IDO LEKOTA
American IT billionaire Jeff Bezos’s deal with local-based internet provider Herotel has thrown Starlink’s South African problem into sharp relief.
One global satellite player is building local partnerships and moving through the market; the other is still stuck outside the gate, complaining about the lock without having submitted the key.
The deal is based on an exclusive distribution partnership where Herotel will use Amazon Leo’s (formerly Project Kuiper) low-Earth orbit satellite infrastructure to launch a new domestic broadband service called evry. It is widely seen as an Amazon victory over the rival Elon Musk’s SpaceX – whose subsidiary Starlink has been unable to launch commercial internet in South Africa because it has not met the country’s economic transformation policies.
The contrast between Bezo-Herotel deal and Starlink captures a bigger truth about South Africa’s digital economy: access is not granted by technology alone.
It is negotiated through regulation, licensing, and an expectation that foreign capital must make room for local transformation. In that environment, Starlink’s problem is not only that the rules are strict. It is that the company has, by all available accounts, not yet completed the basic procedural steps that would allow those rules to be tested against its application.
Starlink’s South African saga has followed a familiar pattern: loud public pressure, political controversy, and no completed licence application. That leaves Starlink in a bind of its own making – not excluded from the market, but not yet willing or able to enter it on the terms the country requires. What actually transpired is now fairly clear. Starlink has not formally filed the licences it needs with ICASA — including the individual electronic communications network service licence, the individual electronic communications service licence, and the relevant spectrum licence.
That account is not contested by government itself. Briefing Parliament in June, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies said ICASA has confirmed it has not received any licence applications from Starlink for spectrum, network service, or communications service licences, nor has any application been lodged through the EEIP route. In other words, the department that oversees the sector describes the same procedural vacuum the company’s critics point to.
Instead of quietly working the regulatory steps, Musk has turned the issue into a public fight. He has argued that South Africa is blocking him because he is not Black, and that framing has become central to his public posture around the market. That may make sense as a political sound bite in a global culture war, but it does not solve the licensing problem at all. It also creates a second problem for Starlink: the company begins to look less like an applicant trying to comply, and more like a foreign actor trying to shame South Africa into moving the goalposts.
That is where the Equity Equivalent Investment Programme comes in. EEIPs are not just a bureaucratic workaround for foreign firms; they are meant to convert market entry into public value. The idea is simple enough: if a multinational cannot or will not give up equity, it should still contribute to the country through investment in skills, enterprise development, broadband access, or community infrastructure. In other words, South Africa is not asking for charity. It is asking for reciprocity.
This is not, however, a case of a united government simply enforcing settled rules on a reluctant company. Communications Minister Solly Malatsi has himself been pushing to widen the EEIP route, telling Parliament in May that he would pursue amendments to the Electronic Communications Act so equity equivalent investment could complement ownership requirements across the sector.
ICASA pushed back the same month, stating that full alignment with the equity equivalent provisions would require a legislative amendment to the current ECA before the regulator could apply them. The regulator added that it remained committed to advancing transformation while it awaited that amendment. The tension, then, is not simply Starlink versus South Africa. It is a foreign investor caught between a minister trying to open a door and a regulator that says only Parliament can turn the key.
That reciprocity matters because the benefits are meant to reach people at the margins. EEIPs can help fund digital skills training, support small businesses, improve connectivity in under-served areas, and widen access to the online economy for schools, clinics, and households that have long been left behind. That is why Starlink’s reluctance is not a neutral business choice. It delays a policy tool designed to make foreign investment useful to the communities that need it most.
Musk’s combative posture has a social cost. In a country still scarred by inequality, every delay in getting satellite broadband into the system is a delay in getting opportunity to people who are most excluded from it. Rural communities, township households, informal traders, young jobseekers, and under-resourced schools all stand to gain from cheaper and broader connectivity. When the process stalls, those gains stay out of reach. The argument may be about ownership on the surface, but underneath it is about who gets left waiting.
Bezos’s Herotel deal highlights what a more effective entry strategy looks like. Rather than treating regulation as an insult, it appears to treat regulation as the terrain on which business must be built. The local partnership model reduces suspicion, creates a domestic stake in the venture, and signals that the company is prepared to work with South Africa rather than talk past it. That matters in a market where the politics of ownership, transformation, and digital access are never far from the surface.
Government’s endorsement of that approach was not left to inference. Malatsi appeared alongside Amazon and Herotel representatives at the announcement itself, a public signal that the local-partnership model is the kind of market entry the department wants to be seen backing, even as it presses ICASA and Parliament to find a legislative route for firms unwilling to follow it.
The difference between Amazon and Starlink is not just about style. It is about outcomes. A company that builds local partnerships and files the necessary paperwork can move toward approval, even if the process is slow or contested. A company that complains loudly but does not enter the process remains frozen in place. In South Africa, grievance does not substitute for compliance, and media noise does not substitute for a licence.
That is why Starlink’s challenge looks increasingly self-made. South Africa may well have created a route through EEIP for foreign ICT players, but Starlink has not yet walked that route. Until it files the application, submits to the regulator, and shows that it is serious about the conditions of entry, its arguments about fairness will remain abstract. The company is asking to be judged on its intentions before it has demonstrated its willingness to proceed.
There is also a wider lesson here for foreign firms eyeing South Africa’s strategic sectors. The market is not closed, but it is conditional. Those conditions are not simply bureaucratic obstacles; they are part of the political bargain that allows private investment to operate in a country still trying to correct deep inequalities. Firms that understand that bargain can build durable positions. Firms that reject it often discover that South Africa is willing to admire their technology while refusing them access.
