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Ramaphosa watching the SIU doing what it’s supposed to do … One by One.

Elon Musk has posted 50 times about South Africa in just 7 days, and Zimbabweans are just as angry as he is. This is because they both desperately need South Africa to allow Starlink in. We all know that the Starlink constellation is the largest array of satellites in the world. However, even with all of those satellites, Starlink still needs to connect to internet data centres on the ground. The satellites have to beam the data down to a ground station, which then sends the data across the internet using undersea cables. This is where South Africa comes in as one of the most connected countries on the continent with seven of the major undersea cables landing in Cape Town and Durban. These are the cables connecting Africa’s internet directly to Europe, Asia and the Americas. Because of this, Elon Musk wants to build a Starlink ground station in South Africa because it would ensure he gets fast, stable, high capacity routes straight into the global internet. Beyond the cables, South Africa also has world-class data centres alongside Tier 3+ infrastructure, which means high uptime, power redundancy, cooling and security. NAPAfrica, one of the largest internet exchange points on the continent is also in South Africa, with facilities in Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg. So, it should be clear that Starlink in SA is not about selling satellite dishes to households. It’s about plugging into the continent’s internet backbone and using South Africa to build a solid launch pad for a robust infrastructure build. Elon Musk can turn on Starlink in every single country on the continent, but without South Africa, he reaches a dead end and can never get his service to work properly on the continent. This also explains why some Zimbabweans are livid about South Africa not letting Starlink in. The service will just not work well over there without South Africa’s participation. OK, but if this is so important to Starlink why is Elon Musk stubbornly refusing to adhere to straightforward BEE requirements? Well, as pointed above, South Africa’s value to Starlink is mostly as infrastructure backbone, not as a massive retail customer base. We all know he won’t get any meaningful number of customers in SA. There’s simply no market for it. Musk just wants to use South Africa to route through neighbouring countries, and to him, this is not worth giving up a 30% stake in South Africa’s operations. For Musk, the BEE thing is just a strategic business decision. All that racism talk is just a smokescreen for a hard-nosed business choice.

Thomas Sowell on the complicated history of slavery