SPEECH GIVEN BY JAY NAIDOO MINISTER FOR POSTS, TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND BROADCASTING AT THE WORLD TELECOMMUNICATIONS DEVELOPMENT CONFERENCE 1998
Tuesday, 24 March 1998, Valetta, Malta
Mr. Chairman,
I wish to thank the Government of Malta and the ITU on this momentous occasion. The WTDC 98 is a time for reflection; it is also a time for careful planning.
In 1994 while you were meeting in Buenos Aires we were celebrating our victory over apartheid. We sincerely thank many of you present here for the solidarity extended to us. We hope to repay that debt in a small way through our humble contribution today.
Last week in South Africa I attended a launch of a telecentre that offers telephone, fax, computer and Internet access in a remote rural village in South Africa. Thousands of people attended. There was the elderly stooped by years of serving as a source of cheap labour on the farms of conservative white farmers, or slaving in the steamy kitchens of their madams or in the deepest pits of the mining conglomerates. There were children keen to see and touch a Minister that bothered to come to their village. Their eyes along the tired eyes of their fathers, mothers and grandparents quivered with excitement. This was bush country. It is dry, dusty, and poor. Very poor. Water is scarce and so are many of the most basic services that we in this room take for granted.
They told me that a few days ago they did a test. When the phone rang the woman took fright and wanted to run away. She had never seen a telephone, never used one and certainly never owned one. She would have would have had to walk fifty kilometres to use a phone in the past. This conference will have to hear her cry for help. Her plea to be in touch with her husband working in the city. Her plea to be in touch with a hospital if her daughter should fall ill.
She is part of four billion people in the world that don't have access to a telephone. Less than two years from the next millennium and the advent of the digital revolution we are still debating the division between the North and the South, the rich and the poor and between urban and rural and men and women. Now is the time for action. Words are meaningless, the digital revolution will be useless to the billions of poor marginalised communities of the world. We have a historic opportunity to pass a legacy to our future generations that will catapult them into the Global Information Society of the next century.
Our challenge is to provide meaningful solutions. The alternative is too ghastly to contemplate. Not, even the fortress economies of the developed world will be able to withstand the overwhelming surge of a displaced majority of humanity.
I will appeal to our distinguished delegates to forge a vision for the next millennium. To work genuinely for a partnership to deliver a better quality of life to people.
In 1995 we started a consultative process involving hundreds of inputs and discussions with stakeholders ranging from civil society. NGOs, the business sector, rural organisations and women's groups. The policy adopted by the Parliament in March of 1996 reflected the broad consensus in our society to transform and modernise our telecommunications sector.
Our new policy is guided by a vision of universal service. It has established a three-tier separation of power between government dealing with policy, an independent regulator ensuring fair competition and transparent licensing regime in a market that is being progressively liberalised.
The only monopoly that applies is for our partially privatised national telecom operator on voice telephony for a period of six years. This trade-off was necessary to ensure universal access. Over this period three million new lines will have to be constructed. Over a million analogue lines will be digitalised. Every school, clinic, post office, police station and village will have to be connected. A digital high speed broadband fibre-optic backbone will have to be built that will be capable of carrying voice, data and video.
However, in all other areas of telecommunications including value added services, paging, equipment supply, trunk calling there is full competition. In cellular with two national operators with over 1 million users we are preparing to license the third cellular operator this year. The basis of our WTO offer was to phase in competition in all areas of telecom by 2002.
Last week we launched the first major city to be fully digital. I answered the excited questions of children in a poor township school who now have access to the Internet. Thousand of our schools and clinics will be connected to the Internet allowing applications of telemedicine and distance education. Technology is helping our society to catapult over stages of development . I can only say that I am pleased with the progress; This year we will build 420 000 new lines from an apartheid high of 150 000 . Next year it will be over a half a million. At the end of the exclusivity period over 75 percent of qualifying households will have access to a telephone. The digital nervous system delivering equal services to rich and poor, urban and rural is being implemented. The benefits of the information society is driving the transformation of our society.
One of the world realities is the globalisation of the world economy. As developing countries we are constrained by a lack of resources and poorly performing economies.
The report of the Independent Commission for Worldwide Telecommunications Development (the Maitland Commission) in 1984 identified the "missing link" in telecommunications development as the gap, in access to basic telephone service, between developed and developing countries. Sir Donald Maitland, the Commission Chairman, illustrated this gap with the famous quote that there were more telephones in Tokyo than in the entire African continent.
That description was as true then as it is now.
In the Global Information Society, there is a direct positive correlation between access to telecommunications and socio-economic development. We realise that telecommunications is no longer the consequence of development, rather it is a necessary precondition.
