AI: The Silent Storm Threatening South Africa's Future – A Progressive Call to Action

In an era where technological revolutions are reshaping economies overnight, South Africa remains dangerously complacent about the transformative power of artificial intelligence. While the world grapples with AI’s rapid evolution, our national discourse fixates on immediate crises like load-shedding legacies, service delivery protests, and political infighting. Yet beneath the surface, AI is quietly rewriting the rules of work, power, and survival. As a developing nation already burdened by the world’s highest levels of inequality and an unemployment rate hovering above 31%—with youth joblessness exceeding 43%—we cannot afford to treat this as a distant First World problem. The stakes for the Global South, and for South Africa in particular, are existential. We must confront how AI, largely controlled by a handful of Western corporations, risks entrenching imperialist dominance while displacing millions from already precarious livelihoods. But with bold, people-centred policies, it could also become a tool for genuine liberation.

The warnings from advanced economies about AI’s disruptive force serve as a stark contextual warning. There, leaders highlight how this technology drives massive job displacement, invades privacy, and concentrates unprecedented power in the hands of a tiny elite of tech oligarchs. These concerns echo globally: AI is not neutral. It amplifies existing power structures. In the United States and Western Europe, where the bulk of AI development originates, a few corporations dominate the infrastructure—compute power, data sets, foundational models. This monopoly is not accidental; it stems from decades of capital accumulation, state subsidies, and strategic export controls that keep cutting-edge chips and algorithms out of reach for most of the world. For the Global South, this means dependency: we become consumers and data providers, not creators. Our labour, cultures, and even languages are mined to train systems that then automate our jobs, often without fair compensation or consent. This is digital imperialism in its most sophisticated form—echoing historical patterns where Western powers extracted resources while dictating terms of “progress.”

South Africa, as the most unequal society on Earth with a Gini coefficient around 0.63, sits at the epicentre of these risks. Our economy is already hollowed out by deindustrialisation, informalisation, and the dominance of finance and mining capital. AI threatens to accelerate this. Studies from institutions like the IMF and World Bank indicate that while low-income countries may see slower direct automation due to infrastructure gaps—limited electricity, internet access, and digital skills—the indirect effects could be devastating. In sectors like retail, banking, call centres (a major employer here), manufacturing, and even agriculture, AI-driven tools are already reducing the need for human labour. Entry-level and routine cognitive jobs, which absorb many of our young people and women, face the highest exposure. A McKinsey analysis suggests up to 39% of jobs in South Africa could be at risk by 2030. Imagine millions more trapped in the expanded unemployment rate above 42%, with discouraged workers swelling the ranks. This is not abstract; it is the quiet erosion of dignity for townships, rural villages, and urban informal settlements already scarred by poverty.

We in the Economic Freedom Fighters have long warned against the ravages of monopoly capital—whether domestic white monopoly or its global variants. AI represents its latest mutation. Control rests overwhelmingly with US-based giants and their European allies, who shape not just the technology but the narratives and norms embedded within it. Algorithms trained on Northern data exhibit biases that marginalise African contexts: from facial recognition failing darker skin tones to language models struggling with indigenous tongues or local accents. This cultural erasure compounds economic harm. Data from the Global South—our faces, voices, consumption patterns—is harvested cheaply, often through outsourced labelling gigs in Kenya or South Africa that expose workers to trauma for pennies. Meanwhile, the profits flow North, widening the chasm between rich nations and ours. Without sovereignty over our digital futures, AI risks becoming another vector for neocolonial extraction: foreign firms dictating our education systems, healthcare diagnostics, or agricultural advice while undermining local industries.

The urgency cannot be overstated. The developing world, home to the majority of humanity’s youth and untapped potential, is sleepwalking into this revolution. In sub-Saharan Africa, where demographic dividends should fuel growth, AI could instead trigger a “demographic disruption” if unmanaged. UNDP reports warn of widening gaps in economic performance, capabilities, and governance between AI haves and have-nots. For South Africa, with our massive educational deficits—millions of learners without basic literacy or numeracy—AI’s arrival without safeguards risks entrenching exclusion. Poor communities, where internet penetration lags and electricity is unreliable, will be sidelined from any “productivity gains,” while elites in Sandton boardrooms adopt tools that shrink their wage bills. This is not inevitable progress; it is a policy failure. Our government has dabbled with a National AI Policy Framework and a Fourth Industrial Revolution Commission, yet implementation crawls amid scandals, like drafts allegedly generated by the very tools they seek to regulate. Regulation debates lag far behind Europe’s AI Act or even emerging strategies in Brazil and India. We debate tenders and coalitions while the future of work burns.

Yet a progressive vision demands we reject fatalism. AI need not be a tool of elite capture. If harnessed through socialist-oriented policies aligned with economic freedom principles—prioritising the working class, landless, and unemployed—it can serve our communities. Imagine AI-powered adaptive learning platforms deployed in under-resourced schools, bridging gaps in teacher shortages and providing personalised education in multiple languages, including isiZulu, isiXhosa, and Sepedi. In healthcare, diagnostic tools could extend services to rural clinics, detecting diseases early in areas where specialists are scarce. Agriculture, employing millions in smallholder farming, could benefit from AI-driven precision tools for crop prediction, pest control, and market access—empowering black farmers against corporate agribusiness. These applications require deliberate design: open-source models trained on African data, public investment in local data centres, and skills programmes that upskill the masses, not just a tech-savvy minority.

To realise this, the Global South must unite in demanding technological sovereignty. We need regional frameworks through BRICS and AU mechanisms to pool resources for compute infrastructure, challenge Western monopolies on chips and models, and enforce data localisation. Domestically, a radical AI strategy must include: nationalisation of key digital infrastructure where private monopolies stifle competition; mandatory impact assessments for AI deployments in labour-intensive sectors; massive public investment in STEM education and vocational training tied to AI ethics and local innovation; and mechanisms like a sovereign AI fund to support community cooperatives developing tools for township economies. Progressive taxation on AI profits—redirected to universal basic services or a jobs guarantee—could cushion displacements. The EFF’s call for expropriation without compensation and nationalisation extends here: why should foreign algorithms own our futures when we can build public alternatives? And a people’s centered progressive government must stand at the very centre of that control.

Critics may dismiss this as Luddite resistance. But history shows technology’s benefits accrue to those who control it. The steam engine powered empires; the internet entrenched surveillance capitalism. AI offers a chance to break that cycle if we act with foresight. For South Africa, ignoring it means condemning generations to permanent precarity—deeper inequality, social unrest, and lost sovereignty. Embracing it progressively means transforming AI into a weapon against poverty: automating drudgery to free human potential for care work, creativity, and community-building.

The time for half-measures is over. As progressives, we must demand that AI serves the people, not profit. Parliament, unions, civil society, and youth movements must mobilise now—for ethical governance, skills justice, and economic decolonisation in the digital age. Our most unequal society cannot survive another layer of exclusion. The Global South’s voice must rise: not as passive recipients of Silicon Valley’s benevolence, but as architects of a future where technology liberates the oppressed. Failure to pay attention today will haunt us tomorrow. The revolution in intelligence demands a revolution in our politics—rooted in economic freedom for all.

* Ambassador Carl Niehaus is an EFF Member of Parliament (MP).

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.