Maputo — The Mozambican government on Tuesday suspended the new tariffs which the National Communications Institute (INCM), the regulatory body for telecommunications, had decreed on 2 May.
After the weekly meeting of the Council of Ministers (Cabinet), the government spokesperson, Deputy Transport Minister Amilton Alissone, told reporters that the government had listened to the INCM's explanation for why it had imposed new tariffs for internet, voice and SMS services.
Then it recommended that the INCM suspend the new prices, and review the study it had used to calculate them. Although delicately termed a "recommendation', this was effectively an instruction.
Alissone said the INCM will meet with the telecommunications operators to inform them of the government's decision, after which the operators should revert to the previous tariffs.
The INCM Chairperson, Thua Mote, initially claimed that the new tariffs would reduce prices and would allow greater "digital inclusion' - but consumers soon worked out that in reality the INCM had greatly increased prices. A group of university students protested to the INCM that the new tariffs had smuggled in price increases of around 150 per cent.
The INCM changed its position and claimed that the only real change it had made was to ban operators from offering unlimited internet access.
It claimed that the tariff for voice calls has dropped from six meticais (about nine US cents) per minute to five meticais per minute. The average price of the data service fell from 2.30 to 1.08 meticais per megabyte.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
But the INCM's initial announcements were deceptive, since nobody buys telecommunications services one phone call or one megabyte at a time. There are a bewildering variety of packages and bonuses offered by the three mobile phone companies (T-Mcel, Vodacom and Movitel) and by the various internet service providers, making it difficult to calculate the average rise or decline in prices.
The INCM also claimed it intervened to ensure the sustainability of the telecommunications market, and to avoid any collapse. But none of the operators had suggested that they were on the verge of collapse or that the market was in any danger.
No company had requested that the regulator push up tariffs, and none had claimed that the tariffs practiced were anti-competitive. It seemed that it was only the INCM that imagined there was a threat to the sustainability of the market.
A wave of protest led the government to think again. At a march to the INCM Maputo headquarters on 18 May, one civil society activist, Quiteria Guirengane warned that pushing up telecommunications prices might be a political measure "to silence Mozambicans'.
"These exorbitant prices must be abandoned', she declared.
