It comes down to who can get away with what: do you have more leverage on your officials or on your local conpanies? If your local companies are monopolies that benefit more from not serving you, you'll be in the same situation as you descibre.
As opposed to simply not having the service for all those decades, and continuing to not have it?
Keep in mind that these governments have a longer history of not delivering, and not maintaining existing infrastructure than most of these private companies. By a margin of decades. There is more data on their inability to deliver than there is on the private companies' malfeasance.
> do you have more leverage on your officials or on your local conpanies? If your local companies are monopolies that benefit more from not serving you, you'll be in the same situation as you descibre.
The difference being local monopolies still provide service to those with resources to pay, whereas the local governments wouldn't.
If there is a market, they will continue to provide service. If they leave, another company will take its place.
I'm not a believer in the free market. But this is one of the classic examples where in corrupt countries international private companies really were way, way better. When the lowly street vendor can afford a cell phone, everyone's life is way better.
Waiting years to get a phone line was the norm for most people I knew there. I've known several folks where the wait list for getting a land line was over a decade - and we're not talking some remote rural village. If we project how long it would take to get the country connected at the pace they were going vs the progress private companies made with cell phones, it is several orders of magnitude. The number of people in the former category who would have died before having a chance at merely having a phone is in the millions.