Regulatory Effectiveness: Namibia's Communications Regulatory Framework

Abstract

Communications regulatory frameworks are established to achieve regulatory objectives such as affordable pricing, universal ICT access and usage, and competition. These objectives may however not be met. In this paper however, we present the regulatory outcomes of Namibia’s communications regulatory framework. We studied the performance of the two dominant and publicly owned telecommunications corporations. We assessed how the national institutional endowment in relation to the regulatory governance and regulatory incentives, such as benchmarking, influenced the performance of the telecommunications sector. We use this analysis to explain the effectiveness of the regulatory framework in achieving the regulatory purpose. One of the major findings of the study was that the roles of the Minister of ICT, as policy maker and as shareholder representative over the dominant public operator Telecom Namibia Limited (TN) are in conflict. There is a concentration of the telecommunications market, with the exit of the only privately owned mobile cellular operator. A paradigm shift in policy is therefore required to address the poor performance of Namibia’s communications regulatory framework to be able to achieve the regulatory purpose.