19 February 2010 CASE STUDY: SENTECH Wrong signals By Larry Claasen

If government were a parent and signal distributor Sentech its child, chances are it would be an overbearing stage mother who pushed its young sprog into activities it had no real talent for. Over the years, the communications department would come up with new roles for Sentech only to see these ambitious plans fail. Siphiwe Nyanda - Appointed a task team At one stage it was planning to rival Telkom and offer a fully fledged telecom service. When this failed, it wanted it to develop a national wireless broadband network (NWBN) which would provide connectivity to schools, hospitals, clinics, community centres, post offices and government offices in underserviced areas. But instead of rolling out the network, Sentech, fearing failure, is sitting on the R500m the department handed out until it gets further assurances on the R3,2bn it needs to put up the NWBN. On top of government's ever changing demands, Sentech's operational performance has been woeful - it incurred a R23m loss in 2009, despite telling parliament in November it was turning the corner. "The train is heading in the right direction," Sentech CEO Sebiletso Mokone-Matabane said. But a task team appointed by communications minister Siphiwe Nyanda to look at Sentech's performance found it to be "rudderless, inadequately funded, and misdirected". So what must be done to turn the signal distributor around? If government wants to solve the problems at Sentech, it must come up with an overarching ICT policy and give it a specific role. The task group has already noted this, saying government should "dispel role ambiguity" by distinguishing between Sentech's mandate and those of other parastatals.