There is a revolution spreading countrywide. It is happening in towns and cities as disparate as Knysna and Johannesburg, in big places like Durban, Cape Town and Tshwane, and small ones like Stellenbosch. At least 34 other muncipalities are also in on the game, racing to set up their own telecommunication networks. They are agnostic on their choice of technologies, although the smaller towns typically are opting for wireless while the giant metropolitan areas prefer a mix of wireless and the power grid. Yes, in some of the bigger centres you may soon be getting your Internet connection on the same lines that bring your electricity. Telkom may not like it, but when Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin talks about putting to work the country’s bandwidth capacity, perhaps this is what he means.
Some places, such as Knysna and Jo’burg, already have internal networks in place connecting municipal buildings. Others are busy with pilot studies, while yet others are calling for tenders. Both Knysna and Johannesburg already offer voice over Internet protocol to some of their municipal officials. Knysna’s wireless network blankets the town; Johannesburg has 200 wireless microwave towers in place, with 300 more to come. Both at this stage offer their networks for internal use only, but from early next year municipalities across the country will start offering Internet services to consumers.
Why are municipalities rushing to join the Internet revolution? Because they can. Minister of Communications Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri announced in February that municipalities would be allowed, with immediate effect, to lease spare capacity to Internet service providers.
Speak to officials across the country who are rolling out capacity and they tell a similar story. Their first idea is to reduce their internal communication costs. The second is to tap into a new revenue stream. Yes, you may soon be paying your monthly bandwidth bill along with your lights and water account. The third is to reduce the cost of doing business, particularly for small companies in their municipalities.
Knysna wants to tap into cheaper Internet costs to encourage people to spend more months of the year in the town. Who needs to work in Johannesburg if you have affordable high-speed Internet access in Knysna?
Unexpected benefits are cropping up. The high costs of leased lines meant that Jo’burg could only afford to link up one-third of its buildings. Now all 500 are connected to its new network. While previously users connected at a miserable 64 kilobytes a second, data now comes at 100 megabytes a second. Best of all is how little the set-up costs are. Johannesburg has paid for its new network in just three months.
Technology has a habit of passing the poor by. But Knysna’s wireless network extends to its townships, and free public phones are being installed across the town to allow free local calls.
Apartheid favoured big corporations over small business and individual consumers. Too often we continue to look for solutions from the commanding heights of the economy, while bemoaning the unemployment crisis and apparent inability of small business to rise to the challenge of job creation. What is happening in Knysna, Johannesburg and myriad other towns show that vast, positive change can come when inappropriate regulation goes.
Lay the ghosts of past to rest
The discovery of mass graves at former South African Defence Force military bases in northern Namibia has resurrected debate about the need to encourage openness in putting the ghosts of the past to rest.
The Swapo ruling party maintains that the graves almost certainly point to atrocities and “secret deeds” of the apartheid South African occupation forces. Former South African security chiefs and those close to them peddle the tired propaganda that the graves belong to those who fell in the Nine Day war that started on April 1 1989. More than 400 Swapo fighters were killed when crossing the Angolan border to “establish bases” from where they would be monitored by the United Nations in terms of Security Council Resolution 435 that paved the way for Namibian independence.
Swapo leaders, human rights monitors, civilians and some journalists present at the time are adamant those graves are known and marked. In fact, the ruling party holds regular commemorations at the gravesites. The ones discovered recently almost certainly predate the April 1989 war, they argue.
The April 1989 graves were dug under the auspices of UN peace monitors. There are also many other known graves of insurgents who died in villages. But then, of course, there are the unmarked, and, dare one say, secret burials of detainees who disappeared after being picked up by South African forces from their homes, villages or public places. Such gravesites and disappearances have remained unaccounted for.
The lack of accountability cuts across both sides of the war. Apartheid South Africa is complicit, but Swapo has its skeletons too. South Africa partially dealt with its chequered past through the truth commission. Swapo opted for a blanket “policy of national reconciliation” and has thus far steadfastly refused to delve into the past for fear of opening up old wounds.
But the Namibian ruling party’s argument is a self-serving act aimed at hushing up deaths and disappearances of Namibians in exile, in what has been notoriously termed the “Dungeons of Lubango” in southern Angola. This is a reference to the detention of hundreds, if not thousands, who were accused of spying for the apartheid regime in Swapo refugee camps.
Namibia may not want to replicate the truth commission. But it is in the interest of its citizens to give a platform to them to tell their difficult, dark stories before they take them to their graves.