The digital land grab: white-owned fibre giants are encroaching on township markets

SOUTH Africa is under siege once more, and this time not by force of arms, but through fibre cables and Wi-Fi routers. In the name of "connectivity," we are witnessing the second coming of a land grab.

- LUVO GREY

First, they came for our land. Now, they are coming for our markets, our digital land, in townships and rural areas that black-owned Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have long nurtured and pioneered.

We are not watching history repeat itself, we are living it.

The Historic Echo: From Stolen Land to Stolen Market

The dispossession of black people from their ancestral land is one of the darkest stains in South Africa's history.

Through the 1913 Natives Land Act and decades of apartheid legislation, 87% of land was allocated to a white minority.

Even today, the vast majority of land remains in white hands, with very little restitution achieved through the post 1994 democratic process.

And now, in this so called fourth industrial revolution, a similar pattern is emerging, only this time the conquest is digital. Townships and rural villages that were never deemed "bankable" are now hotspots of fibre rollout, not by black-owned companies, but by well funded white Afrikaner corporations who ignored these areas until black ISPs created the demand and proved the market.

This is not coincidence. It is a calculated strategy of digital colonisation.

The History of Telecommunications in South Africa

South Africa's telecoms sector has always reflected the broader racial and class divide.

Under apartheid, black communities were structurally excluded from fixed-line access, and investment into communications infrastructure was concentrated in white suburbs and business districts.

Even post-1994, liberalisation of the market through the 1996 Telecommunications Act did not equate to transformation.

A handful of white-owned corporations and foreign multinationals consolidated the infrastructure value chain, from undersea cables and fibre networks to mobile spectrum and switching centres, while black operators were relegated to the periphery with little capital support or policy favour.