Another instance where privatization trumped liberalization: The politics of telecommunications reform in South Africa—A ten-year retrospective

Abstract

Soon after the first democratic election in 1994, South Africa passed legislation to revamp the telecommunications sector—to roll out telephone service to the previously disadvantaged and establish an independent regulator to oversee the reform. The Government sold a 30 percent stake in the state-owned incumbent network operator, Telkom, to expand telephone service to under-serviced areas and populations. Ten years on, the reform has largely failed. Telkom, granted a 5-year period of exclusivity to expand the network, has used its monopoly power to thwart competition. It has raised prices so high as to be damaging to the economy. The Regulator has been largely sabotaged by the Government, in part due to the consequences of the haste to privatize, in part because the ANC leadership has been loath to trust democratic structures outside of its immediate control. The situation has opened up opportunities for rent-seeking under the ideological aegis of Black Economic Empowerment. The paper examines the relative failure of reform in South Africa in the context of internal South African politics and against a backdrop of sectoral reform in similarly situated countries.