Zimbabwe’s digital migration project hasn’t been wrapped up yet. In fact, it’s nowhere near completion judging from the litany of financial challenges that the project has faced as well as the shifts in national economic policy.
There is an outstanding fee of over $140 million that’s expected to be raised by the government to ppay the contractor, Huawei, and get the project back on track.
However, the most pressing figure is a $29 million payment that the State has to make to Huawei to ensure that the current stage of the project is completed.
According to the ZBC, the Permanent Secreteary in the Ministry of Information, Media and Broadcasting Services George Charamba recently highlighted how the non-payment of this outstanding fee had slowed down progress of the project.
Charamba also pointed out the goodwill shared between Zimbabwe and Huawei had been exhausted. The Chinese firm has since has halted any work on the project and only the release of the $29 million will get it back on track.
Chinese firms like Huawei have played a major role in national ICT project like digitisation as well as the LTE rollout of state owned mobile operator NetOne.
As such a strain on relationships between the governemnt and the Chinese firm has a negative impact.
3 comments
Only fools does work on credit to an entity that pays 97% of revenue to salaries
Had this tender been done competitively, we wouldnt pay so much!! Damn!
Charamba, is you had left KweseTV using ZBC infrastructure, you would charged them a fee, say $100 000 a month. Then, you could go back to Huawei and use that as a carrot and tell them that if the deal finishes, more business like KweseTV will come onboard and more money will realised and pay Huawei for even more services installation.
But no, you thought you were being smart. Zimbabwe gvt talk about looking east when they live in the western world. You drive western cars, president uses western cars and aeroplanes, you introduced the western world to look east policy. Now western world are doing more business with chinese, and where are you?
Huawei understand business, right lm about to start testing their 100G storage switches on the promise that if what we building comes off, we will use them. Thats business my friend.