The public debate over Starlink across Southern Africa often resembles a theological argument rather than an infrastructure assessment. To its champions, Elon Musk’s low Earth orbit satellite network represents an overdue bypass of sluggish state bureaucracy and predatory domestic mobile operators. To its detractors, it is an unregulated foreign intrusion that flouts local ownership rules.
During a recent discussion on The Angle Podcast Ep 50 | Is Starlink a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing? Digital Inclusion Debate, Dr Rekgotsofetse Chikane, director of the Tayarisha Centre for Digital Governance at the Wits School of Governance, cut through this false dichotomy with a sharp assessment: “Starlink is a wolf in sheep’s clothing that doesn’t even bother to wear sheep’s clothing,” Chikane observed. “It arrives as the wolf, but in our minds, we process it as a sheep. The wolf looks right back at you saying: ‘I am a wolf. I am here to make as much money as I can. I just happen to be providing a service that is beneficial.’ The real question is what happens when you put that wolf inside your chicken coop.”
The controversy over Starlink is merely the visible crest of a much deeper, structural malaise. Across the continent, political leaders routinely sign grand declarations pledging universal internet connectivity by 2030 under the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the United Nations Global Digital Compact.
Yet, as research from the Tayarisha Centre’s working paper series, AI and Digital Governance Politics and Management: A View from the Global South demonstrates, the primary barrier to digital inclusion is not an absence of orbital technology. It is a toxic mix of contradictory state policies, regressive taxation and unaddressed data extractivism.
In his research paper, Visions and Voids: A Descriptive Examination of Digital Policy Contradictions and Digital Inclusion Gaps in the Global South, public policy analyst Dr Leon Tinashe Gwaka examines why continental access targets remain unfulfilled while an estimated 2.6 billion people globally remain offline; most of them in Africa.
Gwaka rejects the common assumption that digital exclusion stems merely from administrative incompetence or fiscal scarcity. Instead, he documents how the African state routinely operates with conflicting institutional logics. On one hand, ministries publish glossy roadmaps celebrating digital equity. On the other hand, national treasuries treat telecommunications and consumer electronics as captive revenue engines.
“Rather than treating policy incoherence as accidental, the dialectical lens reveals how competing institutional logics are co-embedded within state apparatuses,” Gwaka explains in his study. The state acts simultaneously as an enabler of innovation and an aggressive instrument of fiscal extraction.
Consider consumer hardware. While a smartphone is the foundational gateway to the modern economy, South Africa has long levied a 9% ad valorem luxury excise tax on imported handsets, with relief for devices priced below R2,500 provided only as recently as 2025.
Rwanda eliminated value-added tax on mobile devices, only to reinstate an 18% levy when retail cartels refused to pass savings down to consumers. Across borders, the extraction is even more direct: Uganda’s infamous 2018 social media levy drove 30% of low-income users entirely offline before collapsing, while Tanzania and Zambia introduced taxes on digital platforms and voice-over-IP calls.
This institutional contradiction extends to Universal Service Funds (USFs), a statutory mechanism designed to pool levies from telecoms operators to subsidise infrastructure in non-commercial rural zones. But instead of being used to connect marginalised citizens, these funds routinely sit idle. Gwaka’s paper also revealed that Nigeria’s Universal Service Provision Fund carried forward more than 21 billion naira in unspent balances. The money exists, yet rural schools remain completely disconnected.
Against this backdrop of high data tariffs and abandoned rural corridors, Starlink’s direct-to-cell and satellite broadband capabilities appear revolutionary. Countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, Mozambique and Rwanda moved rapidly to license SpaceX’s constellation while prioritising quick deployment over bureaucratic gatekeeping.
Elsewhere, regulators stalled. In early 2024, Zimbabwe’s telecommunications authority warned the public that operating Starlink hardware was strictly illegal before eventually conceding to licensing demands. In South Africa, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) enforces a statutory mandate requiring individual commercial licensees to have 30% equity ownership held by historically disadvantaged groups.
This regulatory hesitation exposes an acute policy tension. While ownership requirements represent a necessary constitutional commitment to transform South Africa’s economy, domestic telecoms giants have exploited these rules to shelter their comfortable oligopoly.
