Even for unlettered persons looking at that advert it looks like it is a crowd beater, likely to attract a breadth of customers but whose ‘datamatics’ look somewhat doubtful, and especially given its role as state telephone firm with a supposedly clear mission and public role. It is this lacunae that the public is feeling, which has given Tanzania false accolades as one among countries with fast growth in mobile telephony.
The reason accolades that Tanzania has won in that sphere are doubtful is the fact that mobile telephony in this country grows on the back of the collapse of fixed telephony instead of being an additional facility, auxiliary to public needs as it were.
This limitation is true of many African countries because state management of telephony is similar to ours, where state entities usually do not pay for public services like water, electricity or for that matter telephony. It becomes one among office perks for public servants while the private sector pays through the nose to cover up such deficits. Only during the fifth phase has this anomaly started being addressed, rather sternly.
Even when public utilities engage in competitive commerce with established private firms they appear to have to go a further mile to attract users or customers, and hopefully to keep them in a continual manner as with their supposed rivals.
The reason for discounting this supposition is that public firms are usually not in a position to rival the sort of outlays and networking that large private firms are capable of putting up as part of an initial investment strategy, quite unlike a public firm. In that context large private firms attract an enormous clientele and can thus work with usable margins in extending overly diminished costing of certain packages, systematically.
When public firms seek to do the same thing they do so at the risk of erosion of capital margins, as their operating base is unlikely to provide them with a cushioning effect for cutting edge competitive products as it appears to be the case for this advert.
In that case simple economics might be wanting for this product line specifically, before adding the fact that it is being pursued while office telephony, the supposedly principal occupation of TTCL, lies fallow without real or appreciable investment over the past decade. There may have been salient effort singularly in that direction, even changing the market somewhat, but they aren’t noticeable, or advertised for.
There is an English expression, ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ that if for the past 20 years or so TTCL has never seen anything worthwhile to advertise in relation to public telephony, to ask the public to make individual or public investments in that direction, or arranging packages for groups of users, would it really be doing anything significant in that sphere?
Even if the TTCL management feels more at home in designing rather wasteful products like massive gigabyte packages for users while they have a still skimpy operating base, what of the government? Is it just arranging billions of shillings for TTCL to gamble in mobile telephony cutting edge products or it presumably have a reason to direct TTCL to use any subsidy it has from the government in areas where it’s unlikely to lose money, or overwork itself to attract customers, office telephony?
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