At a Bloomberg event near Cape Town on Monday, Deputy Minister of Communications and Technology Mondli Gungubele asked Elon Musk to work with South Africa and launch his Starlink satellite internet service here, BusinessTech reported. The service has not launched in the continent’s largest economy.
“Can you get along with us? Work with us in this journey of minimising inequality?”
Mondli Gungubele, Deputy Minister of Communications and Technology
What Gungubele said about the 30% rule
Musk has criticised as racist the laws that require telecommunications companies to be 30% owned by Black citizens, and on 12 April wrote on his X platform that he cannot get an operating licence “simply because I am not Black”. That is Musk’s own claim and has not been independently verified.
Gungubele’s answer was to reframe the arithmetic. “I hope Elon is listening,” he said. “What is 30% share if you take into account the 70% value that you are going to make in terms of yields and profits? He could invest very significantly in the country of his birth.”
The rules come from laws introduced after the end of apartheid, which required companies in some industries to sell stakes to Black people who had been systematically excluded from the economy under white-minority rule.
Talks are continuing, without a timeline
Gungubele said the government is still speaking to Starlink. “We’re engaging on all those issues, and we hope to find one another,” he said. No timeline has been given, and BusinessTech’s report does not say whether a licence application has been filed or what terms a deal might take.
Where the licence question stands
As we reported earlier, the ownership requirement sits in section 9(2)(b) of the Electronic Communications Act, and SpaceX has proposed equity-equivalent investment programmes in place of direct ownership. Communications Minister Solly Malatsi gazetted a policy direction on 12 December 2025 instructing the regulator, ICASA, to recognise such programmes. In June 2025 Starlink pledged R500 million to connect 5,000 schools, and confirmed R2.5 billion of planned investment in South Africa in October 2025, according to that report.
ICASA pushed back. In a statement reported in mid-May 2026, it said “full alignment with all provisions of the code, including equity equivalent investment programmes, would require a legislative amendment to the current ECA”, according to Advanced Television. Malatsi told Parliament on 12 May that government would pursue amendments to allow equity-equivalent programmes to complement ownership requirements. The chair of Parliament’s communications committee, Khusela Sangoni-Diko, has called the policy direction “an affront to the centuries-old fight for equity and redress”.
The result is a standoff. The Electronic Communications Amendment Bill contains no ownership or equity provisions, and ICASA has not received a licence application from SpaceX. As of June 2026 it had received none for spectrum, network service or electronic communications service licences, MyBroadband reported, citing sources who said the regulator had effectively told Starlink that an application would be rejected while the ownership rules stand.
Elsewhere on the continent, Airtel launched Starlink’s direct-to-phone service in the Democratic Republic of Congo on 14 August, and Paratus began offering satellite broadband in Uganda days later, according to our earlier report.
Why it matters for small businesses
Satellite internet delivered by a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites could change things for South Africans who have historically faced expensive or unreliable connections, BusinessTech noted. For a small business in an area with weak fixed-line or mobile coverage, a working satellite option would affect card payments, online sales and staff communication.
But nothing here is settled. There is no licence, no launch date and no agreed ownership structure, so a business short of connectivity today should plan around what it can buy now. The deputy minister’s remarks show a willingness to talk. They do not announce any change to the 30% requirement. More coverage is in our Tech & Telco and Regulatory & Policy sections.
