Mobile networks accused of adding lines prematurely

By Tererai Karimakwenda
19 December 2006

Many people phoning Zimbabwe lately have noticed that the lines are always busy and it has been very difficult to get through. Those making calls inside the country also say it has been stressful trying to do business or reach family and friends. The state controlled Herald newspaper revealed on Tuesday that the increased line congestion was caused by the release of more than 600,000 new cellular lines by Netone, Econet and Telecel. The paper said the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Transport and Communication was questioning why Zimbabwe’s mobile service providers were offloading new lines on to the market without adequately upgrading and expanding their base stations.

Our Harare correspondent Simon Muchemwa reports that ZANU-PF chefs and some managers from all three networks have been implicated in a corruption scandal involving the sale of extra mobile lines to non-existent individuals. He said lines were released prematurely because the companies wanted to raise cash that would help them with the upgrades. Muchemwa said there are requisition orders which show that fake names and identification numbers were used to order lines by officials at the mobile companies. But he would not release their names saying there might be a court case and more investigations were in progress.

We contacted Sure Kamhunga, head of Group Media Relations at Econet Wireless Group in South Africa. He said Econet had air tight systems and no such scandal had taken place. He explained that they had started increasing the number of lines on the market 3 weeks ago in small batches and had already spent Z$ 90 billion dollars expanding their networks. He denied any involvement in corruption, saying they will be adding more lines till the end of February.

Kamhunga explained that congestion in Zimbabwe is caused by many factors. High traffic areas with large concentrations of usage, power outages as well as the quality of the handsets all influence how congested the networks become. We were not able to speak to any officials at Netone and Telecel.