TECHNOLOGY: Wire Theft Renders Swaziland Phoneless

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

MBABANE, Mar 22 2002 (IPS) - At any given time, ten to 20 percent of Swaziland is without conventional telephone service because thieves are stealing wires.

“They climb up the poles, and just cut the wire. It is a problem that is now seven years old, and it does not seem to be going away,” says Lindiwe Dlamini, spokesperson for the Swaziland Post and Telecommunications System.

The problem is prevalent, though not limited to, rural areas, where fewer police are available to patrol the kingdom’s telephone infrastructure.

Thieves want the copper contained in the wires. “They see the commodity unprotected out there as free for the taking,” Dlamini says.

The phone company says that due to the theft of wire, whole areas of the country are thrown into a telephonic blackout. The only remedy is the expensive replacement of the lost wires, a measure that has proven a temporary solution at best.

“What are we supposed to do?” asks Chief Malunge of rural Enyangeni, 20 kilometres north of the commercial hub Manzini. “Our people are poor, and they cannot afford cellular phones.”

Cell phones, introduced to Swaziland in 1998 when the service provider MTN secured an exclusive 10-year contract from government, would not be a solution even if every Swazi – and over two-thirds currently live below the poverty line – could afford to purchase and maintain the devices.

Currently, about two-thirds of Swaziland is covered by cellular “footprints” laid down by transmission towers, areas where cell phone users can make calls. The more isolated parts of the country are not covered, and these are usually where the theft of wire is most prevalent.

“We have always contended that cell phone service is not a substitute for a national fixed-line phone system,” says Ronnie Mkhombe, marketing manager for MTN-Swaziland, the local subsidiary of the parent Mobile Telephone Network of South Africa.

Cell phones augment rather than replace land-based phones, Mkhombe notes, because of the expense of making cellular phone calls as opposed to land phone calls, and current technical limitations that require a fixed-line system to send faxes and connect with the Internet.

Internet service providers are alarmed that wire theft is cutting their customers off from the World Wide Web. “The situation is retarding progress in communications, and national development in general,” says Mbukiso Ginindza of Africa Online in the capital Mbabane.

What do the thieves do with the wire? “They don’t sell it back to us!” says SPTC spokesperson Dlamini. “They melt it down.”

The copper is recycled for use in metal household objects, or for trinkets sold to tourists. Souvenirs include statues and framed — frieze-like pictures of landscapes — traditional Swazi scenes and portraits that are sold along the roadside and at border posts.

Copperland, a shop located near the primary tourist hotels in the Ezulwini Valley, seven miles east of Mbabane, which specialised in decorative copper pictures, had to close down after police investigators began to inquire where the artisans who supplied the shop obtained their raw materials.

The number of visitors to Swaziland declined by a third last year, affecting all businesses that depend on the tourist trade. But this has not decreased the theft of copper wire.

With the decline in demand for copper in artefacts, a popular alternative use for the stolen metal has been found. Three-legged cooking pots, used by rural Swazis to prepare meals over open fires, were usually made from an inferior grade of iron, but are increasingly made of copper or aluminium, according to Israel Myeni, human resources manager of Mhlume Sugar Estate.

Myeni says his aluminium irrigation pipes are being stolen, and are resurfacing as cooking pots. “It is easy to make these pots, and people have seen how it is done with our pipes. Now they are using telephone wire,” he says.

The Swaziland Electricity Board has reported blackouts due to theft of its wire. Beauty Mamba, a housewife in Enyangeni, laments, “First, we have no phone, and then the lights go out, all because of these thieves.”

Police appear powerless to stop the theft, which they also see as a cause for security concerns. “Emergency calls cannot be made. Copper wire thieves are abetting crime in general by rendering whole areas helpless,” says police spokesperson Assistant Superintendent Vusi Masuku.

Meanwhile, Ben Nsibandze, regional supervisor for the Hhohho district in Northern Swaziland, says, “In some cases we are reduced to using the old fashion way, having chiefs’ runners go from place to place with messages. You don’t appreciate phones, how much we take them for granted, until the line goes dead.”

The theft of unprotected recyclable items like wire and irrigation pipe has a precedent on the nation’s highways, which when constructed are fenced with barbed wire on either side to prevent cattle from crossing and causing accidents.

“No sooner is this wire installed, than people take it to fence their gardens,” says Masuku. “Many traffic fatalities have resulted from collisions with cows on highways.”

The precedent also offers a solution. The transportation ministry is working with communities to create highway patrols to monitor wire theft. It has been suggested that communities should be held financially responsible for this theft, because in most cases it resurfaces at local homesteads.

The phone and electricity companies are also appealing to chiefs and local communities to tend to their telecommunication and power infrastructure.

Mamba agrees with this approach. “We are the ones most affected by these thieves when our services go out,” she says.