South Africa’s redrafted national AI policy will not be made public until Cabinet approves it for comment — and that is now not due before March 2027, months later than the department first promised.
Even then, March is only the first Cabinet step. Approval at that stage is mainly to gazette the policy for public comment, said Jeanette Morwane, acting deputy director-general at the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies and the policy’s project manager. The department will then consolidate comments and return to Cabinet for final approval. She gave no date for that.
Drafting under pressure
“We are working really under pressure,” Morwane said at a South Africa–Finland dialogue on AI, hosted by the Finnish embassy at the National Research Foundation in Pretoria. “We have a deadline of 30 November to submit to the minister.”
By then, the drafting team must finish both the revised policy and a discussion document. Internal government consultations follow from December to February.
“There’s a whole lot of government process we have to go through to get consultations done before we can then submit to cabinet by March 2027,” she said.
A timeline that keeps moving
In May, the department told Parliament it was targeting Cabinet in November with public comment in January 2027. In July, Morwane said the policy would reach Cabinet in November, with January “the latest.” In September, Communications Minister Solly Malatsi said he aimed to have a draft before Cabinet by the end of the financial year.
The first draft was gazetted on 10 April and withdrawn on 26 April after its reference list was found to contain fictitious sources. “This failure is not a mere technical issue,” Malatsi said at the time.
Who is writing it now
In May, Malatsi appointed a seven-member independent expert panel chaired by Wits University AI researcher Benjamin Rosman. Morwane said the minister gave the panel a framing document, and each member submitted advisory notes that the drafting team is now analysing.
“To make sure that we don’t have similar challenges, the minister has also put in place a drafting team from government, led by the department,” she said. It includes the Presidency, the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation, the State Security Agency and the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition.
An implementation road map is being drafted in parallel, she said, “so that we can immediately start implementing.”
Sovereignty — and a gap
Morwane said discussions are focused on compute and data sovereignty, and on “model sovereignty” — ensuring large language models handle South Africa’s official languages. “What’s missing for us is there is a huge need for investing in computing infrastructure.”
One slide in her presentation said South Africa “holds a regional lead in AI readiness” but that “regional peers are moving faster on AI implementation,” citing Egypt’s Karnak, a national LLM launched this year.
