Deputy Speaker, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa, Icasa, is frequently criticised for failing to fulfil its mandate of efficiently regulating the telecommunications and broadcasting sectors to ensure affordable, ubiquitous and high-quality communication services to all South Africans.
It lacks sufficient suitably qualified staff to produce high-calibre, largely technical work promptly. Its council of well-paid full-time councillors is frequently criticised for not adequately providing the regulatory landscape South Africa needs. The council is hindered in its work by not having sufficient councillors with the relevant technical knowledge to properly guide and oversee the work presented to it by an underresourced administration.
Of the five candidates for the Icasa Council presented to this House today, the DA is of the opinion that two candidates will contribute little of value to accelerating the roll-out of the necessary regulations and monitoring the delivery of services. If this House perpetually appoints people with inappropriate skills and scant experience in the environment in which Icasa operates, we are all complicit in the entity's perpetual inability to deliver. How can we call these entities to account before the National Assembly if we are responsible for the inappropriate skills complement in the first place?
The candidates the DA opposes are Ms Nomonde Gongxeka and Mr Manyara Mohlaloga, both of whom are currently ANC cadres in government. Ms Gongxeka is with the SABC and Mr Mohlaloga is with the Department of Communications. And we take a dim view of the career trajectory from public servant to oversight body, as it is an indication of ministerial interference in an entity that should be valued for its independence.
We also maintain that neither of these candidates has the required skills and experience for the job. This is particularly so in the case of Mr Mohlaloga whose career trajectory has been from the ANC Youth League to this House as an MP, and now to the Department of Communications, where his lack of leadership skills led to a delay in the submission of tenders by potential set-top box manufacturers.
The ANC's hard-line approach to the inclusion of these two candidates, at the expense of far better qualified individuals, clearly points to the fact that the ANC still favours cadre deployment and jobs for pals over service delivery. I thank you.