TCS - The TechCentral Show

Business group Sakeliga is taking Icasa to court over the 30% ownership rule for telecoms licensees, and its CEO, Piet le Roux, says the regulator has "clearly misunderstood" the law.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Le Roux tells Duncan McLeod why Sakeliga has asked the high court in Pretoria to set aside Icasa's decision that it cannot give full effect to communications minister Solly Malatsi's policy direction on equity-equivalent investment programmes (EEIPs) without a change in the law. EEIPs would let multinationals such as Starlink invest in skills and local suppliers instead of selling 30% of their South African operations to historically disadvantaged groups.

Le Roux explains why Sakeliga reads the words "or such other conditions" in the Electronic Communications Act as giving Icasa a choice. He also explains why the case forces the regulator to "play their hand", and why Sakeliga hasn't spoken to Malatsi, even though its case leans heavily on his policy direction.

He sets out Sakeliga's broader aim, calling B-BBEE "a very harmful policy programme". He describes EEIPs, which would keep an empowerment requirement in place, as "a tax on being not black enough".

He says BEE ownership deals that operators such as Vodacom, MTN and Telkom made "under a form of duress" should be revisable, case by case. And he responds to online claims that Elon Musk is bankrolling the case: "I'd be very happy to take any contribution from him. But no, we are funded by local people."

Pick n Pay will keep Smart Shopper Pro, its new paid loyalty tier, at its R99/month launch price "for a very extended period", says Vince Viviers, executive: innovation and digital transformation at the retailer. If the price does change, customers will be told well in advance, "so that there are no sneaky surprises".

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Viviers tells Duncan McLeod how Pro, launched last month at the same price as Shoprite's Xtra Savings Plus, is meant to pay its way. A customer who orders weekly on asap! would pay about R148 a month in delivery fees alone, he says.

For Pick n Pay, the prize is loyalty. "Once you commit to paying monthly to be part of a specific programme, then your focus is: how do I unlock the most value here?" Members spend more and shop more often, Viviers says, much of it at competitors' expense.

With rival apps now much alike, he argues, shoppers will choose on product. Fresh food, the biggest part of the basket and the reason people shop every week, is where Pick n Pay thinks it can win. It is also where Amazon, whose Prime service costs R59 a month, has struggled, though Viviers counts it as a competitor already.

He also explains why Pick n Pay is considering dark stores in busy metros, and how Takealot's Mr D app has brought it new customers. Penny, its AI shopping assistant, has lifted basket sizes and shopping frequency, he says, but he gives no figures. Nor does Pick n Pay disclose the size of its online business, whose sales grew 35.4% in the six months to 30 August.

Next is personalisation. Viviers says Pick n Pay is moving to "a much more one-to-one model", with new features due in asap! and Smart Shopper over the next six to 12 months.

South Africa’s mobile operators want tougher Sim registration, but not on the terms communications regulator Icasa has proposed.

Draft amendments to Icasa’s numbering plan regulations, published for comment last month, would require a fingerprint or face check against home affairs records for every new Sim, reactivation and Sim swap. Subscribers would be capped at five numbers per operator, and operators would have two years to re-verify existing customers.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Nomvuyiso Batyi, CEO of the Association of Comms & Technology (ACT), tells Duncan McLeod why the industry body won’t support the rules as drafted. ACT, which represents Vodacom, MTN, Telkom, Cell C, Rain and Liquid Intelligent Technologies, has spent two years working with the justice department on amendments to Rica, the Sim registration law, and its members agreed an industry framework in June.

Batyi says Icasa officials sat in meetings where that work was presented, so the draft came as a surprise. The industry framework would allow 20 Sims per person per network rather than five. It also targets informal dealers who sell Sims pre-registered in their own names.

Batyi explains why prepaid customers are the hard part – some traders in rural areas still register Sims over 2G connections – and what it will cost to query the home affairs database. She warns that forcing every subscriber to re-verify risks repeating the failures of digital migration, and describes the fraud driving the debate, from WhatsApp scams and stolen phones to one-time Pin fraud.

Don’t miss the discussion!

Réan van Niekerk

Metacom has spent 25 years designing its own routers and running private networks for some of Africa's biggest retailers, without a cent of venture capital.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, founder Réan van Niekerk tells Fanie van Rooyen how the Cape Town company came to connect more than 6 000 ATMs, every Pep store in Africa and, by his account, well over half the communications Eskom uses to monitor and control electricity distribution.

