The department of communications will submit its plan to attract artificial intelligence (AI) investment at a cabinet meeting in two weeks, says minister Solly Malatsi.
He told Business Times on the sidelines of the AfricaTech conference in Cape Town that South Africa had a strategic advantage due to its high governance standards, geographic location and status as an entry point into the continent for investment.
“We are putting the AI policy to cabinet in two weeks for adoption. So, cabinet does not have a definitive view at this stage … Our approach is how we can leverage AI to unleash more economic activity among our population while remaining vigilant about the risks.”
Malatsi said the likelihood of misinformation created by generative AI being spread in South Africa would increase as the local government elections approached.
“Those risks will peak, and it is important that, ultimately, in our policy framework, we put sufficient guardrails against those. And it is one of the things we focused on in our G20, which is leveraging AI for good. But we need to empower citizens with awareness.”
Another challenge was the high power and water demands of AI data centres, the minister said.
It’s a conversation that requires constant involvement with local authorities so that the placement ... is not in areas that are water scarce, which will ultimately run the risk of impeding the rights of local communities
— Solly Malatsi, minister of communications
“It’s a conversation that requires constant involvement with local authorities so that the placement ... is not in areas that are water scarce, which will ultimately run the risk of impeding the rights of local communities.”
Strive Masiyiwa, Zimbabwean-born billionaire and founder of Cassava Technologies, said at the conference his company was set to start building its “AI factory” in Cape Town powered by 12,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia.
“The 12,000 GPUs are ... actually being installed at a site just outside the city here,” he said. Alphabet, parent company of Google, had asked Cassava to lead the integration of all African mobile operators into its Google Gemini AI in a move that will give users data-free access to the Gemini app and its AI, Masiyiwa said.
Majda Lahlou Kassi, vice-president and head of the customer unit at Ericsson for Europe, Middle East & Africa, said Africa had made significant strides in technological advancements in the past 15 years, with tech adoption rising fast.
“Africa has, for decades, been in the narrative of how to bridge the digital divide; that Africa is lagging behind when it comes to technological advancement. We really want to see Africa with different eyes, with an open mindset, and with a reality check,” she said.
Ericsson wanted to facilitate partnerships across the continent to enable a fully fledged African digital economy, she said. Connectivity had become critical infrastructure for modern economies, and deployment of 5G across the continent could generate more than $18bn.
“It is the combination of three technologies that is fuelling this next wave of innovation,” Kassi said. “It’s AI, it’s cloud, and it’s mobile networks. So, the combination of these three technologies is what is really helping us get into the next era of the digital economy on the continent.”
Delivering the keynote address at AfricaTech, Malatsi said the public and private sectors needed to be allowed to serve citizens and customers more efficiently, which would help them to exercise their rights and would remove barriers to service delivery.
“They scale on collaboration and shared realms. And without centrally co-ordinated approaches to DPI [digital public infrastructure], governments risk merely digitising inefficiencies and creating silos. Our priority should thus be to ensure that the systems we build for digital identity, secure agreements, and data exchanges are both secure and interoperable.”
He said DPI will truly work when it improves trust between citizens and the government, and that meant services had to be built for the needs of the end-user.
“People should know when they are interacting with an automated system. They should know which data is used and how it seeks redress. High-risk decisions must have human oversight, and we will continue to align our privacy, cybersecurity and AI safety rules with global best practice while keeping them implementable for African countries.”
In February the government said phase 2 of Operation Vulindlela could offer a wallet for citizens to access their IDs, driver’s licences and other documents digitally. It also mooted introduction of a real-time digitised payment system for government services.
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