The Backbone Is Already Chinese: Africa's Digital Dependence and the Question of Control

Seventy percent of Africa's 4G runs on Huawei, and South Africa is more embedded than its leaders care to admit.

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Across much of Africa, the debate about digital colonisation is conducted as though it describes a future to be avoided. The more uncomfortable truth is that the physical backbone of the continent’s digital life has already been built, financed and largely maintained by Chinese firms, and South Africa is no exception to the pattern its leaders tend to locate elsewhere.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

Huawei has constructed roughly 70 percent of Africa’s 4G networks and about half of its 3G, displacing European rivals over two decades. This is not a distant concern for South Africa, the continent’s most industrialised economy, which now sources the majority of its telecommunications infrastructure from Chinese suppliers. The dependence is deepening rather than easing. In September 2025, MTN and ZTE deployed what they described as the world’s first commercial five-band radio unit in the Western Cape, on a network that already reaches about 97 percent of South Africans.

INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS

Layered onto this backbone is a surveillance market that has grown quickly. Eleven African countries have together spent around two billion dollars on Chinese smart-city surveillance, with Nigeria the largest single buyer at more than 470 million dollars, and Ghana, Morocco and Zambia each exceeding 250 million dollars. These packages are marketed as crime reduction, yet researchers mapping their use found the systems repurposed to monitor opposition figures, journalists and activists. Uganda’s 126 million dollar Huawei network was turned on the opposition leader Bobi Wine, and Zimbabwe’s facial-recognition deal handed a Chinese firm millions of African faces to train its algorithms.

Whether China’s system of digital obedience can take root here is the harder question. The tools travel easily, but the full apparatus does not, because it depends on data integration and state reach that most governments lack. Two factors should still give boards pause. China’s national intelligence law obliges its firms to support state intelligence work, and the African Union discovered its Huawei-built headquarters had been routing internal data to Shanghai for years. South Africa already sits among the countries that adopted the Safe City model.

I have previously written about this in the context of computing power, arguing that if we sleepwalk into the next technological era as passive consumers, we will find ourselves renting critical capacity from a handful of foreign providers on their terms, while our data flows outward into platforms we do not control.

IMPLICATIONS

Here lies the paradox. Governments adopt these systems to strengthen the state, yet outsourcing networks, policing and identity to foreign vendors quietly hollows out the sovereignty they believe they are reinforcing. South Africa is now assembling the domestic half of that architecture. The national digital identity system, with facial recognition as its primary biometric, is being built inside the Revenue Service’s hosting environment, even as the responsible department concedes its own cybersecurity maturity remains low. Draft regulations enabling remote biometric verification were opened for public comment through June 2026. These reforms are designed to curb fraud and improve service, and most are welcome. They also build precisely the centralised registry that a surveillance state would require.

CLOSING TAKEAWAY

The governing question is therefore not how to keep Chinese technology out, which is no longer possible, but whether the continent can govern a dependency it did not design. South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act is capable law, yet its enforcement record is thin and its courts have only begun to test surveillance questions. A statute that is not enforced offers little resistance to an embedded surveillance stack. For directors, the lesson is concentration risk in plain sight. Reliance on a single foreign vendor for critical national infrastructure, paired with a domestic identity system of admittedly weak security, is a governance exposure whether or not it is ever exploited. The responsible response is not alarm but diversification, enforceable oversight and the confidence to insist that not every available capability deserves to be deployed.

Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net