Fast forward to today, and if confidence translated into results, we would be downloading a full feature high definition movie in seven seconds flat.
Instead, and unlike our neighbours in Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia and Botswana, our government is still broadcasting analogue and hasn't released the spectrum, and to add insult to injury, Independent Communications Authority of South Africa, Icasa, latest information
memorandum on spectrum release offers these bands as lots for auction when it actually has no idea beyond a guesstimate when this spectrum will actually become available. It's selling something that it doesn't have.
So when we review the work of the department and its entities over the last financial year, what stands out is the lack of progress. The usual competent high flyers like Sentech continue to receive clean audits while serial non-performers like the SA post Office, Sapo, and the Universal Service and Access Agency of South Africa, Usaasa, continue to reflect matters of concern.
Among these are hundreds of millions of rands in unauthorised, fruitless and wasteful expenditure.
Given government failed to switch off the analogue signal by the 2015 deadline due to your incompetence, you effectively cost South Africa hundreds of millions in dual illumination costs; massive legal bills, and billions in revenue that could have been earned by leasing the spectrum in those bands.
While the Auditor-General doesn't record it as wasteful, the fact is you have wasted billions in opportunity costs as you sat on your collective hands and did nothing, Minister after Minister. That's real fruitless and wasteful expenditure; its money downs the drain.
This department is stagnating, treading water and going nowhere besides to conferences spouting off about the Fourth Industrial Revolution without first bothering to educate the Deputy President as to what the first, second and third ones were. [Time expired.] The DA supports this report.