For South Africa and Africa to achieve universal access and services, equitable access to scarce global resources needs to be achieved.

This will require continual improvements of current governance structures and organisational arrangements to make them for efficient and more manageable, says Minister of Telecommunications and Postal Services Siyabonga Cwele, addressing the ATU (African Telecommunications Union) Plenipotentiary in Harare.

Cwele adds that the ICT sector is at the hub of National Development Plan, with telecommunications sector alone growing from an estimated R179-billion in 2011 to an anticipated R187-billion in 2016.

“My Ministry’s focus is to expand, modernise and increase the affordability of ICTs infrastructure and electronic communications services and this is mainly through broadband,” he says.

The ICT Policy Review process is underway and should be finalised in the current financial year, aiming to promote access to ICT services, while strengthening collaboration between the ICT sector and other service sectors such as banking, commerce, agriculture, media and other new services.

“South Africa has adopted South Africa Connect, our national broadband policy, giving clear direction on how we aim to reach our target of 100% broadband access by 2020,” Cwele adds.

“Our vision is to achieve a connected South Africa that will stimulate economic enterprise and innovation and ensure social and economic inclusion; and identify policy choices and strategies that will deliver on a robust and cost-effective solution to universal, affordable broadband access.

“But in order for broadband roll-out to succeed, we need to leverage on our economies of scale.”

He says that, in following on the Transform Africa agenda of 2013, African ICT Ministers need to focus on the five principles in actionable strategies, including:

* Placing ICT at the centre of our national development agenda – mainstreaming ICT applications in the fields of education, health, business, tourism, mining and agriculture;
* Harmonising our policy and regulatory space to create an environment for private sector investment; and
* Promoting an open access, technology-neutral infrastructure service.

He adds that a network that is not safe and secure is not sustainable.

“South Africa adopted a cyber-security policy in 2012, and has worked with members of the African Union on a continental cyber security framework, which was announced recently and adopted by the African Union Summit in Malabo.

“Our task now is to collaborate on the governance of Internet Public Policy. The increasing importance of the Internet in commerce and other spheres of life has enabled new forms of ‘human interaction that disrupt existing social and economic systems’.

“Establishing a distributed, decentralised Internet governance model is in the best interest of all stakeholders,” Cwele stresses.

“The African Continent unfortunately has limited participation in the broader global governance debates. It is important for the African Continent to establish institutional arrangements to help educate, advance and develop its own ecosystem.”