The author, Martin van Staden, says
President Cyril Ramaphosarecently directed communications minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams to cut the price of data by 50% by 2024. This not only shows that government thinks it is immune to the laws of economics, but also that it operates under the assumption that it can solve a problem it helped create. Only an economy freed from the pseudo-economics of misguided public policy will deliver the lower data prices everyone wants.
It is generally assumed that that the perceived high price of data in South Africa is due to the arbitrary greed of data providers. While there is always (rightly) a measure of self-interest at play, this assumption fails to capture a host of factors that contribute to the cost of data in South Africa.