[S. Africa] Private Firms May Rescue State Telecoms
Business Day (Johannesburg) | October 16, 2006
By Lesley Stones
[ geesh, talk about an atmospheric inversion taking place just on the other side of the pond ... ]
allafrica.com
PRIVATE operators may soon be competing for a multimillion-rand tender to take over government's national telecommunications networks to make them more efficient and cheaper to run.
Telkom, the second network operator, Neotel, and Dimension Data are expected to vie for the business as the State Information Technology Agency (Sita) considers handing over its network to a private player.
Sita is responsible for supplying technology services to government departments, but acknowledges that running a national network is not its core competence.
It was struggling to provide a high-quality service and the infrastructure was taking strain as the volume of voice, data and video traffic rose, said CEO Mavuso Msimang.
A request for proposals on the cost of privatising the network will be issued by December, with the initial research likely to result in a massive tender.
"There will be a fair amount of competition from Telkom, Dimension Data and Neotel for the provision of services including internet access and e-mail. We will see if it makes sense to let them take over the management of the networks."
Instead of Sita trying to satisfy the government's technology needs by itself, it made sense to partner with industry specialists, he said. That would give it some technology skills it lacked and would avoid the expense of upgrading its network, as ownership of the assets would be handed over to the private company.
Outsourcing the state's core telecommunications network would leave some Sita staff without a job, but they could be reassigned to Sita's Integrated Financial Management System (IFMS), Msimang said.
That is a project to run the government's financial, human resources, payroll, logistics and supply chain management systems which were previously handled by the national treasury.
The treasury's decision to hand over those systems to Sita was a strong sign of confidence in the agency's turnaround, said Msimang. Sita has had a chequered history and Msimang was appointed in 2003 to turn it around.
The time taken to award tenders had dropped from 240 days to 79 days, 10 executive positions had been cut to four, the number of GMs was halved, and the executive and GM posts were now filled by effective people, Msimang said.
Issues still to address included low staff morale after the headcount cull, and that government departments still only rated Sita at 47% in terms of customer satisfaction, Msimang said.
Last week Sita also issued a tender asking private companies to help devise a blueprint for technology systems for municipal authorities.
At the moment Sita does not provide technology services to local authorities, which buy a mishmash of systems from private companies.
"They are very weak in their use of technology and there is so much that needs to be done that there is a vast scope for intervention," Msimang said. |
