BY MBONO MDLULI
LOBAMBA – The Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) is working on availing set top boxes (bo sigujana) to enable Emaswati to watch local television stations.
This was said today (Wednesday, August 14, 2024) by Minister of ICT Savannah Maziya in the House of Assembly. She was responding to a question posed by Mafutseni Member of Parliament (MP) Sabelo Mtsetfwa, who wanted to know what the Ministry was doing to ensure the availability of the gadgets.
Responding to the question, Minister Maziya said they were finding ways to avail the gadgets, but for now, they had a challenge with certain shops, which did not want to cooperate with the Ministry in selling the gadgets. She said what made them not available was that the people had bought them, after their prices were lowered by the Ministry.
The problem now was that the Ministry had no money to stock other gadgets. She said she was going to approach Minister of Finance Neal Rijkenberg to find out if there could be a way of buying other gadgets. She told the MPs that in 2003, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), of which Eswatini is a member, gave a mandate to its members to move from analogue to digital form of broadcasting.
Maziya said in 2015, Government started launching the programme of digital migration, where the country was expected to move from analogue broadcasting to a more digital one. This programme, according to the minister, came with the set top boxes, which were supposed to be sold in shop. They started selling for E500, but the nation would not buy them. They were lowered to E300 and that was when people started buying them, but still, the response was not positive, according to the minister.
She said the gadget ended up retailing for E250 or E200 and that was when they were bought up until they were no longer in the market. She said there was a need for the set top boxes to be there, even amidst the availability of smart TVs. She said smart TVs were not cheap and many people could not watch them. After her explanation, MP Mtsetfwa suggested that Government should consider putting Eswatini TV on MultiChoice South Africa because most Emaswati watched South African programmes.
