‘All the alarms bells go off’: Digital migration could stall – again

While adamant on Sunday the television digital migration plan would go ahead, the department of communications and digital technologies (DCDT) is likely to face yet more court action.

This time it could be over its awarding of the tender for the set top boxes (STB) to Sentech. The boxes will act as decoders when government switches from analogue to digital transmission.

The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse’s (Outa) director Stefanie Fick said despite certain circumstances where time could be shortened for emergency tenders, the STB installation tender was not an emergency.

Fick said a tender worth billions of rands for three years should not have been pushed through in four days. “All the alarms bells go off because the only people that will be ready for these types of tenders are people who knew about it which put the small, local business in jeopardy.”

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Fick said these tenders “smelt” like someone knew about them coming out and Outa was scared they would be directed to “pre-identified individuals”, instead of creating opportunities for local, upcoming small businesses.

“We think there is something irregular happening here and that is why we are questioning this,” she said.

“We are aware that there needs to be set top boxes installed and the fact that we know the digital migration will happen does not necessarily mean the going out on a tender for installers needs to be urgent.”

She said it would be wise for Treasury to look into the facts and conditions and it was a question of who could put out a tender of this enormity in just four days.

“If it will cost taxpayers a lot of money, I can guarantee you we will consider a court action.”

However, DCDT spokesperson Frans Mthombeni said there were no irregularities in the awarding of the tender.

“If there were any irregularities, we would have been alerted by senior management.”

Mthombeni said the benefits of the digital migration and ending dual illumination outweighed any short-term inconvenience that would happen after the analogue switch-off.

People’s Media Consortium spokesperson Hassen Logat said it was “tragic” the minister would go against the reality on the ground. He said people cannot be “modernised” or forced into a new way without their involvement and consent.

“We all want digital migration but we do not want them to take away the rights of people as that is unconstitutional.”