In a way I’ve been saving up this column for years. What inspires it is the commercial horror that millions of South Africans have had to undergo over their lives, what must cost this country literally billions every year in lost business, what causes more personal stress and outrage than is measurable, what is little short of a national disgrace.
The name of this affliction is what is called our telephone service — and if ever there was an oxymoron that is it. What we now know as Telkom was once called the Telephone Department, those names the only noticeable difference between the appalling excuse for a telephone system under the previous government, and the appalling excuse for a telephone system under this one.
There’s no one without a nightmare story about the telephones in this country. In the old days you could apply for a telephone service and then sit for several years before getting one. One thing I’ll say for those days is that, however long you waited, once installed, the darned things tended to work. The phones may have been steam-driven, they may have lacked optic fibres, computerised terminals, caller-line identity and all the rest of today’s bells and whistles; they may have been available in no more than one homely black bakelite model of a dial telephone, but they functioned.
What is more, once you had a telephone number in those days, it stayed the same for decades on end. No such luxuries any more. Telephone numbers now change with the seasons. Last week I phoned a few Cape Town business numbers in search of a quotation. In five calls, three business numbers had been changed from those listed in the latest telephone directory. A man in a small company in Cape Town told me that his Telkom telephone number has been changed three times in the past four years.
I live in the sticks, but only about as far from the nearest telephone exchange as Illovo is from central Johannesburg. In our valley there are probably a couple of hundred telephones. If we have a whole week go by without a total blackout of our telephone ‘service”, we throw a celebratory party. A Sunday or so ago the system went on the blink for 12 hours. I happened to see a couple of Telkom technicians on the road and asked them what was going on. ‘Maintenance work, surely you were warned,” said one technician. ‘They’re supposed to warn you when we’re doing maintenance work.” I checked around. Not a soul in our valley had received such a warning, either by phone, notice or carrier pigeon. We were all just left to put up with it, like it or not. When you’ve got a monopoly who gives a tinker’s about anything more than talking about quality service.
On that Sunday, the Telkom technicians told me they were replacing old cables — presumably with older ones because the result of their maintenance work was that the service has got considerably worse. From that Sunday on our valley residents couldn’t hear conversations through the frying-pan crackling on the line.
Three complaints I made across a whole week were fruitless. A technician called and said that the problem was identified and was being seen to. Nothing happened. Four more complaints produced a technician to say the fault had been fixed. In fact it had become worse. The story goes from bad to the level of some obscene farce. We all know the way these things are.
Where do we lay the blame for our embarrassing telephone system? Should we start by pointing a finger at Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, who must rank as one of the Cabinet’s single most inept office-holders — and that’s being optimistic about a witch’s brew of Alec Erwins, Penuell Madunas and Manto Tshabalala-Msimangs. Trouble is Ivy will blame it all on what she inherited from that previous apology for an incumbent, Jay Naidoo, and he’ll blame it all on apartheid.
Do we blame it on the current Telkom management? We could, if only anyone could find out who they are. It is quite impossible to get anywhere near whoever or whatever organisation actually runs Telkom. The Telkom management has long since retreated behind barricades manned by a most amenable set of polite complaints receivers. You couldn’t find a nicer lot than the ladies and gents who man the Telkom complaints lines. The problem is that, for all their niceness, they can’t do much more than promise. Obviously the Telkom higher-ups feel they should remain out of touch or sight of their customers. Their job is to dream up reasons for making ludicrous increases for rapidly decreasing Telkom services.
And where, pray tell us, dear Ivy, is our much vaunted competition landline company? How long are you going to continue to obfuscate and misdirect on that one? If ever there was need for competition in this arena — and the appointment of a better minister — it is now.
Or is it just that someone high up in the African National Congress is still waiting to be paid off?