And the other shoe drops…

Monday was probably not a great day for Wicknell Chivhayo’s IMC communications, the company that had seemingly been granted an exclusive partnership with Starlink, and promising to bring the innovative internet technology to Zim in Q3 of this year. This is because on Monday Techzim broke a story that specified three harrowing realities:

• Starlink still doesn’t have a license to operate in Zimbabwe

• IMC Communications has no exclusive partnership with Starlink(and Starlink seemingly doesn’t want to work with them).

• IMC Communications hasn’t been granted the POTRAZ license to distribute Starlink as well.

All three which, at minimum, paint a very bad picture of IMCs reputation and future collaboration with Starlink and at worst, make things uncertain as to whether any Zimbabwean Starlink availability will ever officially happen.

Now the first reaction a lot of you may have is asking where TechZim even got this information. Well that’s the funny part, from IMC and POTRAZ themselves. POTRAZ director-general Dr. Gift Machengete stated in an interview with the Herald that IMC can’t actually be an exclusive provider for Starlink, as POTRAZ’s own constitution has no provision for an exclusive deal of such a kind, as no telecom provider in Zimbabwe can have a technology-specific exclusivity deal. This wouldn’t actually be a bad thing, as after all, there could be more than one provider for Starlink in Zimbabwe, but then we get to the second major revelation, which is that IMC actually doesn’t have the specific partnership or deal to be an authorized reseller for Starlink. Or at least they don’t have it quite yet. Their recently appointed CEO Denny Marandure admitted this as well in a recent interview stating :

“…the president is eager, if it was possible to roll it out before the SADC Summit… but we still have to finish the signing, the reseller agreements, whatever whatever.”

And that last part is the major issue here, as no signed agreements means the big announcement made by our President on Africa Day this year, as well as all the news and promises about IMC after that, are kind of all an empty promise at this point. One could argue that IMC and associated parties are simply being hopeful this all works out, but considering how the TechZim article also points out how Starlink doesn’t seem to want to do business with them, something that goes along with how they don’t want exclusive middle-men in most countries. This creates a number of conundrums that in all honesty, don’t seem to bode well for IMC or its Starlink deal, ones that maybe aren’t unbeatable, but definitely put the company and the deal in a very tight space.

Where do we go from here?

To be honest, even we can’t be sure at this point. After all even the obstacles that are here are fundamentally because of key issues that while addressable, don’t seem to want to be addressed by the players involved. Starlink, for starters, doesn’t really want a middleman, and while it can have resellers in other countries, it doesn’t seem to want an exclusivity agreement that is especially pushed by said country’s government. POTRAZ still wants Starlink to have a proper operating license, whether through a local partner or otherwise, which is honestly fair, but with all this chaos and obscurity of these deals, you can’t be sure if that can ever happen (after all it is rumored that the IMC deal went over POTRAZ’s heads when it got announced on Africa Day). And then there’s IMC themselves who clearly want this deal to happen, but might never get it partially due to the shadier aura around their business (which to be fair, they seemingly are trying to get rid of with these aforementioned interviews) as well as the political affiliations of their owner, Mr Chivhayo himself. So with each specific caveat in play here, can any of us hope to see Starlink officially in Zim soon? That’s the million-dollar question. If one of these variables could be changed, for example, opening up the exclusivity clause and maybe allowing Starlink to choose a reseller of their choice, we could have a different story. And while we can’t outright confirm TechZim’s claims that Starlink is still illegal to order and ship to Zim yourself, there isn’t any direct evidence that suggests that if the IMC deal doesn’t go through, Zimbabweans can still legally use the technology and order kits on their own.

As such, this is how we end up at this point of uncertainty. One which I’m sure local black market Starlink providers and internet providers like Liquid Home can breathe a sigh of relief because of. Here’s to hoping it doesn’t last for long, because if even the sheer news of Starlink coming to Zim caused a few good changes, imagine what actual progress on official Zim availability can do.

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