#DataMustFall, government must step in
Expensive data stifles economic growth and that is a fact.
It’s a shockingly stark comparison: we pay three times as much for data as people do in Mozambique, which is one of the poorest and least developed countries on the African continent.
We understand why many South Africans are querying this state of affairs and why the #DataMustFall movement has sprung up.
Yesterday the Right2Know organisation picketed outside the head offices of the many cellular communication providers to emphasise the scale of the problem.
This is more than a question of excessive money being leached from ordinary South Africans, or of the excessive, and huge, profits made by the cell companies; this is a question of how this practice is helping to choke our national economy.
It is no surprise that, in the data price rankings, South Africa lags behind both Egypt and Nigeria, countries that have both leapfrogged ahead of us in recent years in gross domestic product rankings in Africa. Expensive data stifles economic growth. That is a fact.
And when you stifle economic growth you constrain the number of jobs that can be created. Without growth in employment, we are headed for an implosion. This cannot be allowed to continue.
The government must step in on behalf of all of us.
