Can someone among our leadership please tell Elon Musk to go fly a kite – or voetsek
EDITOR'S NOTE
Elon Musk's persistence and innovation are admirable, but not the disrespect shown by his business approach in Africa. His Starlink satellites are currently crisscrossing our skies without a licence to operate in South Africa.
Image: Ron AI/Independent Media
Polite Americans – who happen to be a tiny minority – will tell you to “go fly a kite” when they’ve had enough of you. The rest will use the f-word.
This is the phrase South Africa should use to tell our own Pretoria-born prodigal son to go away and come back when we’re done making changes to our economic justice laws pertaining to the communications sector.
Elon Musk has been on our back again this week, this time pleading more than demanding for changes to be made to our BEE laws so he can get a licence for his Starlink satellite internet business. Unfortunately, we don’t rush things in this part of the world – for good and bad reasons.
Our beautiful and potentially-rich country is currently run by a man of processes who won’t just quickly get up and change a broken light bulb, but first appoint a commission of enquiry or set up a task team and suchlike to investigate and make recommendations. A couple of years down the line you might see a request for tender proposals in the newspapers. And the mafioso-politicians behind him would support him by saying something like, “that old bulb that served the nation with distinction for years should not be dumped without due process just because its normally resilient tungsten filament finally snapped”.
In the recent past Musk has reportedly used his proximity to his ex-BFF, US President Donald Trump, to ride roughshod over governments across our continent. He has managed to launch his business in neighbouring countries all around us, including in Lesotho, which is virtually our country’s belly button. And his satellites are already buzzing around all above us like minibus taxis on a passenger-less day. He desperately needs an operating licence like yesterday, but he still remains unwilling to comply with our laws like everyone else and wants them changed.
We all know he’s a billionaire and that, to his ex-buddy, our country is just a “s**t hole”, but I still can’t understand the pure arrogance, disrespect, insolence, tactlessness, and impertinence he keeps demonstrating in his quest for the licence.
Someone who’s not scared of him should please tell him to go fly a kite, or use his hometown vernacular – voetsek.