South African\u2013born Elon Musk has worked hard over the past few months in attempts to gain permission to launch SpaceX\u2019s Starlink broadband\u2013by\u2013satellite service in South Africa. But far from nearing those permissions, there are signs that he still has a mountain to climb.<\/p>\n
Local reports say that political party Rise Mzansi\u2019s leader, Songezo Zibi, and parliament\u2019s communications and& digital technologies portfolio chair, Khuselo Diko, have both taken to social media to voice their opposition to Musk and Starlink.<\/p>\n
In December communications minister Solly Malatsi issued a policy directive to regulator Icasa urging it to align its ownership regulations with the ICT black economic empowerment sector code. This includes recognition of equity\u2013equivalent investment programmes, which are already lawful under the Broad\u2013Based Black Economic Empowerment Act and administered by the department of trade, industry & competition.<\/p>\n
Zibi, who is also the chair of parliament\u2019s standing committee on public accounts, said in a video post that South Africa would be \u201cstupid\u201d to give the green light to Starlink to enter the market.<\/p>\n
According to local reports, Zibi says that through his actions, Musk has declared himself an \u201can enemy of South Africa\u2019s constitutional order\u201d and of social justice and redress.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Musk] cannot want to invest in South Africa and claim himself to be similar to other investors who want to invest [\u2026] and because money is involved, we must then accept whatever kind of person who wants to invest here,\u201d Zibi argued<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"South African\u2013born Elon Musk has worked hard over the past few months in attempts to gain permission to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22613,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[63],"class_list":{"0":"post-22612","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-africa","8":"tag-africa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}