Dr. Andile Ngcaba, president of Digital Council Africa, delivered a blunt verdict at the Conext 2026 conference in Johannesburg this week: South Africa’s ICT sector requires a complete institutional redesign, not incremental reform, if the country is to govern the arrival of artificial intelligence rather than be overtaken by it.
Ngcaba argued that both the regulatory framework and the physical infrastructure underpinning the industry must be rebuilt from the ground up to prepare for the rapid acceleration of AI and superintelligence. In his view, the pace of technological change has outstripped the capacity of existing institutions to respond.
“The velocity of change is something that none of us have ever seen before,” he told attendees. “[If you] see all the things that are happening, the critical question, therefore is, when the speed moves like this, and when velocity changes, how do we as a country and as an industry respond to this?”
His diagnosis extended to the state’s own enforcement machinery. Ngcaba said South Africa carries a thin skill set, particularly within the justice system, when it comes to confronting cyberthreats. “There are very few people dealing with cybercrimes investigations,” he said, adding that there is “a thin layer of specialist in persecution in understanding this cognitive warfare of fraud as well as GPT poisoning.” GPT poisoning, also known as AI data poisoning, is a cyberattack in which malicious actors inject false, biased or corrupted information into AI training data to skew behavior, introduce bias or create hidden vulnerabilities.
To address what he described as new bottlenecks, Ngcaba proposed the formation of a specialized team of legal, policy and regulatory experts, tasked with resolving friction points within an 18-month window. “We need full institutional redesign of industry because of this new compute architecture that is bringing AI superintelligence and all this agentic ecosystem that is fundamentally making everything we have done in the last 30 years irrelevant,” he explained. He also called for the country to increase its IT load and push up its Internet traffic.
Government’s position at the conference came from Solly Malatsi, the Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies, who called for collaboration in building Africa’s AI-ready digital future and stressed that no one should be left behind in the AI super cycle.
Meanwhile, the regulatory theme resonated elsewhere on the program. Dietlof Maré, CEO of fiber operator Maziv, echoed Ngcaba’s assessment, telling attendees that the advent of generative AI has exponentially changed the world over the last 12 months. “Someone told me recently that by the time you’ve spent 100 hours studying and understanding AI, the technology has already advanced far beyond what you’ve learned. For every 100 hours you invest in learning it, AI seems to move ahead even faster,” he said.
Maré outlined how Maziv’s strategy has shifted toward high-quality, reliable connectivity capable of supporting the exponential growth of AI. “Our goal is to bridge the digital divide, get South Africa to be competitive and compete with the rest of the world and make our people competitive,” he said. He also pointed to the company’s deal with Vodacom as a critical enabler. “The Vodacom deal for us is critical, it means pumping billions into the economy every year, not just because of the sake of pumping it, but creating an ecosystem of quality and connectivity, and we have to protect that,” Maré added.
That transaction itself illustrates how competition oversight has shaped the sector’s structure. Vodacom South Africa first announced its intention to acquire a 30% interest in Maziv in November 2021, but the deal met a series of roadblocks over competition concerns. In August 2023, the Competition Commission recommended that the transaction not be allowed, and in October 2024 the Competition Tribunal followed suit, prohibiting the deal. The Tribunal’s decision prompted the Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition to file an appeal. The Competition Commission then changed its position in July 2025 after reaching an agreement with the two companies on revised conditions to remedy the competition concerns. With the green light granted in August 2025, the deal was finalized in December 2025.
Taken together, the interventions at Conext 2026 framed the coming period as a test of institutional capacity: whether regulators, policymakers and the justice system can redesign themselves quickly enough to keep pace with the technologies they are meant to govern.