As organised crime syndicates increasingly entrench their dominance, South Africa’s telecommunications sector players are struggling to lay new infrastructure.
So said Thokozani Mvelase, CEO of Communication Risk Information Centre (COMRiC), highlighting that the telecoms sector is not immune to ‘extortionists’, as he described them.
COMRiC is the non-profit organisation (NPO) focused onleading crime and risk intelligence within the telecoms industry.It counts Cell C, Vodacom, MTN SA, Telkom and Liquid Intelligent Technologies as its founding members.
From a telecoms infrastructure perspective, Mvelase said some of the key threats that take place on a daily basis include theft and vandalism, which are not spoken about enough. “We as a country have, one way or another, accepted the levels of crime that we see.
“The organised crime syndicates…we’re not the only ones [impacted] but we are mostly impacted by it. These days…we can’t lay new infrastructure in an area because of the organised syndicates who will want to extort something from you before you can do any work in those areas.
“When you consider it, we invest more in resuscitating old infrastructure than in laying new infrastructure because of some of these impediments that we encounter as a sector.”
Speaking to ITWeb, the CEO elaborated that in addition to battery theft and the like, the telecoms sector must now also contend with organised crime syndicates.
“I know it has been termed ‘construction mafia’…it’s extortion because we don’t know what ‘construction mafia’ means – it means different things to different people. This has been happening for a while; it is just that our sector has not vocalised it.
“For example, when the men in the vans want to lay new infrastructure, or it’s a case of even fixing the existing infrastructure (which may have been stolen), they will be intimated and told they can’t work in the area unless they work with locals, or something to that effect.
“In some instances, no matter how big or small the project is, we end up not being able to deploy the necessary infrastructure timeously because of the delays as a result of these extortions.
“We are impacted heavily because when we have to lay infrastructure, we’d be prevented from doing that and required to come another day or another week.”
According to Mvelase, the adverse effect is that someone within a community will be left without connectivity because a specific company can’t progress with the laying of infrastructure.
This article originally appeared on ITWeb. Click here to read the full story.