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Réan van Niekerk Metacom has spent 25 years designing its own routers and running private networks for some of Africa's biggest retailers, without a cent of venture capital. In this episode of the TechCentral Show, founder Réan van Niekerk tells Fanie van Rooyen how the Cape Town company came to connect more than 6 000 ATMs, every Pep store in Africa and, by his account, well over half the communications Eskom uses to monitor and control electricity distribution. He explains why Metacom designs its hardware in-house instead of buying white-label Asian routers, and why one box per store works better than equipment from four suppliers. He also says satellite services such as Starlink would be a "wonderful supplier", not a threat. Van Niekerk also discusses enterprise technology spending in 2026, the AI-driven memory shortages that now force Metacom to order some components a year ahead, the company's cautious approach to AI, which keeps humans on its support lines, and why Africa is not one market. TechCentral

In this episode of TCS+, brought to you by Arctic Wolf, Jason Oehley, the company's country sales manager, and Andre Den Hond, senior systems engineer, talk about why South Africa is bearing the brunt of ransomware in Africa and what businesses can do about it. The pair unpack an Interpol report that found 92% of ransomware detections on the continent are in South Africa. Oehley explains that the country's high connectivity, big financial services sector and large mid-market are part of the reason, along with a tactical rather than proactive approach to security. Den Hond explains how agentic AI systems can automate the attack chain, adapt when an exploit fails and never tire, putting small and medium-sized enterprises squarely in the crosshairs. Watch the video The pair also explain why the time between a vulnerability being identified and exploited has collapsed, why attackers are increasingly stealing data rather than encrypting it and why cyber insurance often doesn't cover the costs that hurt most. Other points discussed include: Why SMEs that supply bigger companies are a back door for attackers, including the recent breach of a group of South African insurers; The hidden costs of a breach, including downtime averaging 22 days, lost income, idle payroll and reputational damage; A customer that put off a security purchase because of the cost and was hit months later for much more; How to measure the financial impact of cyber risk, and why the return-on-investment argument matters at board level; Proactive versus reactive security, and why there is no silver bullet; Whether South Africa's regulators are keeping up, and the prospect of directors' liability; and Why building a 24/7 security operations centre in-house rarely makes financial sense Don't miss this practical conversation about turning cyber risk into terms that decision-makers understand. TechCentral

Milkor’s advanced 380 drone is flying for a customer in the Middle East, but South Africa’s own defence force has yet to buy one. In this episode of TCS, Milkor vice-president for Africa Daniel du Plessis talks to deputy editor Fanie van Rooyen about why, and about where drones, AI and autonomy are taking modern warfare. Fresh from the Africa Aerospace and Defence (AAD) expo at Air Force Base Waterkloof, Du Plessis explains what buyers were asking about most: drones of all sizes, data fusion and artificial intelligence. He sets out where a 1.5-tonne surveillance aircraft that can fly for more than 30 hours fits in a world of cheap, expendable drones like those used in Ukraine. He also tackles the harder questions. Who decides who Milkor can sell to, and how do South Africa’s arms export controls work? Where does a human stay in control as drones carry guided missiles and become more autonomous? Are fears about “killer robots” overblown? And how does the 380 keep flying when GPS signals are jammed or spoofed? Closer to home, Du Plessis says the SANDF is severely underfunded and that money, not interest, is what stands between the 380 and South Africa’s defence force and Border Management Authority. He warns that South Africa and the rest of the continent are not ready for cheap attack drones, but says the local defence industry has the capability to respond if government acts now. The conversation also covers Milkor’s larger 780, its new agreement with European missile maker MBDA and how much of the 380 is built in Cape Town. TechCentral

Frogfoot plans to keep buying smaller fibre network operators in South Africa’s suburbs as the market consolidates, but CEO Shane Chorley stopped short of ruling out a sale of the business. “I’d be ignorant to say that we would ignore any offer,” Chorley said on the latest episode of the TechCentral Show – watch or listen below. “I would hope to say that we will be the acquirer rather than being sold.” Frogfoot has already bought a couple of small suburban operators and wants to acquire “as many of those smaller operators as possible”, he told show host Duncan McLeod. He expects somewhat larger networks, of more than 30 000 homes, to come up for sale in the next few years, followed in time by “a much bigger consolidation of one or two of the bigger ones”. The mooted merger of Octotel and MetroFibre had been “going on for a while”, Chorley said, and he expected consolidation among suburban operators to continue. Abraham van der Merwe, who leads Frogfoot, Vox and Hypa, said consolidation was inevitable because “infrastructure requires scale”. But he said Frogfoot was unlikely to be consolidated any time soon because its “long-term and patient” investors, among them the founders, intend to own the business for a very long time. The two spoke after a DNI-led consortium invested in the businesses in a deal valuing them at R14.4-billion. Most of the money will go into townships, where Van der Merwe said fewer than two million of 12 million to 15 million homes have fibre. Frogfoot wants to lift its build rate from about 80 000 connections a year to 360 000. That untapped market is also why Van der Merwe is not worried about operators overbuilding each other. Overbuilding splits market share and wrecks the economics, he said, and there is little reason to do it when so many homes have no fibre at all. It took about a decade to connect the 4.5 million homes in the suburbs; the township market is three times that size. TechCentral

