The photographs from last week’s Amazon Leo launch event told a happy story: the communications minister beaming, Amazon’s top policy executive in town, Herotel and its parent, Maziv, basking in the announcement that South Africa will finally get low-Earth orbit satellite broadband.
Evry, the new Herotel service powered by Amazon’s constellation, will connect the farms, dorps and forgotten corners that fibre and fixed-wireless infrastructure doesn’t reach.
It is genuinely good news. It is also worth being clear about what it is not.
Start with the deal structure, because it is the whole story. Amazon will not hold a single South African licence. Herotel will acquire the necessary Icasa authorisations, and Amazon simply supplies the technology and capacity.
It is an elegant arrangement — and a verdict on South Africa’s regulatory environment. The world’s fifth most valuable company looked at our ownership rules, the empowerment requirements that have kept Starlink out and the endless debate over BEE and equity equivalent programmes, and concluded that the rational move was not to engage with any of it. It found a side door.
The government should resist the temptation to claim vindication. The Leo deal does not prove the rules work; it proves they can be routed around by a company patient enough — and rich enough — to give away its consumer relationship to a local partner.
The equity equivalent question that was supposed to be resolved — allowing multinationals to meet transformation obligations through investment rather than ownership — remains mired in political contestation. Nothing about the investment climate has been fixed. One clever workaround by one trillion-dollar company is not reform.
And before anyone declares the Starlink saga settled, consider what Amazon is actually selling. Leo has around 290 production satellites in orbit out of a planned 3,232. It has missed the US regulator’s deadline to have half its constellation flying by end-July 2026 — and missed it spectacularly: when Amazon asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for relief in January, it projected roughly 700 satellites by now.
The FCC granted a waiver in June, in part because it wants a second mega-constellation to challenge SpaceX’s dominance, but the final deadline of mid-2029 still looms, and a New Glenn rocket exploding on its Cape Canaveral launch pad in May did not help. Evry is promised for 2027 — a service on a network that does not, in any meaningful consumer sense, exist.
Starlink, by contrast, has more than 10,000 satellites in orbit, millions of customers and operates in most of the countries surrounding South Africa.
The service South Africans can’t buy is the one that works today; the one they have been promised works mostly in press releases. That is not a triumph of policy; it is a country choosing between a product it will not license and a product that is not ready.
None of this vindicates Elon Musk. SpaceX could have entered South Africa years ago the way Amazon just did: partner locally; let someone else hold the licences; sell capacity wholesale.
It chose instead to demand entry on its own terms and to turn a licensing question into a political grievance, with Musk amplifying the claim that Starlink was barred “because I’m not black” to his hundreds of millions of followers, feeding it into the toxic politics of US-South Africa relations.
That choice had less to do with rural connectivity in the Karoo than with Musk’s political project in the US, where his business interests and his ideological ambitions have become impossible to disentangle.
And let us not be coy about that project. This is a man who has cosied up to some of the most repellent figures in Western politics, who championed Tommy Robinson, the convicted anti-Islam agitator and English Defence League founder, and beamed himself into Robinson’s London rally last year to tell the crowd that violence was coming and they should fight back. He has boosted a rogues’ gallery of similar movements across Europe.
Confronted last week by The Economist’s editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, with the observation that he backs not just the populist right but the fringe far right, Musk offered only that he supports “the normal people”. His record says rather more than his self-assessment: this is populist, far-right politics, whatever soothing gloss its funder applies to it.
South Africa owes Musk nothing, least of all rules rewritten to soothe his grievances. But it owes its citizens more than a regulatory regime so unworkable that the good outcome is a foreign giant finding a way around it. Amazon located the side door. The pity — and the indictment — is that years into this debate nobody in government has fixed the lock.
McLeod is editor at TechCentral