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.

The Cape Town firm quietly connecting Eskom, Pep and 6 000 ATMs

Milkor's 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 The TechCentral Show (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.
Speaking after the Africa Aerospace and Defence (AAD) expo at Air Force Base Waterkloof in September, Du Plessis explains what buyers were asking about most: drones of all sizes, data fusion and AI. 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 more difficult 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 South African National Defence Force (SANDF) is severely underfunded, and that money, not interest, is what stands between the 380 and the SANDF 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 can respond if government acts now.
The conversation also covers Milkor's larger 780, its new agreement with European missile maker MBDA and why about 99% of the 380 is built in Cape Town.

Drones, AI and the future of warfare, with Milkor's Daniel du Plessis

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.

Frogfoot sees bigger fibre deals coming

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!

Norrsken22’s Lexi Novitske on how China is winning African tech

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.

Dominic White and Adam Ely on AI agents going rogue

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.

Octotel’s Trevor van Zyl on the fibre merger question

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!

Herotel CEO Van Zyl Botha on beating Starlink to South Africa

Steven Boykey Sidley has been a chief technology officer at a Fortune 500 company, a private equity investor, a videogame designer, a jazz musician and, for the past four years, a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg. He is a partner at Bridge Capital, heading its futures advisory, and the author of eight books – two of them on bitcoin and crypto – with another due in October.
TechCentral deputy editor Fanie van Rooyen spoke to him about the moment money finally became native to the internet, why the South African Reserve Bank appears to be walking in the opposite direction, and what AI is quietly doing to science and schooling while everyone argues about chatbots.

Money just became native to the internet - Steven Boykey Sidley

Specops Software’s Darren James explains why identity checks alone no longer stop determined attackers.

Traditional approaches to access security no longer hold up in hybrid, cloud-first environments – and AI is widening the gap.
In this episode, host Kevin Smith speaks to Darren James, senior product manager at Specops Software, about the distance between how organisations secure access and how people actually work.
Businesses have poured money into identity-based controls – passwords, multi-factor authentication, zero-trust initiatives – yet breaches keep rising, because attackers increasingly exploit trusted identities rather than technical vulnerabilities. An intruder holding legitimate credentials looks like an authorised user and can operate undetected.
That points to a shift in security thinking: verifying the user’s identity is no longer enough. Access decisions must also account for the device being used, its security posture and whether trust should hold for the length of a session.
Working through a real-world breach, James shows how a single compromised account escalates into a serious incident, and where a more contextual approach to access control could break the attack chain before damage is done. The discussion reframes zero trust as an ongoing process rather than a one-time authentication event, and makes the case for layered verification.
He also looks ahead to automated attacks and the rise of non-human identities – service accounts and AI agents among them. As organisations lean harder on autonomous systems, identity-centric models will face pressures they were never designed for.
The executive takeaway is this: the cybersecurity battleground is shifting from identity verification to continuous trust. In an era of AI-driven threats and hybrid work, organisations need to stop asking “who is accessing the system?” and start asking, continuously, “should this access still be trusted?”
Don’t miss the discussion.

TCS+ | Specops' Darren James on continuous trust in an AI world

ADG’s Cliff de Wit on why the next management challenge is overseeing teams of autonomous software agents.

Not long ago, organisations were experimenting with generative AI to draft e-mails, summarise documents and answer questions. Today agentic AI is changing what the technology is for.
In a conversation on TechCentral’s TCS+ podcast, Cliff de Wit, MD for South Africa and group chief innovation officer at Accelera Digital Group (ADG), argued that the real story is not machines replacing people but a fundamental shift in how work gets done — and where humans create value.
Rather than completing individual tasks on command, AI agents can be given an objective and left to determine how best to achieve it. De Wit illustrated this with a know-your-customer (KYC) use case in which agentic AI is already automating complex workflows and accelerating business outcomes.
AI is no longer simply a tool that assists workers. Increasingly, it is a digital workforce in its own right.
In a country with one of the world's highest youth unemployment rates, concerns about automation are understandable. But De Wit challenges the idea that AI should be viewed purely as a job-replacement technology.
"The human skills involved in business are fundamentally changing, but the basics of business still remain," he said.
Businesses will still need people to solve problems, exercise judgment, build relationships and drive innovation. What changes is how those outcomes are achieved: as routine and administrative work is automated, workers move up to activities where uniquely human skills matter most.
The sharper risk is distributional. Without investment in education, training and digital skills, AI's productivity gains could widen existing inequalities — not because jobs disappear, but because opportunity concentrates among those who know how to work with the technology. AI literacy may soon matter to employability as much as computer literacy did during the digital revolution.
Organisations are already deploying agents into operational environments, in some cases slotting them into workforce structures alongside human employees. Leaders are no longer managing only people; they are managing mixed teams.
De Wit believes businesses are better prepared for this than they think. Companies have long used governance frameworks and risk controls to oversee human decision-making, and many of the same principles adapt to digital workers. Whether a decision is executed by a person or a system, accountability, escalation and oversight remain essential.
Which decisions should be delegated, then, and which should stay under human control? De Wit's answer comes down to risk, and he sets out a framework for categorising it. The future, on his reading, is unlikely to be fully autonomous. Successful organisations will run human-in-the-loop models in which AI handles execution while people supply direction, judgment and accountability.
De Wit is optimistic. Many local organisations are still experimenting, but a growing number are moving past pilots to solve real problems and generate measurable value.
For leaders, the question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to do so responsibly, effectively and inclusively. The future workforce will consist neither solely of humans nor solely of machines — it will consist of humans who know how to lead, govern and orchestrate digital labour.
And that future is arriving faster than many realise. Don’t miss a great discussion!

TCS+ | Why South African workers must become supervisors of digital labour

TC|Daily is a technology show from TechCentral, South Africa's premier business technology news website. It features interviews with newsmakers, ICT industry leaders and other interesting people.