Mohamed Sami, group chief information officer at Vodacom, says autonomous AI agents that resolve customer problems without handing them to a human are the next big shift in customer experience – and that it is closer than many think. Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Sami said Vodacom’s chatbots and voice bots already handle a considerable share of customer calls, while AI tools help its human agents find information without jumping between systems. “When I say it is the next big thing, it is not something that is happening in years. It’s something that is happening very soon,” he said. How autonomous those agents become, he added, depends on how much intelligence and orchestration sits behind them. Watch the episode Sami also discusses: • Where the line falls between his role and that of the group CTO as network and IT converge; • Why Vodacom is using small language models to help large models handle isiZulu, Swahili, Amharic and Egypt’s Arabic dialects; • How a standard set of AI agents across the software development life cycle is lifting developer productivity, and why it hasn’t cost software engineers their jobs; • How Vodacom is trying to stop AI token bills running away, including orchestrators that route work between expensive, cheap and self-hosted models; • Why he told the board that cybersecurity is one of the company’s biggest risks, and the programme to rebuild core platforms designed before the generative AI era; and • What it takes to be a modern CIO, and his advice for a graduate who wants his job in 20 years. Don’t miss a great discussion on technology in telecoms. TechCentral

Chinese companies have built their position in African technology one layer at a time – first phones and telecoms equipment, then fintech and now the AI models that local start-ups build on. American private capital, meanwhile, is pulling back. Lexi Novitske, general partner at Norrsken22, thinks US investors will regret it. Novitske moved to Nigeria in 2012 and has invested from Lagos ever since. Norrsken22, a pan-African growth fund backed by Nordic tech founders including those behind Klarna, Skype and Minecraft, closed its debut fund at US$205-million in 2023. It is now about halfway through deploying that capital, with no exits yet. In this episode of the TechCentral Show, she expands on the argument TechCentral reported last week: that African start-ups are increasingly building on Chinese AI models such as Alibaba’s Qwen because they are cheaper and more available, and that the US risks losing both a young, digital-first market and access to its data. In the interview, with TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, Novitske also discusses: • How Nigeria’s start-up scene has changed since she began as an angel investor; • Why unpredictable regulation and a shortage of top talent are bigger obstacles for Nigerian founders than power cuts; • How Chinese-backed OPay and PalmPay won Nigerian fintech by absorbing years of losses, and why that now makes regulators uneasy; • Why Silicon Valley’s AI boom has drawn venture capital away from Africa, and when she expects it to return; • Why Egypt and South Africa offer the best opportunities right now, with Nigeria likely to follow; and • What Optasia’s oversubscribed JSE listing means for Johannesburg, why the biggest African fintechs are looking to New York, London and Hong Kong instead, and why one or two winners can return an entire fund. Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral

AI agents are no longer a thought experiment for security teams. They are breaking out of test environments, hacking real companies and, according to one of our guests, already going rogue inside large businesses. In this episode of the TechCentral Show, TechCentral deputy editor Fanie van Rooyen talks to Dominic White, MD for South Africa at Orange Cyberdefense, and Adam Ely, GM of AI security at Check Point, about the escalating threat AI poses to cybersecurity. They unpack the incident in which OpenAI’s own agents escaped a test environment and broke into Hugging Face’s systems. White argues the initial breach was far from sophisticated and questions whether OpenAI understands its duty of care. Ely explains why the incident shows that even highly skilled, well-resourced teams can’t rule out agents going rogue. They also take on the widely reported story that three Hacktron researchers used Anthropic’s Claude to take over OpenAI employees’ accounts – a story White calls “deliberately misleading”. Also discussed: • A Check Point customer running 50 000 AI agents – and what happens when they drift • Why sandboxing and human oversight are struggling to keep up • Why even security professionals end up switching off their own agents’ safeguards • The case for monitoring agents from the inside, in real time • Whether AI development can – or should – slow down • Who is accountable when an agent breaks the rules • The Manhattan Project comparison both guests reach for • What they expect to see in the next 12 months Whether you run a security team, build with AI or simply want to understand where the technology is heading, this is a frank conversation with two practitioners who see the threat from all sides. TechCentral

