As the South African telecommunications industry prepared for a meeting to map out the legal future of communications in the country, Telecom Namibia said it fears no competition when its own market is liberalized.
Speaking recently at the African Convergence conference in Rosebank, South Africa, Telecom Namibia Managing Director Theo Mberirua said the best way to confound potential competition is to provide the best possible service at the lowest possible price.
“My philosophy has been that we don’t want to keep competition out via legislation. We want to keep it out by delivering the services our consumers want at competitive prices,” said Mberirua.
Yet he would like to see competition introduced into the market to change customer perception of the company.
“A monopoly is never good enough, because there is nobody to compare with,” he said. “We find that people will stand in a queue at a bank for 45 minutes, but if they wait five minutes for a telephone they think we are the worst company on the continent.”
In contrast with South Africa, where operators spend much time in court battling for legal supremacy, Mberirua does not believe in enforcing restrictive regulation.
“Sometimes our people see an illegal operator and run to me saying, `Look, he has an illegal antenna on his roof. Let’s go to the Communications Commission.’ Then I first have to calm them down. If [the consumers] are going to the competition, we must ask ourselves why. We are the biggest communications company in the country; we are supposed to have the economies of scale. If they are going to the competition, we are doing something wrong.”
Like many other state-owned telecommunications companies throughout the world, Telecom Namibia is struggling to balance basic service provision to the majority of the population with corporate hunger for broadband Internet services.
Namibia, however, presents a unique situation to a network operator. It is the most sparsely populated country in the world, with two people for every square kilometer of land. When the company was commercialized in 1993, the great distances between population centers were bridged by analog microwave transmission. Today Telecom Namibia claims that 99.9 percent of its backbone is digital, with Internet protocol facilities in place, with full fiber-optic rings planned for major cities.
Consequently, Mberirua said, Namibia ranked alongside Mauritius, South Africa and Egypt in the 2000 African competitiveness report. “We think we are out there and rank among the best,” he said.
He might soon have the opportunity to prove this, as privatization of the state-owned company lies within the five-year horizon. Mberirua said the next two to three years will be spent building value in the company before any stake is sold, as privatization is essential before competition is introduced.
“It is very difficult to compete with a private company when you are still controlled by the government,” Mberirua said.
Yet current government control does not extend as far as it might in other countries. Mberirua joked about the horror his fellow operators on the continent expressed when he told them the Namibian Ministry of Defense’s telephone services had been cut for nonpayment.
“They told me that they would disappear off the face of the earth if they tried that, but we had to send them a message. Today our government is our best payer,” he said.
