This magazine has documented every step in the failed politics of telecommunications reform in South Africa. Now the entire sorry saga is retold in a paper co-authored by Willie Currie of the Association for Progressive Communications, and Robert B. Horwitz of the Department of Communication at the University of California in San Diego.

The ten-year retrospective makes for sobering and intensely depressing reading. The authors interviewed everybody who was anybody during this time. In its 44 pages are collected, with academic rigour, failure upon failure, which makes the most cogent case yet for the dismissal of the current Minister of Communications, Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri. Moreover, I contend that it justifies the abolition of the ministry itself.