Harare — LAST week, The Financial Gazette revealed that South African cellular giant, MTN Group, had taken what might be preliminary steps towards a planned take-over of Net*One, the government-owned mobile phone network in Zimbabwe.

This week, we again carry a story on the planned disposal of TelOne to Telkom South Africa, undoubtedly to help recapitalise the ailing fixed line company that ranks among the worst performing parastatals in the country.

We are in favour of privatisation as we believe in a free market economy where government is only an enabler of business and is not itself an active player in the market.

But we are concerned that the current privatisation process ranks among the most obscure in the world, and that it could easily drift into an influence-peddling affair with very little to do with eligibility in the choice of the most successful bidders.

This newspaper had earlier reported extensively about the planned privatisation of the Zimbabwe Iron and Steel Company, in which two steel companies have been shortlisted for the purchase of the potentially money-spinning company that has, however, been a perennial loss-maker and a drain to the fiscus due to mismanagement and years of inadequate recapitalisation.

In an editorial on the issue in one of our December 2009 editions, we warned that the entire privatisation process lacked transparency, and that important details were being kept away from key stakeholders, and indeed the public, who are essentially the owners of these assets.

We called upon the government to mobilise all stakeholders, who include labour and beneficiary or supporting businesses for the various State-owned companies, to back the process and become keenly involved in its implementation.

And after we had raised this issue, we have received numerous calls from both offshore and locally on the issue, with some commentators saying even winners in the current privatisation process are unlikely to have confidence in the entire system.

The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, as we pointed out, has already condemned the process as a "trial and error" experiment that had no regard to the implications for other stakeholders, for example, job losses or insecurity and poor service delivery.

Our concern is that very little is being put in the public domain concerning the privatisation of these parastatals, and government is disposing public assets, whose valuation has not even been made public to shareholders -- Zimbabwe's long-suffering taxpayers.

The criteria for the selection of preferred bidders has also been kept an official secret, lending the whole exercise to speculation. Is it going to be a company with the most plausible turnaround plan, or with the biggest balance sheet, or it has to be just from the so-called friendly countries?

As it were, Zimbabweans have only always awoken to the news that such a company has received bids for privatisation, without any information or knowledge of how these companies were invited to participate in the tenders.

It might be instructive to take note of what is happening across the border, in Zambia, to highlight the level of transparency the administration in Lusaka has tried to give to its privatisation programme.

In mid-September, the Zambia Development Agency (ZDA) announced the government's plans to sell a controlling stake in phone company, Zambia Telecommunications Co (Zamtel), which also owns mobile phone operator, Cell-Z, and internet service provider, Zamtel Online.

The Zambian government then made it clear, in a public statement, which was also an invitation for bids, that it wanted to retain a minimum 25 percent shareholding in the company, which it has reserved the right to sell through an Initial Public Offering on the Lusaka Stock Exchange.

A fourth bid from Russia's Altimo was submitted five minutes after the deadline of December 23 2009, and was consequently not added to that day's offers from Libya's LAP Greencom Ltd together with LAP Green Networks, Angola's Unitel Corp and India's state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. The Zambian public was kept informed about this entire process through public statements.

The ZDA said its board later met and decided to accept the submission from Altimo, which, like the others, is not yet binding.

The four other companies that had been on an initial shortlist of eight bidders but chose not to bid were Telkom SA, state-owned Indian telecoms firm, Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd, Portugal Telecom and an Egypt-based consortium, Orascom Telecom, and its subsidiary, Telecel Globe.

The four short-listed bidders were then invited to conduct further due diligence on Zamtel, and will be asked to submit a binding bid for a majority equity stake. ZDA said details of the next phase of the privatisation and of the indicative bids received were set to be revealed this week.

After this process, another shortlist of bidders will be announced, and these will conduct a secondary due diligence exercise before a final bidder is announced.

We don't think Zimbabwe should copy the Zambian model of transparency in the conduct of their privatisation programme, and we would hate to prescribe how this should be done.

But we insist, as we have said before, that the current method of implementing the privatisation of government-owned enterprises promotes, and does not prevent, influence peddling and underhand deals since the process is not transparent.

This does not inspire faith and confidence in the population in those vested with the mandate to oversee the process.

We are aware of the immense benefits privatisation will bring to the recovering economy, both in terms of the increased availability of products to consumers as well as growth and diversification in the privatised entities.

We demand the involvement of all stakeholders in the privatisation process, and that government should update the public throughout the process.

Above all, we demand a more open and transparent process.