Plan on WhatsApp calls likely to come to a dead end

By Charles Makakala Last week Tanzania’s minister of ICT, Dr Faustine Ndugulile, told a local newspaper that “the government was looking into ways of preventing loss of its revenues, occasioned by WhatsApp calls”.According to the report, the number of international calls has fallen dramatically in the past decade, from 107.2 million calls to 27.3 million calls per quarter between 2012 and 2020, respectively. That’s a decrease of 75 percent in eight years, surely a cause for considerable concern for policy makers and revenue collectors.Commenting on this move, Mr. Emmanuel Manase, a director at Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA), explained that the government is trying to find ways to offset its losses without putting any additional burden on end-users. I was impressed. What was described revealed a high degree of duty of care that’s seldom manifested in similar government regulations. Too bad that the effort is misguided in this case.From the very beginning, international voice gateways (IGWs) have always been lucrative sources of income for both operators and governments. In Tanzania, for decades that business was monopolised by TTCL which was the only licensee in that category (Zantel had a licence for Zanzibar). As a monopoly, regardless of TTCL’s performance, it…
Read More