A bill to strengthen tobacco control in South Africa is slowly making progress. Parliament’s Health Committee voted in favour of the Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill earlier this year, allowing it to move forward for a clause by clause review. The proposed law which was meant to prohibit point-of-sale product displays, make…
ITWeb contributor Phillip de Wet. By January 2027 – when the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies hopes to maybe start taking public comment on a national AI policy – a United Nations approach to AI will already be the subject of lobbying. At the beginning of last week, we got a solid indicator that…
ITWeb contributor Phillip de Wet. On Monday, I found myself looking for the enterprise-technology angle to the United Kingdom’s planned social media ban for children under 16. There isn’t really one. Beyond better age verification (a problem the porn industry solved long ago, but not well), almost nothing will change directly in the world of…
Almost ten years after French President Emmanuel Macron’s Ouagadougou speech, which laid the foundations for renewed relations between France and the countries of Africa, Kenya and France are co-organizing the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi on 11 and 12 May 2026. This renewal is built on a partnership of equals, based on shared interests and…
ITWeb contributor Phillip de Wet. Two years ago, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies (DCDT) nearly nailed the problem. The 2024 National Policy on Data and Cloud tasked the Competition Commission to “identify proactive preventative measures to ensure a fair and competitive market”, and demanded transparency from cloud operators “regarding data portability and interoperability…
ITWeb contributor Phillip de Wet. Microsoft, AWS and Dell and their peers operate peacefully in South Africa by way of a bit of classic magic: making one concept mean entirely different things depending on where in the world you are based. In South Africa, “Equity Equivalent Investment Programme (EEIP)” is a long way of saying…
ITWeb contributor Phillip de Wet. What happens if the United Kingdom blocks X? Last week that was a silly question, on which bookmakers offered silly odds. On Monday, a member of Cabinet stood in the UK Parliament and vowed to – within days – activate legislation that would leave X and its users open to…
ITWeb contributor Phillip de Wet. 2026 is going to be quite something. The good old CES in Las Vegas is going to show just how much artificial intelligence (AI) we now have at the edge. Memory shortages are going to bite everywhere. We’re going to see new chip approaches allowing cool new systems. There will…
ITWeb contributor Phillip de Wet. Take it from someone who has tried (and often failed) to sell various newspapers and magazines: South Africa doesn’t have enough readers. Depending on how you slice the data, something like a tenth of the population is illiterate by a formal definition. Functional literacy is a far bigger problem –…
Does the rise of AI threaten the futures of those working in BI?
