The trade union Solidarity on Tuesday welcomed Telkom’s decision not to bring a R5-million claim against Gregg Stirton’s website Hellkom.co.za.
The website claims that Telkom’s bandwidth charges are crippling the South African economy. It also provides links to surveys revealing that the incumbent is the most expensive fixed-line licencee in the world.
“I am slightly relieved,” Stirton told the Mail & Guardian Online on Tuesday.
“One would wonder what [would have happened] if the case went ahead. I wasn’t worried about it at all; it did not keep me awake at night.”
Stirton wasn’t surprised Telkom decided not to pursue the claim.
“I think they decided to not go through with it since the site hasn’t done any major damage; it is not worth all the bad publicity [for Telkom],” he said.
Telkom’s turnabout came after the Constitutional Court’s recent finding in a similar case that the T-shirt manufacturer Laugh It Off was entitled to use parody in order to criticise South African Breweries, Solidarity noted in a statement.
According to the union, the site was one of the first opinion-shapers to start criticising Telkom in 2004, when the telecommunications group wanted to lay off 4 000 workers in spite of having made a R4,5-billion profit and management having received bonuses of R48-million.
The union said it had discouraged Telkom from taking action against Hellkom.co.za, recommending that the listed company should rather use criticism on the satirist website to improve its tariffs and services.
“A win-win situation would have been for the public to be allowed to register their frustrations on the Hellkom website and for Telkom, in turn, actively to attend to these problems in order to improve client service,” Solidarity deputy secretary Dirk Herman said.
Stirton told the M&G Online he has other campaigns planned to inform people in poor communities that the government is partly to blame for Telkom’s high prices.
“I have a couple of campaigns in the pipeline. In the next two months, we [together with the Freedom of Expression Institute] will spread flyers around in poor communities in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
“We want to explain that the government is one of the reasons behind the high prices.”
Stirton added: “The poor people are forced to use prepaid cells [cellphones], which are expensive. It should be the other way around: the poor people should get the cheap communication.”
The Democratic Alliance’s Dene Smuts also welcomed Telkom’s decision to abandon legal action against Stirton’s site, especially in the light of the Constitutional Court judgement on the Laugh It Off issue.
Smuts added: “I think it was a miscalculation [for Telkom] to have even tried to have the site closed down.”
Herman believes the appointment of Papi Molotsane as the new Telkom CEO, replacing Sizwe Nxasana, has “brought in a clean-sweeping new broom”.
“The trade union would like an early meeting with Molotsane to discuss with him the findings of Solidarity’s 2004 commission of inquiry. These findings included a recommendation that tele-density in South Africa should be increased and that the company should follow a strategy of active growth,” he continued.
South Africa’s tele-density has been stagnating at about 10% or about 4,5-million telephone lines. The government estimates that in rural areas the figure drops to one telephone line per 100 households.