The state’s role in terms of what we call regulation should change to be an enabler.
This is the view of Andile Ngcaba, the executive chairman and founder of private equity firm Convergence Partners, noting that the telecommunications industry should strive to remove the word regulation in-laws, vocabulary, and terminologies.
Ngcaba participated in a roundtable on “Looking Back, Going Forward: How Africa’s Tech History Contains the Roots of its Future” at Africa Tech Fest and AfricaCom 2022 in Cape Town. He was joined by Nic Rudnick – CEO of Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Nika Naghavi – Executive director of MNOs at MFS Africa; and Funke Opeke – CEO at MainOne.
The discussion centred around how Africa’s lack of regulation surrounding digital technologies in the early 90s led to many modern advancements.
“It (regulatory model) might have worked at the beginning, but now if we still think we will use that model in the digital era, it will probably be counterproductive,” he said.
“We need to change regulators. It’s whether we close them down. I am very serious.”
Ngcaba added that when the state liberalised the telecoms sector, people said there would be chaos. The popular argument at the time was that there must be one national operator running telecoms.
“That’s how people were thinking. If we do that today, I told our regulator (ICASA) is, either you close, or you call yourself something else. They must be enablers. You can say maybe Digital Enabler Organisation. They need to enable things.”
A former director-general in the communications department, Ngcaba is among the people who authored the current legislation, which set out how regulatory frameworks must be done.
He told his fellow panellist that in his culture, when a child is given a name, they have a meaning, and the child must leave up to the name.
“When you are called a regulator, you always want to stop things,” he explained.
“If your name is enabler, you want to enable things. So, we need to ensure that Africa’s informal sector is enabled to get to the digital life.”
Rudnick, agreed with Ngcaba and explained that during the 90s, when liberalisation of the telecoms sector took place, governments started issuing spectrum.
He said there were very few, if any, independent regulators. “So that spectrum was issued into a kind of a void. If you can say that, I think private enterprise does well in the void.”
The so-called void resulted in the creation of the giants of the African technology industry such as MTN, Vodacom, Airtel, Econet and Tigo, etc. “They really thrived in that very free market.”
Since then, Rudnick said independent regulators had become institutions and a lot more assertive.
“I think in some countries they have been for the good of the sector, but many have been an impediment to the rollout of new generation networks that we see and through delays of spectrum licensing.”
To enable innovation, Rudnick said: “I think some regulators, and its hard to be a generalist to the whole continent, but some regulators need to understand that keeping out of the way for the industry is best way to encourage development.”
