The need for leadership and sovereignty in South Africa’s digital future

As long as their power continues to aggregate, fines will remain futile because they can easily monetize around them.

- PALI LEHOHLA

It is no surprise that ten men now own $2 trillion of the world’s wealth — all concentrated in technology and luxury goods. They even extract value from the R350-per-capita SRD grant through airtime and related micro-transactions. They are sharks, swallowing everything in their path.

The statement of G20 South Africa says “Today’s inequalities are not the result of the laws of nature. They are the result of what we, as nations and the global community, have done. Inequality is a choice. It is not inevitable and can be reversed with political will”

But who has the courage to bell not the cat but the vulture culture so rampant for decades if not centuries?

Makate’s Please Call Me Case, which has finally reached finality in a non-disclosed public account of the amounts involved in the settlement is not only an isolated case of corporate bullying but is a symptom of a global manifestation of bullying in the space of the world of electronic networks.

This also obfuscates rules of origin and the maligned arguments of the benefit of the commons. Instead in front of massive evidence expands greed and further aggregation of the commons value addition for exclusive private consumption. It was the case with Zakes Mda against Anthropic.

Mda, a renowned South African novelist, was part of a class-action lawsuit against the AI company Anthropic for using his and other authors’ books without permission to train its large language models.

It is a similar struggle won by Ngugi waThiongo. His last publication in English was Petals of Blood. Henceforth he published in his native language until his demise a year or so ago.