Octotel CEO Trevor van Zyl joins the TechCentral Show to talk about where South Africa’s fibre market goes next – including a potential merger with MetroFibre Networx. Van Zyl told TechCentral that Octotel and MetroFibre Networx are assessing a combination that would create the country’s third-largest fibre network operator, with both companies sitting under a common investor in an AIIM-led consortium. In the interview, he sets out Octotel’s position: just under 400 000 homes passed across the Cape Town metropole, the West Coast and the Garden Route; a balance sheet he says lets the company deploy capital when and where it chooses; and a Western Cape footprint he argues overlaps very little with MetroFibre’s. He discusses the next phase of roll-out, too. As networks push into lower-LSM areas, “the commercials and the economics start changing”, he says, and affordability now reaches well into the middle class. He rejects the idea that fixed-wireless access can substitute for fibre in dense settlements – wireless has improved dramatically, he says, “but when you look at the actual demand case and what is required in those environments, it absolutely has to be fibre”. The more important question, in his view, is how to distribute it economically once you get there. On Openserve’s move into the ISP business, Van Zyl is relaxed. He says he understands why Openserve did it, but that Octotel will not follow: “We certainly don’t want to become an ISP. We’re not good at being an ISP.” He also expects consolidation among ISPs as networks saturate, sees low-Earth orbit satellite as complementary to fibre rather than a threat to it, and will not rule Octotel out of any future move by MTN on fibre network assets. Don’t miss the discussion. TechCentral

Chris Shortt, chief technology officer at Shoprite Group, says the work of the next five years is meeting the customer at their point of need, wherever that is – and that this does not mean the end of the store. Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Shortt said Africa’s largest retailer is building towards a unified experience regardless of how a customer reaches it: ordering by voice from a home assistant, or walking in to choose their own tomatoes and their own fillet. “How do we blend that for you so that it’s actually how you want to do things, as opposed to how we might want you to do things,” he said. The group’s store footprint, he added, is as alive and active as it has always been, and its point of presence in communities still makes a difference to customers. Delivering on that promise rests on a real-time inventory layer, which is why modernising Shoprite’s core SAP retail platform is the largest technology project the group has running. Shortt also discusses: • How the CIO/CTO’s job has changed, with the infrastructure now simply expected to work and the role shifting towards helping business counterparts understand the art of the possible; • Why about 12 000 Shoprite employees are using generative AI, and how the gateway the group built picks the least expensive model that can handle a request; • Why his product teams now pair one or two people with several agents, and what he put to the group’s chief people officer about recruits who arrive with agents of their own; • Why he will not comment on other retailers’ ERP failures, and the “day in the life of” testing he relies on instead; • What he tells the audit and risk committee when they ask what keeps him up at night; and • The book that shaped his thinking, and the productivity habit he will not work without. Don’t miss a great discussion on the future of retail. TechCentral

The company runs 125 chargers and wants a thousand within five years, focused on urban hubs. -- Rubicon’s public charging network is profitable and grew usage markedly in two months as fuel prices spiked, the company’s e-mobility head has told TechCentral’s Watts & Wheels. Hilton Musk said usage climbed roughly 30% in a single month, then another 30% the month after. “We thought it was a fluke,” he said. “But it carried on.” Growth started levelling off in June, largely because importers have sold through their stock of affordable EVs. Rubicon, founded in Port Elizabeth in 1985 as an electrical supplier to the likes of Volkswagen, now runs 125 chargers and wants a thousand within five years – about eight times its current footprint. The network turned profitable roughly a year ago, which Musk put down to concentrating on dense urban markets: Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Bloemfontein. Around 90% of driving happens inside those hubs, he said, with the other 10% between them. The company has chargers on the N3 and N4 and opened the Durban-Cape Town route in 2024. The N1 remains GridCars territory. Musk expects public charging to take a larger share in South Africa than the 80/20 home-to-public split seen in mature markets – closer to 70/30 – because many EV owners live in complexes and estates with no charging. At R7/kWh, Rubicon’s DC charging works out to roughly R1/km, against about 50c/km on municipal power at home. Both undercut petrol comfortably. He is sticking with 2028 as the year battery-electric vehicles reach 5% of new passenger sales. Count hybrids and plug-ins, he said, and the market is nearly there already. Don’t miss the discussion. TechCentral

