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# Starlink could qualify without selling a single share, but the regulator says the law has to change first
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/starlink-south-africa-ownership-rule-icasa/
- Published: 2026-09-30T02:45:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-30T02:44:59.000Z
- Description: The government says Starlink is welcome if it respects the 30% ownership rule, and the one route around that rule is stuck until the law changes.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Policy, Business Bagel News

Starlink, Elon Musk's satellite internet service, had reached 27 African countries by June, and South Africa's government says it would be happy to welcome it here too. Deputy communications minister Mondli Gungubele said so on Monday, on stage at a Bloomberg media gathering in Hermanus. The welcome came with a condition attached: respect the country's equity laws.

The law in question was written after apartheid to put a share of the economy in the hands of the people who had been kept out of it. In telecoms it means that anyone holding an individual licence under the Electronic Communications Act must be at least 30% owned by historically disadvantaged groups, in the regulator ICASA's own wording. Musk has called the rule racist, and in April wrote on X that he could not get an operating licence "simply because I am not Black."

Gungubele's pitch was that the trade is a fair one. He asked whether Musk could get along with South Africa and walk with it in reducing inequality, and put the ask plainly: "We are saying, for instance, 30% here." He also wants foreign operators to leave skills behind, asking how local engineers will get access to those systems, and what the country will have learnt by the time the company leaves. Government is still talking to Starlink, he said.

## The route that needs no shares

A second way in exists on paper, and it needs no shares at all. Equity equivalent investment programmes let a foreign company earn empowerment status by spending on things like small suppliers, enterprise development and jobs instead of selling a stake. Microsoft, IBM and Amazon Web Services are among the tech companies that have already used this route, and Musk has lobbied for Starlink to do the same. Starlink has said that, as a start, it would give 5,000 rural schools free broadband worth R500 million, MyBroadband reported.

The policy side has already moved. Government has gazetted a final policy direction telling ICASA to accept these programmes as an alternative to the 30% rule. ICASA's answer, in May, was that it cannot fully do that without changing the Electronic Communications Act itself.

## An application that has not arrived

The paperwork on Starlink's side is thinner still. In a written reply to Parliament in June, the communications department said ICASA had confirmed it had received no licence applications from Starlink at all, for spectrum or for the network and service licences an operator needs.

Back in April, MyBroadband reported that ICASA's next step on the wider rules would be public hearings on its draft final regulations, with approval pencilled in for the fourth quarter of 2026/27\. Until then Starlink is welcome in principle and absent in practice.