If you had taken an X-ray of teledensity in the world in the 1990s–pick a year–Bangladesh and a few of its neighbors, such as Nepal, Pakistan, India and Myanmar, would have radiated “dangerously low.” Except for a few rich or lucky people, no one had phones. The only other part of the world that competed with South Asia for paucity of phones per population was sub-Saharan Africa.

But about the time Quadir had his “connectivity is productivity” epiphany in New York, a group in South Africa was already fighting the government for a cellular license. M-Net, which had started pay TV service in South Africa in 1986 (one of only two such services in the world outside the U.S.) had conceived its “cellular project” in 1990, the year Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

MTN’s project, which took four years to get off the ground, marked the beginning of the opening of the African continent to widespread telephony, and has even led, more recently, to replications of GrameenPhone’s village phone “scheme” in Uganda, Rwanda and Nigeria. By the year 2000, combined with activity in South Asia and elsewhere, information communications technology was spreading across least developed countries like wildfire.

M-Net proposed to state-owned Telkom in 1991 that they jointly develop GSM service for South Africa. As recounted in MTN’s 10 Year Book, published in honor of its 10th anniversary in 2004, Telkom gave that a flat no, forecasting that only 18,000 people in South Africa would ever need cellphones, and saying that if their forecast changed, they would provide the service themselves.

A year later, Coopers & Lybrand, commissioned by South Africa’s Department of Posts and Telecommunications, recommended that the country’s telecom sector be restructured and that two digital cellular licenses be offered, Telkom getting the first. M-Net pounced on the study and again approached Telkom to partner on the first license. No go. Telkom said it was now actively planning its own network.

In 1993, in the midst of political upheaval after Mandela’s release from prison and the emergence of the African National Congress (ANC) as a serious threat to President de Klerk’s hold on power (de Klerk had released Mandela from prison and lifted the ban on the ANC), the government confirmed that it would grant two licenses to provide a national cellular radio telephony service, with applications due June 1. This was two years after the first free elections in Bangladesh; in South Africa, the first fully democratic elections were less than a year away.

It would be a mistake to equate democracy with liberalization, privatization or deregulation, for certainly there are enough examples in recent history of non-democratic regimes and “benevolent” dictatorships that have achieved economic success with free-market systems. Singapore, Chile, South Korea and China are Exhibits A, B, C and D. But democratization clearly implies devolution of power from the top of a hierarchical government with narrow interests down to the general population. In South Africa’s case, the dramatic shift in the balance of power devolved from a white minority toward the black majority, in Bangladesh’s case from a military dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy–and those political mindshifts can certainly be equated with pressure to reform monopolistic control of sectors that serve the public interest and common good.