By PHAKAMISA MAYABA
WHILE RUBBING shoulders with the US business elite ahead of the 79th session of the UN General Assembly in September, it was President Cyril Ramaphosa’s closed-door meeting with the South African-born entrepreneur Elon Musk that set tongues wagging. The question on many people’s lips was whether Starlink, Musk’s high-speed satellite internet service, might finally be coming to Mzansi skies.
The company already provides internet services to at least 16 African countries, including neighbouring Zimbabwe, Eswatini and Mozambique. Due to a fast-evolving data landscape, this is a terrain often dubbed The Digital Divide, which will determine the ‘haves’ or ‘have-nots’ in this new global order.
According to Arthur Goldstuck, CEO of World Wide Worx, the surprise meeting was precipitated by a tweet on X – another Musk platform – from the South African venture capitalist Michael Jordaan who asked Musk to bring his Tesla cars as well as Starlink to our shores. Musk then responded: ‘That’s the plan.’
Readers will recall that Musk’s most prominent tweet to Ramaphosa came in July last year following Julius Malema’s latest singing of ‘Kill the Boer.’ Musk took to X (formerly Twitter) to say: ‘They are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa’. He went on to ask why the president wasn’t saying anything.
Despite Starlink’s lauded efficiency, Goldstuck continued during his SABC interview, ‘it’s incredibly expensive.’ ‘What it’s really geared towards,’ he said, ‘is where there isn’t internet access.’ For remote farms and mines, it would be a boon. However, for rural villages ‘it’s not a solution for inclusivity; it’s not going to bring internet access to underserved communities unless they have a retail business model where you can put a receiver in a village, for example, and then resell – at very low cost – access to what then becomes a Wi-Fi hotspot.’
Despite this, the messaging from government seems to be pushing the ‘hopeful access-to-millions’ message. Communications and Digital Technology Minister Solly Mahlatsi is already on the ball, reportedly stating that he would issue a policy direction to the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) so that Starlink can bypass the broad-based black economic empowerment (BEE) rule’.
This is the controversial rule which states that international telecommunications companies ‘must be 30% owned by historically disadvantaged groups if they want to operate in South Africa’.
‘This,’ said the minister, ‘is part of an initiative to significantly expand access to broadband connectivity to poor South Africans and people living in remote parts of the country.’ He further acknowledged the importance of access to broadband for those seeking employment, remote work or to get businesses off the ground, adding:
‘Giving millions of South Africans access to broadband would therefore constitute one of the biggest empowerment programmes the South African government has ever undertaken.’
However, is all of this practical, or just another PR whitewash? In an interview in the lead-up to May’s general election, Gayton McKenzie, Patriotic Alliance leader and now minister of Sports, Arts and Culture, insinuated that established telecommunications companies were gatekeeping the sector and were bent on stonewalling competition from people like Musk.
Said Mckenzie: ‘Look at the price of airtime, data … it’s ridiculous. Elon Musk, Starlink, is not coming here, you know why? It’s going to kill their profits.’
By Goldstuck’s estimation, government’s role in the equation should merely be to grant regulatory approval. Already, there are companies falling over themselves for said regulation so as to capitalise on the expected windfall.
That Icasa has already declared the use of Starlink’s roaming services which are fully functional in South Africa as ‘illegal’ has not stopped consumers from accessing the service through outside internet service providers (ISPs). For the sake of this article, which was meant to delve into our core focus namely ‘a project for models of rural communication,’ from a monetary premise things don’t look too promising.
60 Starlink satellites stacked together before deployment in May 2019. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
Since December last year, Starlink users in South Africa have been paying about R1 299 a month. Another ISP has reportedly reduced its monthly fees from about R1 499 down to about R880 and R1000. According to another report, a Starlink start-up kit will set you back R14 999, plus a deposit of R1 999.
These are heady sums in spaces where entire families often subsist on some form of social welfare. In recent years, local wireless internet providers have descended on Colesberg and surrounding towns. Their monthly subscriptions will set you back anywhere between R579 to R999 a month – again, nothing to be sneezed at down here.
According to a 2023 study by the UK-based price comparison site Cable.co.uk, South Africa is the 89th most expensive country out of 237 measured in which to buy a 1GB data bundle, and the 20th most expensive out of 50 Sub-Saharan African countries.
Members of Ramaphosa’s UN delegation might have fallen all over themselves to get into a photo with the SA-born tech billionaire, but bromances and business are not exactly the same thing. And Musk seems as shrewd a businessman as the billionaire president, who didn’t flinch at firing a few employees on his Phala-Phala farm. (No, they had nothing to do with the covert stashing of foreign currency).
If anything, Musk is not the sort to pander to the big men. At the time of writing, the Nigerian Communications Commission had refused to approve a unilateral subscription price hike by Starlink. Almost overnight, the subscription skyrocketed from N38,000 to N75,000 – reportedly, a 97% increase. Perhaps best not to expect any special treatment from the guy who doesn’t really seem much of a fan of the land of his birth.
FEATURED IMAGE: Elon Musk and President Cyril Ramaphosa pose for the cameras after their meeting in New York. Image: SA Presidency account on X (former Twitter).