He explains why Metacom designs its hardware in-house instead of buying white-label Asian routers, and why one box per store works better than equipment from four suppliers. He also says satellite services such as Starlink would be a "wonderful supplier", not a threat.

Van Niekerk also discusses enterprise technology spending in 2026, the AI-driven memory shortages that now force Metacom to order some components a year ahead, the company's cautious approach to AI, which keeps humans on its support lines, and why Africa is not one market.

Milkor's 380 drone is flying for a customer in the Middle East, but South Africa's own defence force has yet to buy one. In this episode of The TechCentral Show (TCS), Milkor vice-president for Africa Daniel du Plessis talks to deputy editor Fanie van Rooyen about why, and about where drones, AI and autonomy are taking modern warfare.

Speaking after the Africa Aerospace and Defence (AAD) expo at Air Force Base Waterkloof in September, Du Plessis explains what buyers were asking about most: drones of all sizes, data fusion and AI. He sets out where a 1.5-tonne surveillance aircraft that can fly for more than 30 hours fits in a world of cheap, expendable drones like those used in Ukraine.

He also tackles the more difficult questions: who decides who Milkor can sell to, and how do South Africa's arms export controls work? Where does a human stay in control as drones carry guided missiles and become more autonomous? Are fears about "killer robots" overblown? And how does the 380 keep flying when GPS signals are jammed or spoofed?

Closer to home, Du Plessis says the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) is severely underfunded, and that money, not interest, is what stands between the 380 and the SANDF and Border Management Authority. He warns that South Africa and the rest of the continent are not ready for cheap attack drones, but says the local defence industry can respond if government acts now.

The conversation also covers Milkor's larger 780, its new agreement with European missile maker MBDA and why about 99% of the 380 is built in Cape Town.

Frogfoot plans to keep buying smaller fibre network operators in South Africa’s suburbs as the market consolidates, but CEO Shane Chorley stopped short of ruling out a sale of the business.

“I’d be ignorant to say that we would ignore any offer,” Chorley said on the latest episode of the TechCentral Show – watch or listen below. “I would hope to say that we will be the acquirer rather than being sold.”

Frogfoot has already bought a couple of small suburban operators and wants to acquire “as many of those smaller operators as possible”, he told show host Duncan McLeod. He expects somewhat larger networks, of more than 30 000 homes, to come up for sale in the next few years, followed in time by “a much bigger consolidation of one or two of the bigger ones”.

The mooted merger of Octotel and MetroFibre had been “going on for a while”, Chorley said, and he expected consolidation among suburban operators to continue.

Abraham van der Merwe, who leads Frogfoot, Vox and Hypa, said consolidation was inevitable because “infrastructure requires scale”. But he said Frogfoot was unlikely to be consolidated any time soon because its “long-term and patient” investors, among them the founders, intend to own the business for a very long time.

The two spoke after a DNI-led consortium invested in the businesses in a deal valuing them at R14.4-billion. Most of the money will go into townships, where Van der Merwe said fewer than two million of 12 million to 15 million homes have fibre. Frogfoot wants to lift its build rate from about 80 000 connections a year to 360 000.

That untapped market is also why Van der Merwe is not worried about operators overbuilding each other. Overbuilding splits market share and wrecks the economics, he said, and there is little reason to do it when so many homes have no fibre at all. It took about a decade to connect the 4.5 million homes in the suburbs; the township market is three times that size.

Chinese companies have built their position in African technology one layer at a time – first phones and telecoms equipment, then fintech and now the AI models that local start-ups build on. American private capital, meanwhile, is pulling back. Lexi Novitske, general partner at Norrsken22, thinks US investors will regret it.

Novitske moved to Nigeria in 2012 and has invested from Lagos ever since. Norrsken22, a pan-African growth fund backed by Nordic tech founders including those behind Klarna, Skype and Minecraft, closed its debut fund at US$205-million in 2023. It is now about halfway through deploying that capital, with no exits yet.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, she expands on the argument TechCentral reported last week: that African start-ups are increasingly building on Chinese AI models such as Alibaba’s Qwen because they are cheaper and more available, and that the US risks losing both a young, digital-first market and access to its data.

