Elon Musk’s Starlink, the high-speed, low-cost internet access offering from space, won’t be coming to South Africa. The reason, says tenacious SA opposition politician Dianne Kohler-Barnard, is the ANC demands that to be licenced, Starlink must first give 30% of the local company to politically connected cronies under the guise of Black Economic Empowerment. That’s a demand that Musk, who was born and raised in Pretoria and still has family in the country, refuses to countenance. This was admitted by the ANC in Parliament, prompted by Kohler-Barnard, the DA’s Shadow Minister of Communications. So while the rest of Africa stands to leapfrog into the digital age through Starlink’s cheap, fast, universally accessible bandwidth from space, ANC policy will stop South Africa from participating. Kohler-Barnard spoke to Alec Hogg of BizNews.
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