Strive Masiyiwa, the founder of one of Africa’s top communications operators, Econet, on Tuesday survived a bizarre attack by President Robert Mugabe’s government to try to shut down his profitable Zimbabwean operation on the grounds that it was ”subversive”.
At 6.46pm last Friday, when most staff at the corporation’s headquarters in Harare had gone home, a fax machine there received a letter from the state-run telecommunications regulator announcing that Econet was to ”cease to operate” at midnight, according to court documents obtained on Wednesday.
In just more than five hours, said the fax, new regulations would force Econet, Zimbabwe’s only independent mobile telephone operator with assets of Z$334-billion, to switch off its station that connects its 160 000 international business subscribers to the rest of the world through Intelsat, the United States-based satellite system.
Rapid recourse to the courts stayed the unannounced blow.
On Tuesday Judge Younis Omerjee, after an urgent hearing in his chambers, ruled that Jonathan Moyo, Mugabe’s propaganda chief wearing his current hat of acting Minister of Transport and Communications, had ignored the legislation governing the telecommunications industry.
He declared Moyo’s regulations ”null and void and of no effect”.
It was the latest addition to the notorious record of the man who in the past four years has closed down all private radio stations; outlawed independent television; banned the Daily News, the country’s only independent daily newspaper; ringed the country’s independent media with some of the most repressive press laws in the world; ordered the arrest of journalists; and issued a relentless stream of invective against anyone who criticises him or his boss.
Moyo’s target, however, is no pushover. Masiyiwa had a three-year legal battle with the government that finally got him a licence for Econet to operate mobile telephones in Zimbabwe, and he went on to several other African countries to make the company one of the continent’s most used mobile phone systems.
When he first applied for a licence, he said, three top ruling-party bosses demanded a bribe of $750 000 and majority shares in the company. He told them to get lost.
He began to attract the government’s renewed attention in late 2002 when he bought the dominant shareholding in Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe, which owns the Daily News.
A warning sounded on Christmas Eve when the state press, directly under Moyo’s control, claimed moves were under way to withdraw Econet’s licence after an ”investigation” indicated the company was using allegedly illegal foreign currency ”to finance subversive activities to undermine the ruling Zanu[-PF] government”
The regulations meant to close Econet last Friday night also made Tel One, the state-owned telephone operator, the sole legal provider of international telecommunications services.
Econet receives an average 1,5-million minutes of international telephone calls a month, said Douglas Mboweni, chief executive officer of Econet (Zimbabwe), 70% of them from South Africa. Its current licence runs to 2012.
In an affidavit to court he admitted that the fax ”raised alarm”, but he said he ”did not seriously believe the government could do this”.
Moyo, he said, ”cannot possible have thought out the very serious implications from the precipitate actions being taken”.
Tel One had no capacity to take over Econet’s international traffic, he said.
”As we speak, Tel One subscribers cannot call overseas cellphone numbers,” he said. ”Chaos would result. Subscribers … will simply wake up to no service.”
The situation appears little different from 1995 when the Supreme Court abolished the state-owned telephone service’s monopoly because it was so bad that it violated the right of freedom of speech.
Econet’s lawyers this week charged that the government was trying to ”nationalise” Econet’s property. Moyo’s own lawyers agreed that there had been ”no compliance” with telecommunications laws, Omerjee said.
”The chronology of events since early 2000 demonstrated that the second respondent [Moyo] has always harboured a desire to close down the applicant’s [Econet’s] operations,” said Mboweni.
”The world, including most African countries, have moved away from monopolistic policies and they are adopting the … system that gives consumers maximum access,” he said.
”There is no reason Zimbabwe should be dragged back to the dark ages.” — Sapa