Mthuli Ncube must slow down on NetOne privatization

By Staff reporter | 03 Apr 2019 at 11:24hrs
Mthuli Ncube
The way Mthuli Ncube is running with the quick offloading of NetOne and TelOne, one may be forgiven for thinking that he is the minister of ICT Postal and Courier Services.

While the issue of partial privatization, or even full privatization of SOE is a noble move for all non-performing state-owned enterprises, the move has to be done with one major intention of releasing only non-performing State Owned Enterprises, not all of them.

We have personally advocated the idea of making sure underperforming SOEs be liberalized and more importantly be moved into more capable hands as the government has failed to capacitate them, especially when their competitors are doing so well, and they may never catch up.

However, the irony of this whole matter when the government, or is it a government official seems to be so much excited about making sure he quickly releases one of the few if not the only profitable SEO.

Mthuli Ncube openly came out stating that he will be merging Netone and TelOne as a single asset to the next bidder, as soon as they finish the evaluation, meaning this asset will operationally work as two separate entities but sold as one.

Slow down Hon, Why so quick on these telecoms when you actually have many more other dead horses.

ZESA has failed to be profitable as the sole energy supplier, ZINWA does not even know how clean water must look and ZINARA has collected road fees more that its willing to fix the major roads like Harare Beitbridge which have become death traps.

If you love to fix the tech sector first, we have Zarnet, Which purportedly bought Telecel, there is an ailing Zimpost, Government Internet Service Provider, (GISP), Courier Connect, and of course Telecel which is now 100 % owned by Zimbabweans where your government is sitting on 60% and the asset is slowly dying.

Why are the priorities so high on NetOne the only asset which is recovering from millions of losses to a first time ever of $15 million profit, this move boggles the mind.

It would be a very exciting move to hear that big players like MTN are finally in Zimbabwe controlling a majority stake at a company like Telecel Zimbabwe, I think we would be excited to hear a small player buying Netone.

We hear from our rumour mill that the next NetOne buyer is already known and all he has to do is to sign papers but is this what we really want for this State Owned enterprise.

We will come back with part of this version as more information reaches us, in the meantime, we hope a high priority will be put to making sure that we salvage crumbling state-owned entities.

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