A celebratory message arrived recently: one side of a particular road was being trenched by Neotel, while the other was being dug up by MTN. Great news indeed, if only because it proves that the space-time continuum doesn't implode when two competitors dig up the same road. Similar good news appeared elsewhere. A company named Seacom is building a new undersea cable. Vodacom says it wants a meerkat in every telecoms hole it can find. Every second VANS operator is swindling reporters into believing it's a historic first, the next-big-thing in infrastructure. Talk of new interconnect regulations, industry consolidation, self-provision and new pay TV licences spices up dinner parties, and pundits get drunk on the heady mead of price wars and dark fibre. The cause is the new Electronic Communications Act, which, though still a vague piece of legislation, is making it possible for some enterprising companies to squeeze through some gaps. So we find ourselves celebrating – finally – the culmination of “managed liberalisation”. But why? There's something deeply pathological in our reaction.

In May 2003, the “light at the end of the tunnel”, according to a senior manager connected with what is now Neotel, was that it could be “up and running by the end of the year”. It didn't happen. Just like a dozen other supposed landmarks on the road of “managed liberalisation” didn't happen. The industry has hardly been liberalised and its management has been disastrous. Maybe we've been looking at that light for so long that we've become blinded by it. Maybe now that it appears close, we're too afraid it will go away again. It's as if we're suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, the curious psychological phenomenon where hostages or victims of abusive relationships form an unnatural attachment to their captor. The term was coined when hostages in a Swedish bank robbery in 1973, having been held for days in a vault with dynamite strapped to their bodies, perversely sympathised with their captors and viewed their rescuers as the enemy. One victim became engaged to one of the robbers and another started a legal defence fund for them.