South Africa has still not crossed 1% of new vehicle sales going to electric vehicles, well short of the 5% mark at which adoption typically accelerates, The Electric Mission executive director Hiten Parmar told TechCentral’s Watts & Wheels with Wills. Parmar, who heads the non-profit advocacy body and co-founded the Southern African Electric Mobility Association, said the past three years have changed what is available locally. Battery-electric models are now selling below R400 000 and range has improved sharply. But 64% of cars sold in South Africa go for under R400 000, and import duties plus the ad valorem levy keep most electric models above that line. The commercial side is moving faster. Light-, medium-, heavy- and ultra-heavy-duty electric trucks are now available in South Africa rather than being promised in presentations, Parmar said, with fleets reporting total cost of ownership savings of up to 25%. The economics improve the further a vehicle travels, which makes high-mileage fleets the first adopters rather than the last. He pointed to the 12.5GW of private solar installed in South Africa by the end of 2025, on figures from the South African Photovoltaic Industry Association, as an underused base for charging. Fleets can charge from their own generation during the day and fall back to the grid overnight. On manufacturing, Parmar said six of the seven passenger and light commercial vehicle manufacturers in South Africa now have batteries entering local production, and four have secured hybrid investments. What is missing is a tier-one battery cell supplier and an incentive framework for zero-emission vehicles to sit alongside the one government has run for local vehicle assembly since 1995. With European export markets tightening towards 2035, he said, the window for that decision is closing. Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral

Winstone Jordaan was building charging infrastructure before South Africa had electric cars to plug into it. GridCars began developing its backend platform in 2010. The first EVs arrived in 2013. In this episode of Watts & Wheels with Wills, the GridCars founder tells William Kelly why the hardware was never the hard part. Working out where to put a charger and how much power to feed it is straightforward. Building the billing and roaming systems behind it is not. That is also the answer to a question drivers keep asking: why can’t you just tap a card? Because the network needs to know who you are. If a charger is faulty, or the power is about to go off, Jordaan wants to be able to call you. He is candid in the interview about the economics of building a national EV charging network. A charge point operator needs around a thousand chargers to be profitable, by calculation. South Africa has roughly 650 in total. A 24-hour call centre alone takes seven people. Long term, he expects 500 000 chargers for a car parc of 11 million vehicles. Jordaan also thinks adoption is about to accelerate sharply, and that the disruption will reach well beyond motoring. He recently told one industry gathering that a third of the room would be out of business within five years. On charging infrastructure as a reason not to buy an EV, he is clear about one thing: there are enough chargers. Thinking otherwise, he says, is just being poorly informed. Don’t miss the discussion. TechCentral

Episode 8 of Watts & Wheels – TechCentral’s electric motoring show – opens with William Kelly on his soapbox, clipboard in hand, and a simple demand: keep left, pass right. Too many South African drivers, he argues, treat the left indicator as an invitation to be overtaken rather than a signal of intent, and lane discipline would save the country time, fuel and a great deal of frustration, he opines. Duncan McLeod wonders where enforcement of that sort ends – cameras and artificial intelligence deciding when you should pull over? – which leads neatly into the episode’s main interview. In episode 8, William and Duncan get stuck into: • An interview with Dillan Fernando, CEO of Tracker, on what a vehicle-tracking business becomes when cars generate far more data than a stolen-vehicle recovery unit ever needed – and what happens once AI is pointed at it. • The grid maths – William sets a total Eskom grid figure of roughly 47GW against a national fleet of about 13 million vehicles, of which only some 10 000 can be plugged in at all. His conclusion: EV charging is nowhere near being an Eskom problem, and on current trajectories most of us will not live to see the day it is. • EV education in South Africa – how much do buyers actually understand about what they are being sold, and whose job is it to tell them? • Volvo gets Gemini – Google’s assistant has begun rolling out to Volvo cars, starting in the US and reaching models going back to 2020. Fixed voice commands give way to something closer to conversation: brainstorming a holiday, finding a decent coffee stop on the route, summarising an incoming text and dictating a reply in another language, or simply asking for something calming on the stereo. • Tesla lands in Africa – in Casablanca – Morocco, not South Africa, is where Tesla has put its African base, with a corporate presence in Casablanca and a Supercharger network built out since 2021 across Casablanca, Tangier, Rabat, Fez, Marrakesh and Agadir. Its cars still cannot be bought through official channels here. Is Africa a sleeping EV giant? The hosts are unconvinced. • Trade deals and battery minerals – India signs a motor industry trade deal with the EU while, at home, Itac proposes bringing EV battery minerals into the list of qualifying standard materials under APDP2, at a standard value added rate of 50% against the usual 25%, provided they originate in Sacu or the SADC region. William’s question: is anyone actually going to build the batteries? • Mad Chinese cars – BYD’s Tang and the Denza B8, plus XPeng’s GX, the brand’s first three-row luxury SUV. • A moment of silence – too soon, Honda? The hosts mark the company’s retreat from its electric vehicle strategy. Also in the mix is the new metal heading for South African showrooms. The Jaecoo J5 and the iCaur are on the way, along with the BYD Atto 2 DM-i, a plug-in hybrid whose entry-level version carries a 7.8kWh Blade battery – a remarkably small pack for a car you are expected to plug in. It arrives loaded with equipment, which prompts a broader observation: Chinese brands have spoiled South African buyers so quickly that the goalposts have already moved. To contrast all that smoothness with something built for a purpose, there is the new Thula – the locally engineered electric game viewer that featured in episode 5 – back for another look. The episode closes with Hot or Not, where the Toyota FJ, the BYD Atto 2 DM-i, the iCaur and the Thula game viewer all go under the hammer. Watch S1E8 of Watts & Wheels now. Don’t forget to subscribe, and please share the show with your friends and colleagues. TechCentral

