JOHANNESBURG—Elon Musk’s promise to provide cheaper, faster, and more reliable internet access in Africa is proving to be very difficult to keep, even for someone as famously indefatigable as he is.
The business magnate and super-investor is the founder and chief engineer of SpaceX, CEO of Tesla, and owner of Twitter, although he’s struggling to get his revolutionary Starlink service off the ground in Africa, his home continent, as he confronts a complex web of bureaucracy, greed, and incompetence.
The latest African government to try to block the entrepreneur, who’s a U.S. citizen, from launching his satellite internet service locally is South Africa, where Musk was born and raised.
Starlink, his “satellite internet constellation” operated by SpaceX, has been providing internet access since 2019, with its services currently available in 53 countries, according to the company’s website.
However, only two of 54 countries in Africa—Nigeria and Rwanda—have allowed Starlink access to local markets; that has so far ensured that the continent remains very much in the dark when it comes to internet access for the vast majority of its 1.4 billion people.
Starlink uses satellites that orbit the earth at a relatively low height to provide internet connectivity that Musk claims is the fastest and cheapest available.
Starlink is very much at the forefront of a “revolution” in internet usage globally, Arthur Goldstuck, founder of South Africa’s World Wide Worx tech group, told The Epoch Times.
“The most dramatic example is Ukraine, where it’s allowed internet access to continue uninterrupted, partly because Musk himself shipped a large volume of receivers to Ukraine. Having said that, he then expected the U.S. government to pay him for those. So he doesn’t do anything without some kind of return for himself.”
African internet service provider (ISP) markets are overwhelmingly dominated by telecom companies, most notably South Africa’s MTN Group and Vodacom. MTN, the largest in Africa, has almost 300 million subscribers, while Vodacom claims 125 million subscribers.
“African mobile corporations and ISPs charge the highest mobile data prices in the world, expecting the poorest people in the world to pay these prices,” independent tech expert David Kilanji, based in Nairobi, Kenya, told Epoch Times.
“African governments see the telecoms boom and the immense demand for connectivity as a major cash cow. So they tax the telecoms industry and related services and goods heavily. Infrastructure is also generally unavailable, or of poor quality in Africa, and this drives costs up even more.”
Cable named Equatorial Guinea as the country selling the highest-priced data globally. In the tiny mineral-rich kleptocracy in Central Africa, one gigabyte costs almost $50.
Saint Helena, off the southwest African coast, charges almost $40 for one gigabyte, with São Tomé and Príncipe charging almost $31 per gigabyte. Both have the excuse of being remote islands. Not so Malawi, where one gigabyte is priced at almost $26; Chad, at almost $24, and Namibia, at about $22 for a gigabyte.
Data costs are “exorbitant” across Africa, according to Goldstuck, with one gigabyte commonly costing upward of $10.
“How can Africa develop, in this context?” Kilanji asked. “Again, we have a combination of big business and politicians collaborating to kill our continent, while speaking with a forked tongue and saying they’re doing all they can, in terms of investment, to lift us out of poverty.
“Meanwhile, they combine to ensure there’s no to little competition in domestic mobile markets.”
He said many African governments “work at all costs” to prevent their populations from gaining access to the internet.
“It’s in their interests to keep their people in the dark, literally,” Kilanji said. “The internet brings knowledge, and knowledge is a dangerous thing. Many regimes are afraid that if the people know the truth about them, there will be coups and revolutions left, right, and center. I would say that’s a valid concern, wouldn’t you?”
He said Starlink’s potential access to African markets is about much more than an international company wanting to sell data in an untapped market.
“We’re talking here about politics and power. We’re talking about African elites losing billions of dollars if Elon Musk is allowed in,” Kilanji said.
Goldstuck noted that Starlink would break the “data monopoly currently held by relatively few mobile giants,” a monopoly that allowed them to “charge whatever they wish, basically, in the absence of competition regulations” in Africa.
Starlink’s basic monthly subscription package costs $110 and allows users to download 1,000 gigabytes of data, meaning one gigabyte would cost Africans less than 50 U.S. cents.
South Africa is one of the cheaper countries in Africa to buy data, with one gigabyte costing about $2. But even its government is resisting the entrance of Starlink into Africa’s second-largest and most technologically advanced economy.
“This would be one of Starlink’s most lucrative markets in the developing world. But so far, the government’s not granting it the necessary approvals to operate here,” Goldstuck said.
In early March, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed high-level African National Congress (ANC) official Mondli Gungubele as minister of communications and digital technologies.
Ramaphosa said Gungubele would lead South Africa’s “digital transformation.” However, the minister told The Epoch Times that he’s “not familiar with the Starlink issue.”
“I’ve read about it in some newspapers,” he said. “It’s not a case that is on my table at the moment, so as a new minister I cannot comment about Starlink.”
Gungubele did reply in relative detail to the opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), when it recently wrote to him asking why Starlink wasn’t operating in South Africa.
He told the DA that local branches of multinational companies such as Musk’s must, by law, be 30 percent owned by “persons from historically disadvantaged groups,” which Starlink hadn’t agreed to.
Black economic empowerment stakes like that are often given to ruling party officials or people close to it.
“We all know what happens in this country when we hear the words ‘historically disadvantaged,’” Goldstuck said. “It means big companies give almost a third of themselves to the ANC.”
In this context, the expert said, it was “unsurprising” that Musk would refuse to effectively surrender a “large chunk” of future South African profits to “persons unknown.”
Dianne Kohler Barnard, the DA’s spokesperson on telecoms, told The Epoch Times that it’s “ridiculous” to expect a multibillion-dollar international company to hand over at least 30 percent of its equity to the ANC government.
“Minister Gungubele’s response to me indicates that the ANC has no intention of ever rolling the internet out to the masses in South Africa. So millions will continue to live with no access to technology, unless it is provided by an ANC cadre,” she said.
Goldstuck said South Africa is “far from the only government in Africa seeking to block” Starlink.
“Tanzania, for example, is requiring that Starlink establish an East African headquarters of sorts in the country. Now, why should a company that’s operating from the skies via satellite and via a massive HQ in the United States set up shop on the ground thousands of miles away?” he said.
“Various African countries are finding bureaucratic ways to stop additional competition from coming in, to prevent universal access. African governments talk the language of universal access to the internet, but they don’t give any effect to that talk. And that’s because they have their own narrow self-interests as priority, and not their people’s.”
Until that attitude changes, millions of Africans won’t have a path to arguably the most essential tool for progress in the modern world, according to Goldstuck.
“We, by means of the inept, ignorant, and selfish leaders we elect and who are forced upon us, are responsible for lack of development in Africa; we shouldn’t blame anyone else,” he said.
