SA's Al policy refuses to take the human out of the machine

The proposed national Al framework prioritises flexibility over legislation, but the bottleneck may be in institutional hurdles.

- By Lindsey Schutters

Dumisani Sondlo, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies' AI policy lead, was refreshingly candid about South Africa's approach to artificial intelligence regulation when he opened discussions at GovTech 2025, the digital government innovation conference.

The forthcoming National AI Policy, whose cluster approval process has been completed and now awaits Cabinet presentation before a 60-day public comment period, is an exercise in pragmatic ambition, or perhaps ambitious pragmatism.

"We are not going to go for legislation at all with this policy," Sondlo explained at the conference last month. Instead, the policy will offer each sector a menu of governance options for risk-based frameworks, guardrails and other approaches, with government bodies coordinating between sectors rather than imposing top-down rules.

It's an oddly light-touch approach for a country positioning itself, through its presidency of the G20 this year, as Africa's voice in global AI governance conversations. But it's also a strategy born of self-awareness.

The policy's development was, in Sondlo's words, "an act of acknowledging that we don't know enough".

One big question

The language used to describe the policy vibes includes the typical tech bro tongue twisters: "intergenerational equity", "inclusive economic growth" and uniquely South African, but still unsurprising, "ubuntu principles".

The policy's philosophical grounding raises practical questions about implementation. To quote from the AI industry jargon: how do you operationalise ubuntu in a procurement process? How do you translate cultural principles into technical standards? How do you ensure that a flexible, non-legislative framework does not become a regulatory vacuum?