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Trojan Horse – Star Link?

The United States has 800 military bases worldwide and would love to have one in South Africa. However, because of South Africa’s political positioning, this is not viable. This is where Starlink comes in.

Proponents of Elon Musk’s satellite internet present it as a solution to rural disconnection, a godsend for farmers, rural clinics and schoolchildren. But Starlink is not just bandwidth in the bundus. It’s a Trojan Horse designed for 21st-century American domination.

If and when South Africa opens its airspace, it will find that “securing our borders” is the least of its problems. South Africans will discover that sovereignty leaks not through borders but through satellites.

Starlink pretends to be a neutral service provider. But neutrality is fiction in geopolitics. While its marketing speaks of farmers and learners, Starlink’s parent company, SpaceX, is neck-deep in the US military-industrial complex.

SpaceX holds Pentagon contracts for missile tracking and battlefield communication. Its satellites are integrated into NATO-linked defence networks. And under the Starshield programme, it is actively developing military-grade space capabilities.

In Ukraine, we saw the real Starlink: coordinating drone strikes, powering real-time battlefield intelligence, and even at Elon Musk’s whim, it dictated the limits of military operations. This isn’t telecoms. It’s geopolitical domination masquerading as broadband.

Now imagine this network quietly embedding itself across South Africa, not as a traditional foreign base with boots on the ground, but as a network of terminals, antennas, and encrypted channels beyond local control. No soldiers, no flag. Just a silent satellite occupation.

Starlink doesn’t need to obey local laws; it bypasses them. Ground stations may be offshore or in neighbouring states. Traffic is routed through US-controlled channels.

When Starlink lands, ICASA will be rendered irrelevant, sidelined by a network that answers not to Pretoria but to Palo Alto and the Pentagon. Forget the BEE requirements. Your honourable members in the Parliamentary committees can discuss them vigourously amongst themselves.

In practice, this means any embassy, NGO or mining company using Starlink would be operating in a digital enclave, communicating independently of the state, shielded from scrutiny, and free from South African jurisdiction. This is the erosion of digital sovereignty, and it’s happening under the radar, literally.

Across Africa right now, NGOs operating in conflict zones or resource-rich regions now rely on Starlink. This creates a parallel communications infrastructure: fast, encrypted, and entirely unaccountable to the host state. These terminals can communicate across borders without touching local networks, making them invisible to regulators, security agencies, and even policymakers.

In practice, this means that foreign-funded NGOs, mining firms, and diplomatic missions can operate within South Africa but outside its digital jurisdiction. South Africa will be digitally Balkanised by infrastructure it neither owns nor controls.

Real-time African data on movement, transactions, agriculture, climate, and demographics will be harvested without oversight and used to train AI models, support predictive policing, or guide strategic investments. All of this happens outside African jurisdictions, enriching US intelligence, tech firms, and defence agencies.

Crucially, the data flowing through these Starlink terminals is not neutral. It’s routed through US-controlled ground stations, governed by American law, and increasingly fed into AI systems, surveillance platforms, and military simulations.

Now, contrast this with how the United States treats foreign technology. Huawei was banned outright because the US believes it could compromise national security. TikTok has faced legislative bans, sanctions, and forced divestments. The justification is that American sovereignty must be protected from Chinese infrastructure.

But in Africa, US tech is welcomed with no questions asked. Starlink is entering countries like Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya, and Zambia, often outside normal regulatory processes, with no public debate, and in most cases, in defiance of local telecom and regulatory laws.

Where the US sees data infrastructure as a matter of national defence, African governments too often see it as a development opportunity. But digital dependency is still dependency, and when the infrastructure is foreign-owned, so is the power.

The brilliance of Starlink is that it needs no bases. Its dishes are rural clinics. Its antennas are schools. Its forward-operating stations are NGOs. And its justification is always wrapped in the warm glow of “progress.”

But we must learn from history: the railroads of the colonial empires weren’t built for the people, they were built to extract. Today’s satellites do not just connect, they entrench, create dependencies, determine how data flows, how communications are routed and who holds the keys to the cloud.

Already, Starlink is live across much of Africa. In each case, its arrival is celebrated as “leapfrogging traditional telecoms technology.” But Africans should ask themselves what they are leapfrogging into.

South Africa is next in line to be lulled by the illusion of harmless technology, and once this system is embedded, it cannot be dislodged.

The truth is that Starlink is not in it for the money. The commercial model makes no sense in rural South Africa, where the incomes are low and the population is sparse. There’s a reason why network coverage is poor in rural areas. There’s no money to be made there.

Meanwhile, the people who can afford to pay for Starlink are in urban areas and already have relatively affordable high-speed LTE and fibre. So why the interest?

Because, again, this isn’t about profit, it’s about presence and judging by how Starlink is brushing aside the country’s BEE laws, it will almost certainly pressure regulators for exemptions and use NGO-driven deployments to sidestep procurement laws.

The feel-good narrative of “connecting the unconnected” is not philanthropy, it’s a Trojan Horse aimed at the last African state with both the capacity and the inclination to resist American technological dominance.

This isn’t about giving villagers 480p YouTube. It’s about embedding US communications in a BRICS country, dominating infrastructure for NGOs and military contractors, securing exclusive access to real-time African data for AI and intelligence applications, and weakening South Africa’s sovereignty without ever firing a shot.

Starlink is the perfect proxy: a private company doing what governments can’t admit to. For South Africa, accepting Starlink means accepting the expropriation of digital control.

History teaches us that the technologies of empire rarely announce themselves with weapons. They come with promises. They come with progress, and they are here.”
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