👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – SA delays AI policy to 2027

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Solly Malatsi, South Africa’s communications minister, has conceded to losing the AI policy war—at least his actions tell us so. Drafting an all-encompassing policy to review one of the most consequential emerging technologies in the world might require 14 heads, or maybe more.

Malatsi found out the hard way. After his department was caught using fake citations in its drafted AI policy released on April 2, it subsequently withdrew the paper. On May 14, Malatsi appointed an independent panel, chaired by Prof. Benjamin Rosman of the University of the Witwatersrand, to redraft the policy. But the damage was done, and the timeline has paid the price. South Africa has now set a date for a revised policy: January 2027.

The deeper problem is institutional. South Africa had positioned itself as a potential continental leader on AI regulation, and the credibility of that ambition now rests on a panel of 14 experts fixing what a government department could not. That is not inherently a bad outcome, but it is a revealing one.

It suggests that the capacity to govern AI seriously does not yet exist inside the state, and that building it will take longer than any minister’s timeline originally assumed.

In the meantime, the gap between policy and reality keeps widening. In the meantime, the gap between policy and reality keeps widening. AI usage in South Africa rose to 23.1% of the population in the first quarter of 2026, up from 21.1% in the second half of last year. The country’s AI data centre market is projected to grow from $70 million in 2025 to over $572 million by 2031, driven by investments from Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. The infrastructure is being built, the adoption is accelerating, and the money is already moving. The policy meant to govern all of it will not arrive until next year, at the earliest.

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Namibia’s Communications Regulatory Authority (CRAN) is turning into one of Africa’s more assertive telecom regulators, and Telecom Namibia is its latest target.

The state-owned operator is now facing regulatory scrutiny after repeated network outages disrupted Internet services across several regions, with CRAN demanding detailed explanations on root causes, corrective measures, and a credible plan to prevent further failures.

In March, the same regulator rejected Starlink’s licence application on ownership and compliance grounds, despite 98% of public submissions backing the satellite provider’s entry.

There’s a notable sequence here: Namibia kept out a disruptive connectivity operator, and now finds itself holding an incumbent accountable for failing to deliver reliable service. The pressure on CRAN to show that its regulatory decisions serve consumers, not just compliance checklists, is building.

Telecom Namibia already operates in the shadow of Mobile Telecommunications Limited (MTC), the country’s largest operator, claiming 91% market share. Persistent outages, with no credible fixes in sight, are exactly the kind of opening that accelerates subscriber losses.

On May 20, the Namibian telco announced a network modernisation programme, but has also warned that some of the corrective work may itself trigger temporary disruptions, a difficult message to sell to customers who are already frustrated.

Zoom out: CRAN has signalled it will assess not just the outages but the overall viability of Telecom Namibia’s business model. It appears this is no longer just about fixing a few network faults. It is about whether the operator can credibly fulfil its obligations at all.

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There was once a time when walking into Pep stores meant you wanted to buy socks or other clothing items. Today, you might leave with a financed smartphone and a SIM card repayment plan.

In its 2025 financial report, Pepkor, one of South Africa’s biggest retailers, reported that its cellular rental business, FoneYam, is growing.

The company’s phone-rental book ballooned to R2.6 billion ($158 million) in six months, up from R1.7 billion ($103 million) in the previous year. The retailer activated 1.3 million new FoneYam accounts during the period, pushing its active customer base to 2.4 million people.

What makes this more interesting is that overall phone sales barely moved. Pepkor sold around 6.7 million handsets during the half-year period, almost the same as last year. Meaning the real growth story is financing access to phones.

Isn’t Pepkor supposed to be a clothing store? Pepkor owns brands like Ackermans, Tekkie Town, Dunns, Refinery, Legit, and has a 6,000-store network within South Africa. But over the last few years, the company has applied cosmetics and transformed itself into more than a retail fashion business. It is working.

It now operates a massive financial services ecosystem that includes loan offerings through Capfin, insurance through Abacus, and smartphone financing through FoneYam.

In November 2025, it announced plans to launch Pep Bank through a partnership with Investec, one of South Africa’s largest banks.

South Africa’s telecom market is becoming… interesting: Pepkor said it now has 8 out of 10 South Africans buying prepaid phones from its stores and continues generating ongoing service revenue.

Its financing model spreads the costs of phones into smaller payments, making smartphone ownership more accessible to people who may not qualify for traditional credit. Its growth shows that the company helping South Africans afford smartphones may be just as important as the companies building the mobile networks.

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