Amazon’s Leo satellite constellation is coming to South Africa in 2027 through Herotel. TechCentral deputy editor Fanie van Rooyen speaks to Herotel CEO Van Zyl Botha about Evry, the brand that will sell Amazon Leo to South African homes, and about how a company with no local licence walked into a market that has kept Starlink out for years. Botha explains why low-Earth orbit satellite technology changes the equation for anyone living beyond the reach of fibre and fixed-wireless services. He addresses the awkward questions directly: • How does Amazon get in without giving up 30%? • Does a wholesale-retail split leave anything behind in the country? • Would he sign the same deal with Starlink tomorrow? • What about the regulatory asymmetry? Also covered: what Evry is likely to cost; why studies on the market’s size range from 480 000 to 2.4 million potential customers; why Herotel is taking registrations for a service that has not launched commercially anywhere; whether Evry will cannibalise Herotel’s own fibre and wireless base; what Vodacom’s stake in Maziv means for Herotel’s independence; and why LEO satellites are viable now when the idea is 40 years old. Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral

Discovery group CIO Derek Wilcocks on personalised Vitality, the limits of AI coding and why growth beats cost-cutting. Derek Wilcocks, group CIO at Discovery, says AI has finally given the group the ability to do something it has wanted to do since Vitality launched more than 25 years ago: personalise it. Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Wilcocks said Personal Health Pathways is built on AI models trained on member data collected since 2000, and used only with a member’s consent. For most of Vitality’s history, the targets were identical for everyone. The programme can now suggest a walk, a glucose test or a cancer screening rather than a run. Wilcocks spent 23 years at Dimension Data, now NTT Data, where he ran Internet Solutions, served as group CIO and led the Middle East and Africa business as CEO. He was the 12th person to join Internet Solutions and founded a subsidiary that sold the first firewalls into South Africa’s banks. He joined Discovery in 2018. In the discussion, he is candid about the limits of AI in software development. Discovery is measuring efficiency gains of roughly 20-25% in some areas from AI coding tools, but developers in large corporates were spending only a quarter to a third of their time writing code to begin with. Senior developers use all the major agentic coding frameworks, though the group has spent heavily on guardrails constraining what those tools are allowed to do. Wilcocks also discusses: • Why Discovery’s health and life businesses buy no traditional enterprise software, developing everything from scratch; • Why he thinks Elon Musk is right about the direction but wrong about the timing on the end of source code, and the three problems standing in the way – explainability, efficiency and maintainability; • Why the decade in which knowing how to code was enough to walk into a job has come to an end; • How a federated model with around 14 CIOs across the group is held together by mandatory central security, privacy and ethics functions – and what happened when Discovery’s data scientists were asked to simplify the AI rules written for them; • Why he sees AI at Discovery as primarily a growth story rather than a cost-cutting one, with staff retrained and redeployed rather than cut; and • His route into computers, from a Commodore Vic-20 with 4KB of memory to the father who cured him of wanting to be an electrical engineer. Don’t miss any of the other great interviews on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO. TechCentral