'Administrative oversight'

ADSL South Africa (Broadband South Africa), 6 March 2007

‘Administrative oversight,’ this is Telkom’s lame excuse for ignoring a directorate ruling of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). It’s clear that Telkom has once again walked over ASA.

What’s the problem?

ASA ruled in June 2006 that Telkom may not claim, among other things, ‘that it is, “Africa’s leading integrated communication company”. It was instructed to remove this claim from its website, but despite this ruling the claim remained on the telecoms giant’s site’ (Telkom does not comply with Advertising Standards Authority, MyADSL, 2 March 2007).

According to the ASA website: “The complainant saw the same claim on the respondent’s website on 30 January 2007, nearly six months after the respondent received the instruction to remove it. The respondent [Telkom] admitted that the claim still appeared in the website” (Telkom does not comply with Advertising Standards Authority, MyADSL, 2 March 2007). In other words, almost half a year has past since the ruling and ASA is still waiting on Telkom to comply.

‘Telkom said that the non-compliance was not a flagrant disregard of the Directorate ruling but an administrative oversight’ (Telkom does not comply with Advertising Standards Authority, MyADSL, 2 March 2007).

Is ASA capable or willing to enforce rulings where Telkom is involved?

One can’t help to second-guess ASA’s capability or willingness to effectively regulate advertising in the public interest because it “does not deem it necessary to consider sanctions at this time” against Telkom (Telkom does not comply with Advertising Standards Authority, MyADSL, 2 March 2007).

Why doesn’t ASA deem it necessary to consider sanctions?

ASA ‘said that it can see that Telkom has challenging logistical issues to overcome and that recent staff changes may have contributed to the lack of action from the telecoms provider…’ (Telkom does not comply with Advertising Standards Authority, MyADSL, 2 March 2007). In other words, ASA came just short of blaming it all on ‘logistical issues’ and ‘staff changes’ at Telkom.

Here are questions we think ASA and Telkom should answer:

How is it possible that logistical issues can hamper a big company such as Telkomfrom making a simple change to its website? Can you name one ‘challenging logistical issue’?

How many members of staff are needed to make a simple change to a website? 1, 100, 1000, 10 000, 100 000 or more?

Why doesn’t it take Telkom six months to make changes to its website when a new product or service is involved? Or when you’re ready to take the public for a ride by deliberately publishing lies or disinformation?

Well, we can go on and on but it’s not the point we want to make here…

The situation reminds us of this T-shirt we saw of a Frenchman sitting at a table with a mango placed in front of him, with the wording: Last mango in Paris.

ADSL South Africa(Broadband South Africa) really hopes ASA get its act together otherwise Telkom will keep on taking them and us for a ride.