There she goes again. After eight years in office and all those nice things they said about encouraging competition, technology neutrality and managing liberalisation, minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri is proposing to drive us up another dead-end.

“I have taken the policy decision,” she dictated in her Department of Communications budget speech, “that mobile broadcasting services will be provided on a single network with national coverage, using the DVB-H standard. The network... will be operated on the basis of open and non-discriminatory access principles.”