TV blackout on cellphone wars

On any day of the week, if you've really got nothing better to do at 2am or 3am, you can switch on the telly and watch a 24-hour channel devoted to the murder trial of a gun-toting jock who used to be famous for running really fast on artificial legs.

Thanks to Oscar Pistorius the world now thinks that no white South African ever embarks on anything as hazardous as a school run or a grocery shop without a 9mm pistol strapped to their bodies and that at night honkies all brush their teeth, say their prayers and check that their gats are fully loaded.

By a curious quirk of history, I happen to be what is known as a white South African but, for the record, let me state that I don't own a gun. Nor does any white person I know - and some of my best friends, I will have you know, are white.

I don't like the Pistorius trial and its attendant media hoopla because of what the world seems to think it says about us as a nation.

The day the public protector's Nkandla report was released, I saw (admittedly on the OPTCB channel) the results of an online poll that suggested 77% of TV watchers were much more interested in Pistorius's security arrangements than the +R200-million security arrangements at our president's rural Xanadu.

This made me so depressed that I went to the deep freeze and ate half a tub of Bar One ice cream.

Meanwhile, in another courtroom, South Africa's two big cellular companies (the red one and the yellow one) are this week fighting Icasa over the telecommunications regulator's proposed cuts in interconnection rates. Sadly, as far as I know, DStv has no plans to dedicate a 24-hour satellite channel to covering these proceedings but it will continue broadcasting, around the clock, the trial of the Pretoria sprinter.

The big cellular companies argue that the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa has erred in cutting the amounts they can charge the little cellular companies (one of which is 38% owned by the state - the same state whose functionaries reckoned the president needed a swimming pool to keep him safe).

And the big guys argue that Cell C and Telkom Mobile can voetsek because it's only thanks to them (the big guys) that there is a playing field at all.

Meanwhile, the little guys are claiming that the big guys have refused to give Icasa vital documents it needs to determine what the big guys' costs are, but the red big guys are on the record as saying that they offered Icasa the documents but the authority couldn't be arsed to come and collect the envelope they had left at reception.

As this drama unfolds, little businesses are shelling out money hand over fist for voice and mobile data charges that they know are extortionate and wondering, not so much who is to blame, but when they will be able to afford cellular (read, "anyone but Telkom") voice communications to run their struggling enterprises.

Just the other day, Icasa acknowledged that it might have rather over-reached itself in its interconnect-cutting mission and that it was now going to spend all of six months double-checking its Excel spreadsheets on the rate cuts it suggested should come into effect next year and the year after.

Imagine the drama: Cell C and Telkom Mobile vs Vodacom and MTN, strange bedfellows suddenly fighting the same corner; Icasa flip-flopping left, right and centre; corporate secrets that have been buried for decades suddenly laid bare. This, you would imagine, is drama of the highest order - and its outcome will affect all of us, unlike the Pretoria murder trial.

But you won't see broadcasters going to court asking to have cameras inside the mobile telephony-courtroom because it's not that important; it's only the economy, stupid.