry signs of deprivation and drought. The deep and lasting scar of a donga is therefore an appropriate metaphor for the particular South African flavour of the profound digital divide inflicted by apartheid on the country, a chasm that cut the majority of the country’s population off from access to telecommunications services, primarily on the basis of racial categorisation.

1.2 ICT Access Today

Dramatic shifts have shaped the telecommunications market since then. Today South Africa has many more mobile phones than inhabitants, and the fixed-line customer network is now in terminal decline. With over 88 million ‘active’ mobile SIM cards in a population of some 56 million, and Telkom’s main line subscriber base having shrunk to under 3 million (below what it was in 1993), it is a radically altered landscape. With burgeoning access to the Internet via laptops and smartphones, the rollout of broadband networks and FTTH connectivity has assumed centre stage. It is no longer a simple telephony landscape. Increasingly, the environment is perceived as an integrated ecosystem (Fransman, 2010) driven by a complex and dynamic interaction involving the previously disparate domains of telecommunications, broadcasting, the Internet and computing.

Further, the disparities in access to telephony today are dramatically less starkly racialised, as can be seen from the graph below, which compares telephony access enjoyed by South Africa’s racial groupings between 1996 and 2013 (Fig. 1.1³).

Fig. 1.1

Households with telephony by race: 1996 vs 2013

(Source Author, data from Stats SA [1996, p. 80, 2015, p. 25])

The stark and yawning divide between ‘black’ and ‘white’ South Africa of 1996 has now narrowed dramatically. While the percentage of ‘white’ South African households with either a fixed-line or a mobile telephone in their homes has increased to 99.4% (an increase of 12%), access to fixed-line or mobile telephony in ‘black’ households has soared by some 730% to reach 94.1%. The digital divide today is far more closely linked to issues such as income and geographic location, and it is these axes of the digital divide that Statistics South Africa now focuses on in its reporting.

1.3 ‘The People Shall Call’

Confronted with the deep digital donga of 1990 that separated ‘white’ South Africa from ‘black’ South Africa, that cut the majority of the country’s population off from the economic, social and cultural benefits of access to telephony, it is hardly surprising that the new ANC government made “providing access to these essential services for all South Africans” the centre plank of its telecommunications policy as it prepared to contest the country’s first democratic elections (ANC, 1992, p. 53). The stated national telecommunications policy intention of the new government sought to ensure the “provision of basic universal service in telecommunications to disadvantaged rural and urban communities” (RSA, 1996a, p. 1). It is a policy commitment attested to, as this book shows, by a series of specifically-targeted policy and regulatory interventions over the ensuing 20 years, aimed in various ways at ensuring that those disadvantaged and deprived by apartheid secured access to telecommunications services.

The levels of access to telecommunications services have both skyrocketed and become substantially more equitable in the intervening 20 years. It would appear, therefore, on the face of it, that policy-makers can claim an easy victory, a clear policy success. But yet commentators—both academic (Gillwald, 2005; Hodge, 2004; Lewis, 2010; Msimang, 2006) and in the press (Business Day, 2006; Guest, 2006; Vecchiatto, 2006, 2007; Perry, 2010)—have almost universally been sceptical of the effectiveness and impact of those very interventions.

Such widespread negative assessment implies at least some level of fracture between policy intention and policy impact. Possibly the overall policy thrust towards universal access and service was ill-conceived and inappropriate for a developing country such as South Africa. Perhaps it was the concrete implementation of universal access and service policy that was badly flawed, either due to failures at institutional and human capacity level, or because of policy slippages, or the modalities of policy transfer. It may also be that the dynamics of access were simply overtaken by other developments, such as technological evolution, or the changing nature of the sector, or the incoming tide of the market. More likely, some complex interaction of multiple factors, some internal, others external, underpins what unfolded.

1.4 The Evolution of Universal Service

What, then, was the international policy backdrop for the new ANC government’s avowed intention to ensure that the country’s ‘black’ majority secure access to telecommunications?

The call for universal access to telecommunications services was to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Digital Donga
• 2. Universal Access and Service: The Rise of International Good Practice
• 3. Universal Access and Service in South Africa
• 4. Universal Service Obligations
• 5. The Universal Service Fund
• 6. Under-Serviced Area Licences
• 7. Universal Service (and Access) Agency (of SA)
• 8. UAS Policy: From Conception to Outcomes
• Back Matter