Western Cape Premier Helen Zille has lamented the impact that criminals are having on the province’s ability to roll-out broadband in underserviced parts of the province.
In the latest edition of her newsletter, Zille said criminals are undermining the ability to deploy broadband to schools in the south-east quadrant of Cape Town, which includes impoverished areas such as Langa and Khayelitsha.
She said contractors are refusing to work in those areas because “they have been repeatedly robbed at gunpoint, and their equipment, including cellphones and money, stolen”.
“Apart from the fact that they fear for their lives, they cannot meet their delivery schedules if their programmes are constantly disrupted by crime. And if they do not meet their delivery schedules, financial penalties kick in,” Zille said.
She said that one case, workers were robbed at gunpoint on two separate occasions while working at the same site in Nyanga. “They were busy connecting 19 sites to broadband for the benefit of local residents. The contractor packed up and left, refusing to put his staff at further risk.”
The problems go further than that, Zille said, with thieves making off with fibre-optic cable. “This is a dreadful new phenomenon, which brings no commercial value at all to the thieves, while playing havoc with our budgets and delivery plans,” she explained.
“Neotel, our service provider, now brands their fibre-optic cables so that criminals are informed that connectivity cables contain no valuable metal and are not worth stealing.”
She said that unless communities protect their infrastructure, there is a limit to what government can do. “It is hard work to lay cables — but also to dig them up. Surely the perpetrators are seen by community members who know that a crime is being committed. We need them to be our eyes and ears on a 24/7 basis if they want the investment required to improve their children’s lives to bear fruit.”
Residents of crime-ridden communities have a choice, Zille said: if they work together to ensure the safety of contractors installing valuable infrastructure in their areas, and then subsequently protect the infrastructure, the province will connect all schools to free high-speed Internet by the end of 2016. “If criminal elements continue to block our progress, we can’t achieve this.”
The broadband roll-out is part of the Western Cape government’s plan to integrate e-learning resources in the province’s education system. “This requires every school to have free Internet access, which in turn requires that they are all linked to broadband.”
Improving education is the province’s core mandate, Zille said. “We cannot use crime as an excuse for failing to fulfil our mandate, but in truth it is an enormous barrier.”
She said the province cannot focus more than it already does on crime prevention as it doesn’t have such powers under the constitution. “We only have powers of ‘oversight’ over the South African Police Service, which we use to the fullest extent possible.”
She said the police have informed the province that they cannot have a physical presence at every delivery point in the south-east sector of Cape Town for the broadband roll-out. This is because it “takes days to dig the trenches and install the fibre. I understand their dilemma.” — © 2016 NewsCentral Media
