South Africa’s Starlink licensing saga has become the most revealing mess in the country’s technology policy landscape. Not because the underlying regulatory question is particularly hard — it isn’t — but because the personality at the centre of it has made it nearly impossible to have the conversation that needs to happen.
Strip Elon Musk from the equation and what you have is a straightforward policy question: should communications regulator Icasa’s licensing rules, which require 30% ownership by historically disadvantaged groups, be updated to recognise equity equivalent investment programmes (EEIPs) that are already lawful under the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act and already used by Microsoft, IBM and Amazon Web Services, among others? The answer, on its merits, is “absolutely yes”. Icasa’s licensing regulations are out of step with the country’s empowerment rules and need to change to encourage greater foreign direct investment. That much is obvious.
Ironically, the ICT sector code already accommodates EEIPs. The department of trade, industry & competition administers them. Communications minister Solly Malatsi’s December 2025 directive to Icasa to align its licensing rules with the existing framework is not the radical departure his critics have painted it as. It is a regulatory housekeeping exercise that should have been done years ago.
But Musk has made it about himself. His inflammatory claims that Starlink is being blocked because he is “not black”, his amplification of elements of the discredited “white genocide” narrative and his increasingly erratic behaviour on the global stage have turned what should be a dry regulatory amendment into a political hand grenade.
South African politicians are now positioning themselves not on the merits of satellite licensing policy, but on the question of whether they are for or against Musk. This does South Africa a big disservice.
Khusela Diko, a leading ANC MP and chair of parliament’s portfolio committee on communications, has dismissed the thousands of public submissions in favour of the necessary regulatory reform being led by Malatsi — a senior DA MP — as a “fake and orchestrated campaign”, adding, pointedly, that “99% come from white people’s names”. Whether or not the Starlink e-mail campaign was astroturfed, the racial profiling of public submissions is a remarkable thing for a parliamentary committee chair to do in public.
South African politicians are now positioning themselves not on the merits of satellite licensing policy, but on the question of whether they are for or against Musk
The contrast with neighbouring Zimbabwe is instructive. A government that maintains sanctions-era hostility to Western interests has approved Starlink and is distributing 8,000 units to rural schools. Yet South Africa, with its far more sophisticated regulatory institutions and democratic traditions, cannot get out of its own way.
Rural farmers need connectivity that no other provider is currently delivering. Likewise, schoolchildren and teachers in remote areas would benefit enormously from the uncapped and free internet Musk has promised to deliver. Starlink could also be used to create internet hotspot businesses in rural areas, allowing people to find work and participate in the digital economy.
None of this means the concerns about Musk are illegitimate. Starlink’s documented history of threatening service disconnection in Ukraine is a red flag. Any licence should come with conditions that address this. The argument for caution exists — but it should be made on its own terms, with specific regulatory safeguards attached, not used as a smokescreen for what has become a personality contest and a political weapon.
Does South Africa have the institutional maturity to separate the policy from the person? Can the country update a legitimate regulatory mechanism — one that would benefit not only Starlink but also other international satellite operators —without it being framed as a capitulation to Musk? If the answer is “no”, that tells you something troubling about how transformation policy is made in this country and how easily it can be weaponised.
Regulatory expert Dominic Cull of Ellipsis has warned that Icasa’s formal process to amend its rules could take two years or more. That’s two years in which South Africa remains a continental holdout — the largest unserved market in a region where every neighbouring country, bar Namibia, has already licensed the service. Two years in which the digital divide that politicians claim to care about is not fully addressed.
The irony is that the people paying the highest price for South Africa’s inability to have a grown-up conversation about this contentious topic are the rural and underserved communities that every side of this debate claims to be fighting for. They do not need Musk’s advocacy. But they do need the internet. Right now, though, the politics is getting in the way — and that’s a real shame.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral
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