The information society is not an impossible dream; neither is it a sophisticated nicety. It is fundamental to the upliftment and the improvement in the quality of life of all the disadvantaged people of the world, to ensure that future generations do not suffer from the same disadvantages and that the principle of equal opportunities prevails.
It is incumbent upon the world telecommunications community, as we meet here in 1998 in Valletta, to address the challenge of narrowing the development gap. We need to think creatively about the application of technology and how it can be used to build a truly global information infrastructure that meets the different needs of different people in different countries and regions and communities and villages of the world.
The impact of the information society and the associated structuring of the information economy is central to telecommunications development. In addition, the emergence of multimedia services, the rapid development of mobile communications, the advent of intelligent networks and satellite communications contributes to a dynamic sector. Towards that end, telecommunications policy will need to address the challenge of addressing the development gap.
We need to ask the question - what is to be done ?
The Information Revolution
The WTDC 98 is a reflection of the increasing awareness of the close links between telecommunications and political, economic and social development. It is also a reflection of and increasingly diverse world. In an increasingly information intensive global economy, the provision of adequate communication infrastructure and services is crucial for national development and improved competitiveness.
The challenge for some of us is to expand rural communications, which is often neglected because of the misplaced view that it is uneconomic. This is because conventional studies have counted only traffic from rural areas rather than traffic generated to them.
Telecommunications services have also proven to be extremely valuable in improving education indicators and reducing operational costs in several developing countries. The Singaporean experience in electronic data interchange has produced tangible benefits, with excellent multiplier effects.
Quality telecommunications infrastructure and services are a prerequisite for the attraction of foreign direct investment. Global competition for investment among developing countries has skyrocketed in recent years, with available capital being scarce and extremely selective.
Quality telecommunication services will be a key national competitive advantages by the turn of the millennium. Indeed 1998 will also be remembered as the year in which cross-border traffic over the Internet first exceeded that on the telephone network - a major challenge to the network.
The Revolution in Telecommunications Trade
1998 saw the implementation of a historic agreement in telecommunications concluded at the World Trade Organization. It also witnessed the opening up of telecommunications markets within several Member States of the European Union.
The telecommunication sector is one of the major components of the world's economy, ranking third after banking and health services. Furthermore, telecommunication networks are a major facilitator of trade in other goods and other services. For instance, the value of financial services transferred over the SWIFT international telecommunication network exceeds $US 1 trillion each day.
The extensive coverage and binding nature of the WTO agreement accounts for over 90 per cent of international telecommunications traffic. These commitments by the signatories represent significant departures from conventional liberalisation programmes. Notwithstanding the different national configurations, the WTO agreement makes for a markedly revolutionary sector.
The intensity of the revolution will impact upon regulatory structures and operations, existing legislation, competition policy, pricing policy, interconnection agreements, business and consumer practices. But most importantly of all the signatories will need to establish the implementation mechanisms and dispute resolution mechanisms necessary for new operators and service providers to enter those segments of their telecommunication markets which they have committed to open.
However with all perceived benefits, there are risks. These include the possibility of a decline in telecommunication revenue for particular operators, an infringement of national sovereignty and loss of control over basic telecommunication infrastructure. These are all strategic considerations. Another fear is the fear of predatory competition from powerful competitors. All of this will affect the pricing policy and the accounting rate system.
Undoubtedly world telecommunications liberalisation can have an adversely distributive effect - if no concerted effort is made to prepare a careful plan and strategy.
The WTO agreement also highlights the multilateral nature of telecommunications trade and represents a significant deepening of the institutional reorganization of telecommunications governance. The international telecommunications community needs to work together to find solutions appropriate to the new telecommunications environment heralded by the WTO agreement.
The world telecommunications community needs to take into account the infrastructure construction and the development of information processing industries. We need to participate collectively in the building of the information society.
It is our view that the WTDC 98 has a critical role to play to leapfrog the developing world into the information economy of the 21st century. This conference must be a further platform for growth and development for the wider telecommunications community.
We remain poised on the threshold of a new global information society with all of the benefits that that has to offer all the people of the world. But we will never achieve the global information society unless we prepare for the global information economy. This means adopting a bold and decisive approach to the international trading patterns and investment realities. Telecommunications and information services are essential to all forms of economic activity. The WTO agreement, therefore, represents a bold step towards building the global information society.
We need to focus on the opportunities, the strengths and the positive outputs, not only on the perceived threats.
Towards this end it becomes incumbent upon the ITU and the BDT in particular, to become more responsive to telecommunications in developing countries, more effective and more efficient in the effort to become more equitable in improving the access of telecommunications towards all of humanity.