Rennie Naidoo, professor in Information Systems at the Wits School of Business Sciences.
South Africa’s land reform debate remains a dominant feature of public discourse. But a more insidious form of dispossession is underway – one that is redrawing the boundaries of power, wealth and control.
This isn’t about hectares or fences. It’s about code, data and cloud infrastructure. And we don’t own it.
For centuries, South Africa’s economy was shaped by extractive industries, including mining, minerals and agriculture, which were largely designed to enrich Western colonial powers and imperial nations that built their wealth on the back of local dispossession.
After 1994, economic power shifted hands slightly, as political liberation opened space for a new elite. Still, many of these politically-connected actors continued to embrace the same extractive logic, channelling wealth through networks of patronage and offshore interests rather than restructuring the economy for true broad-based empowerment.
Today, far more power flows through platforms like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Our most sensitive data is often stored abroad. Our communication and commerce live on foreign servers, governed by laws not of our own making.
This dependency is more than technical. It’s structural. Small businesses, once visible through local networks, now pay “rent” to Google and Meta. E-commerce is dominated by Takealot, whose parent company’s fate is tied to China’s Tencent, leaving South African commerce exposed to external geopolitical and corporate interests.
Every click, message and scroll generates data, monetised by global corporations with little commitment to South Africa’s future. Between Silicon Valley’s platform monopolies and China’s state-backed tech expansion, we risk becoming a digital colony: a consumer market with no say in its digital future.
Our state remains overly fixated on legacy land battles, ignoring the digital frontier slipping away.
Economists like Yanis Varoufakis warn that we’re no longer living under capitalism, but under a new regime of techno-feudalism. In this order, platform owners are the new digital lords, and the rest of us are digital serfs – granted access, not ownership, and governed by algorithms, not laws.
Platforms aren’t just services anymore; they are gatekeepers of visibility and economic participation. They decide who is seen, heard and hired, while extracting relentless rents from users who have no meaningful say in how these systems operate.
Shoshana Zuboff coined the term ‘surveillance capitalism’ to describe this new economic logic, in which human experience becomes raw material, relentlessly tracked, mined and monetised. Every click, swipe and GPS ping is fed into opaque algorithmic systems that don’t just predict our behaviour, but actively shape our beliefs, preferences, politics and sense of reality itself.
The architecture of digital apartheid
We face a new kind of apartheid – digital apartheid – where access to visibility and opportunity is governed not by institutions, but by algorithms.
For many, this takes the form of platform labour: Uber drivers, delivery workers, gig economy taskers whose livelihoods are dictated by code. For the rest of us, it’s the data we surrender, powering AI systems we can’t opt out of.
Even digital pop culture – TikTok, Instagram and YouTube – shapes the minds and aspirations of our youth. Yet, the Department of Education, under-resourced and disconnected, has almost no influence over the digital ecosystems that are raising our next generation.
Platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook are already shaping public opinion, influencing elections and nudging political outcomes far beyond their borders. Yet our state remains overly fixated on legacy land battles, ignoring the digital frontier slipping away, one shaped not by policy or people, but by algorithms we neither design nor control.
The Department of Communications and Digital Technologies lacks a clear roadmap for digital sovereignty. POPIA remains largely unenforced. There is no national strategy on cloud regulation, algorithmic accountability, or data localisation.
Contrast this with countries taking bold steps to assert digital sovereignty: the European Union enforces the Digital Services Act to regulate platform accountability; India has banned dozens of Chinese apps on national security grounds; and the United States began to ramp up anti-trust actions against Big Tech to curb monopolistic behaviour.
These nations recognise that control over data, platforms and infrastructure is now central to national power. South Africa, by contrast, remains dangerously unprepared.
Reclaiming digital sovereignty also means investing in local cloud infrastructure, enforcing data protection, and creating open, transparent systems that empower rather than exploit. It means resisting the lure of shiny imports and investing in home-grown talent and tools that reflect our values and needs.
Instead of investing in resilient, home-grown digital infrastructure, many of our policymakers are swayed by the glossy pitches of Silicon Valley billionaires, offering pre-packaged solutions that promise efficiency but deepen dependency, bypassing the hard work of building sovereign, accountable systems tailored to our realities.
This will not be just another policy failure. It will be a moral one. Because when decisions are driven by political convenience or the pursuit of super profits, we entrench exclusion instead of dismantling it. Just as apartheid once restricted movement and access to jobs, digital tools now regulate access to jobs, services and even the truth.
Reclaiming our digital destiny
We dismantled the political and legal machinery of apartheid. But unless we act now, we risk surrendering to a subtler, more pervasive system of control – one written in code, enforced by algorithms, not the Constitution.
This is a call to South Africa’s IT community and policymakers. We must ask hard questions. Where is our data? Who controls our platforms? What systems are we building – and for whom?
Because the real battle for the future isn’t just over land – it’s over the digital terrain where our identities are shaped, our economies are built and our children’s futures are coded.
Just as the Western empire continues to wage wars over oil, gas and critical minerals with the Global South to secure energy dominance, a dynamic visible in the current geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, a new, less visible war is being fought today over digital infrastructure, data flows and algorithmic influence.
Control over platforms, cloud infrastructure and AI systems has become the new frontier of economic and political power for the West. Global South nations without digital sovereignty risk being reduced to suppliers of raw data and consumers of futures imagined elsewhere.
Consider the United States’ recent actions against TikTok. Under the guise of national security, it passed legislation forcing ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to divest or face a national ban, a move upheld by the Supreme Court and now repeatedly delayed for political bargaining.
Yet this aggressive stance comes even as platforms like X and Facebook, with documented histories of election interference, disinformation and data misuse, continue to operate with far less scrutiny. The lesson is clear: when the platform serves Western interests, regulation tends to bend. When it doesn’t, sovereignty becomes a weapon.
This isn’t the mythical free market in action; it’s digital geopolitics. When global platform access is determined by the military-industrial complex, it becomes clear that the rules of the digital world are not neutral. They’re being rewritten by those with the most power, for their own strategic gain.
And while the West, led by US tech giants, fights to preserve its dominance, one can only hope that the rise of BRICS will signal a growing push for digital multipolarity.
Irrespective, the new digital terrain is far too vital to be governed by platforms that serve foreign powers who obey no local laws and recognise no national sovereignty.