In the interview, with TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, Novitske also discusses:

• How Nigeria’s start-up scene has changed since she began as an angel investor;

• Why unpredictable regulation and a shortage of top talent are bigger obstacles for Nigerian founders than power cuts;

• How Chinese-backed OPay and PalmPay won Nigerian fintech by absorbing years of losses, and why that now makes regulators uneasy;

• Why Silicon Valley’s AI boom has drawn venture capital away from Africa, and when she expects it to return;

• Why Egypt and South Africa offer the best opportunities right now, with Nigeria likely to follow; and

• What Optasia’s oversubscribed JSE listing means for Johannesburg, why the biggest African fintechs are looking to New York, London and Hong Kong instead, and why one or two winners can return an entire fund.

Don’t miss the discussion!

AI agents are no longer a thought experiment for security teams. They are breaking out of test environments, hacking real companies and, according to one of our guests, already going rogue inside large businesses.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, TechCentral deputy editor Fanie van Rooyen talks to Dominic White, MD for South Africa at Orange Cyberdefense, and Adam Ely, GM of AI security at Check Point, about the escalating threat AI poses to cybersecurity.

They unpack the incident in which OpenAI’s own agents escaped a test environment and broke into Hugging Face’s systems. White argues the initial breach was far from sophisticated and questions whether OpenAI understands its duty of care. Ely explains why the incident shows that even highly skilled, well-resourced teams can’t rule out agents going rogue.

They also take on the widely reported story that three Hacktron researchers used Anthropic’s Claude to take over OpenAI employees’ accounts – a story White calls “deliberately misleading”.

Also discussed:

• A Check Point customer running 50 000 AI agents – and what happens when they drift

• Why sandboxing and human oversight are struggling to keep up

• Why even security professionals end up switching off their own agents’ safeguards

• The case for monitoring agents from the inside, in real time

• Whether AI development can – or should – slow down

• Who is accountable when an agent breaks the rules

• The Manhattan Project comparison both guests reach for

• What they expect to see in the next 12 months

Whether you run a security team, build with AI or simply want to understand where the technology is heading, this is a frank conversation with two practitioners who see the threat from all sides.

Octotel CEO Trevor van Zyl joins the TechCentral Show to talk about where South Africa’s fibre market goes next – including a potential merger with MetroFibre Networx. Van Zyl told TechCentral that Octotel and MetroFibre Networx are assessing a combination that would create the country’s third-largest fibre network operator, with both companies sitting under a common investor in an AIIM-led consortium.

In the interview, he sets out Octotel’s position: just under 400 000 homes passed across the Cape Town metropole, the West Coast and the Garden Route; a balance sheet he says lets the company deploy capital when and where it chooses; and a Western Cape footprint he argues overlaps very little with MetroFibre’s.

He discusses the next phase of roll-out, too. As networks push into lower-LSM areas, “the commercials and the economics start changing”, he says, and affordability now reaches well into the middle class.

He rejects the idea that fixed-wireless access can substitute for fibre in dense settlements – wireless has improved dramatically, he says, “but when you look at the actual demand case and what is required in those environments, it absolutely has to be fibre”. The more important question, in his view, is how to distribute it economically once you get there.

On Openserve’s move into the ISP business, Van Zyl is relaxed. He says he understands why Openserve did it, but that Octotel will not follow: “We certainly don’t want to become an ISP. We’re not good at being an ISP.”

He also expects consolidation among ISPs as networks saturate, sees low-Earth orbit satellite as complementary to fibre rather than a threat to it, and will not rule Octotel out of any future move by MTN on fibre network assets.

Don’t miss the discussion.

Amazon’s Leo satellite constellation is coming to South Africa in 2027 through Herotel. TechCentral deputy editor Fanie van Rooyen speaks to Herotel CEO Van Zyl Botha about Evry, the brand that will sell Amazon Leo to South African homes, and about how a company with no local licence walked into a market that has kept Starlink out for years.

Botha explains why low-Earth orbit satellite technology changes the equation for anyone living beyond the reach of fibre and fixed-wireless services.

He addresses the awkward questions directly:

• How does Amazon get in without giving up 30%?

• Does a wholesale-retail split leave anything behind in the country?

• Would he sign the same deal with Starlink tomorrow?

• What about the regulatory asymmetry?

Also covered: what Evry is likely to cost; why studies on the market’s size range from 480 000 to 2.4 million potential customers; why Herotel is taking registrations for a service that has not launched commercially anywhere; whether Evry will cannibalise Herotel’s own fibre and wireless base; what Vodacom’s stake in Maziv means for Herotel’s independence; and why LEO satellites are viable now when the idea is 40 years old.

Don’t miss the discussion!