Mobile network operators reap immense margins in urban centres while ignoring the unprofitable rural “last mile”. When a foreign satellite provider bypasses terrestrial base stations altogether, the state freezes, torn between defending local ownership frameworks and delivering basic connectivity to rural clinics.
Outsourcing national backbone infrastructure to a foreign satellite operator controlled by an erratic billionaire carries severe sovereign risks. National communications become dependent on foreign orbital networks that can be switched off at will during geopolitical disputes. But weaponising transformation rules to shield domestic telcos from competition while leaving rural citizens in the dark is equally indefensible.
Even if satellite terminals covered every rural district tomorrow, connectivity alone cannot resolve the structural asymmetry governing the digital economy. In their foundational study, Addressing Global Southern Data Poverty: A Review from African Data Policies, Dr Beatrice Bonami of the University of Edinburgh and Dr Seydina Moussa Ndiaye of Université Cheikh Hamidou Kane call this deeper exploitation “Southern Data Poverty”.
Bonami and Ndiaye show that Africa is not data-scarce; rather, it is subject to continuous digital extraction. Global technology conglomerates harvest hundreds of terabytes of mobile money trails, health records, biometric identifiers and behavioural patterns daily via zero-rated applications and mobile networks. Yet African researchers and public institutions are systematically locked out of accessing the curated, high-quality training datasets needed to build sovereign artificial intelligence.
“Populations are subjected to large-scale extractions of personal and sensitive data while denied access to training datasets,” Bonami and Ndiaye write. The extracted information is processed in foreign server farms, used to train proprietary algorithms for Western consumer markets, and sold back to African institutions as subscription software. Meanwhile, the manual labour of cleaning and filtering violent or traumatic data is outsourced to underpaid workers in Nairobi.
Extraction inflicts direct epistemic damage. Foundational models built on Western training data fail to grasp African linguistic nuance, municipal governance realities or local legal traditions. As Bonami and Ndiaye argue, deploying foreign machine learning tools without local training pools amounts to epistemic erasure, which forces African public institutions to view their own societies through foreign cultural assumptions.
Shaking fists at Silicon Valley will not alter this dynamic. As Chikane argued on The Angle Podcast, foreign technology firms have no economic incentive to build localised models for markets that generate negligible subscription revenue.
“In their hierarchy of commercial concerns, we are at the bottom,” Chikane remarked. “Why should OpenAI or Anthropic care about contextualising data for Mpumalanga when their paying enterprise clients sit in North America? There is a level of entitlement in expecting foreign monopolies to solve our representation problems. If we want localised technology, we have to build it ourselves.”
Chikane points to homegrown initiatives that demonstrate what sovereign development looks like in practice. At the University of Johannesburg, the sociology department developed an internal large language model trained on local curricula and institutional materials, capable of providing academic guidance to postgraduate students in isiZulu.
Real digital sovereignty is not achieved through data localisation laws that demand multinational servers sit on domestic soil. It requires investing in sovereign Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and open-source civic platforms.
Rwanda’s unified Irembo government portal and South Africa’s nascent Mzansi Exchange demonstrate that integrating municipal, health and home affairs data across open architectures delivers immediate public value.
African governments must stop treating the digital economy as an emergency tax base and start treating it as core public infrastructure. This means abolishing regressive import tariffs on communications hardware, disbursing stagnant Universal Service Funds to open-access rural networks and mandating transparent data trusts that empower local developers.
Starlink is not a saviour arriving to liberate Africa from isolation, nor can it be wished away by defensive regulations. It is a commercial tool operating within an unforgiving global market. If African states refuse to fix their own institutional contradictions, they will remain perpetual consumers of foreign hardware and suppliers of raw behavioural data while watching their digital future dictated from space.
This is the first of five stories from the series. It is derived from the podcast:
Earl Joseph is the founder of The Digital Afrikan, a digital media company based in Johannesburg. He is also an award-winning journalist, editor, publisher and commentator on African technology policy, governance and institutional transformation.
Stanley Moloto is the editor, host and producer of The Angle Podcast, which focuses on the African digital innovation ecosystem. He is a digital entrepreneur, web developer and co-founder of The Digital Afrikan.