2012 State of the Nation Address (#SONA) had a gr8 theme, but that’s where the first part of it ended

When I heard that the theme for the 2012 SONA is “The Knowledge Economy and Development Opportunities“, I was naturally excited by the first part thereof. I started dreaming that South Africa’s first citizen, President Jacob Zuma (a.k.a. JZ), was going to make major pronouncements – such as government’s intervention to ensure reduction of the current exorbitant bandwidth costs; substantial investment in infrastructure for the achievement of highest bandwidth speeds in the world; rapid rolling out of free wi-fi services in all cities and major towns; removal of VAT on smartphones to encourage
cheaper prices and thus ensure higher penetration; slashing of company tax by half for all companies involved in the development of Internet-based solutions
that directly solve this country’s challenges in the health and eduction sectors; building of comprehensive ICT-only higher education institutions that will be free to top-performing and deserving Matriculants; opening of appropriate government-held databases for data mining and analytics; etc. While I suspected that this would be far-fetched, I still thought there will be some good news about knowledge economy-related develope-ments. Click Here to read more