OPINION | Whoever owns the data owns the truth: Capitec, the DA, and the quiet enclosure of South Africa’s information economy

In June 2024, in the aftermath of an election in which voter turnout fell to 58.57%, I argued that South Africa’s democracy was in crisis, not simply because people had stopped voting, but because the alternatives on offer were themselves financed and shaped by the same captains of capital who had long protected the status quo.

Parties like Rise Mzansi, ActionSA and BOSA, I maintained, were not vanguards of “new politics” but instruments of a broader strategy: fragment the vote that seeks radical economic transformation, while keeping the Democratic Alliance (DA), the most well-funded and reliably market-friendly party, intact.

Two years on, that pattern has not just persisted. It has moved into a new and more consequential domain, OUR data.

And it is worth naming this pattern in the language South Africa is already familiar with. After three years of public hearings, the Zondo Commission described state capture as a project in which a relatively small group of actors, together with their network of collaborators inside and outside of the state, systematically redirected state resources or its mandate for their own gain, facilitated by efforts to exploit or weaken key state institutions and public entities.

That definition was written about one era and one network. But a definition is a lens, not an epitaph. Viewed through that lens, what is unfolding in our information economy today is not an entirely new story. It is the same story told in a new register.

– An industry the state arrived at late –

Data mining and data governance are among the world’s fastest-growing strategic areas, while South Africa’s government, like most governments, has been slow to build the institutional capacity to govern this space entirely on its own terms.

Into that gap steps private capital, and increasingly financial capital, because banks already sit on some of the richest and most granular behavioural datasets available: every transaction, income stream and pattern of spending and saving generated simply by living an economic life.

This is the context in which the Department of Home Affairs, under Minister Leon Schreiber, has begun routing Smart ID applications through bank branches.

Capitec is leading the rollout, with the service now available at more than 240 branches nationally. The new model connects participating banks directly to the Home Affairs systems through a secure, API-based Digital Gateway, with a government target of eventually reaching 1,000 branches by 2029.

What is being shifted here is not a peripheral government service. It is the delivery of a core state identity function: establishing and verifying who a citizen is, which in turn underpins access to a wide range of rights and services.

That Capitec is a major participant in this arrangement is politically significant. Capitec founder, Michiel le Roux, has been linked to more than R208 million in donations to the DA over the past five years, channelled through Fynbos Kapitaal, Fynbos Ekwiteit and Fynbos Trust, according to political-funding disclosures.

This is precisely the mechanism I described in 2024, and it echoes the broader architecture identified by the Zondo Commission: networks operating both inside and outside the state, with political influence and economic interests intersecting.

The Zuma-era network sought influence through strategic appointments and procurement. Today, influence can operate differently. A funder does not necessarily need to occupy a ministry or sit on a state-owned company board. Funding can create proximity to the political system, while policy and administrative choices determine where strategic public functions are delivered.

The forms may differ. The underlying questions remains the same: who benefits when public functions and opportunities are increasingly routed through private institutions with significant political relationships?

– Data mining as a monopolised frontier – 

What should trouble us is not simply the funding relationship, but what it could foreclose.

Data governance is a strategic industry that ought to remain open to young entrepreneurs, to smaller fintechs and public-interest technologists building tools for spatial planning, service delivery and support for informal-economy.

Instead, we may be witnessing an early form of enclosure: the largest, best-funded and most politically connected players gaining privileged positions in state-linked digital infrastructure before the industry has had a meaningful opportunity to be contested or democratised.

This is monopolisation dressed as efficiency, “shortening long journeys”, in the language Capitec itself uses, while potentially narrowing who gets to build, participate in and benefit from South Africa’s data economy.

The resource at stake is not literally the population register itself, which remains a state asset. The concern is the growing concentration of access, infrastructure and opportunity around the systems through which South Africans establish and verify their identity.

Who controls those access points can shape who participates in the data economy that develops around them.

– When the data-holder becomes the truth-holder –

The clearest illustration of why this matters lies in a separate but related dispute: the one between Capitec and Statistics South Africa over the unemployment rate.

Capitec CEO, Gerrie Fourie, has argued based on patterns of informal economic activity observed through Capitec accounts, that actual unemployment may be closer to 10% than the 32.9% reported by Stats SA for the first quarter of 2025. Stats SA’s response was pointed. Its Quarterly Labour Force Survey already includes informal and self-employed workers in line with International Labour Organisation standards.

Statistician-General, Risenga Maluleke, has also rejected the suggestion that the institution manipulates its figures.

This is not merely a methodological observation. It is an ideological one, and who makes the argument matters.

Reframing informal, precarious economic survival as employment is not a neutral technical correction. It can become a redefinition that reduces the perceived scale of the crisis, and with it, potentially, the political pressure to expand social security, infrastructure and protection for millions of South Africans who rely on government support.

People who generate income through informal activity are not, by virtue of that activity, necessarily inside a safety net. They may remain outside the protections associated with stable formal employment and functioning social security are meant to provide. Calling that activity “employment” does not close that gap. It can obscure it.

And here the Commission’s vocabulary sharpens what we are looking at rather than merely describing it.

The Zondo Commission found that state capture involved the manipulation of the public narratives in ways that served those seeking to capture the state.

What makes the current moment particularly significant is that the institution making a public argument about how the informal economic activity should be understood is also participating ins a growing ecosystem through which the state’s identity services.

These are not necessarily the same issue, and there is no evidence that the two are coordinated. But together they raise a broader question about interpretive power.

When a major financial institution has access to large-scale economic data while also occupying an expanding role in state-linked digital infrastructure, its ability to shape public debates about how citizens are measured, classified and understood becomes increasingly significant.

We are no longer talking only about who owns data. We are talking about who gets to define what that data means.

– The pattern, not the incident –

This is the deeper crisis beneath the one I identified in 2024.

The Zondo Commission concluded that state capture was not simply about extracting resources, but also about securing future power and consequently shaping the political order.

Read against the present moment, the strategic asset of the previous era was the state-owned enterprise. The strategic asset of this one may be the dataset. The previous capture mechanism was the corrupt procurement contract and the captured board.

The mechanism today can be the lawful outsourcing arrangement, the digital partnership and the disclosed political donation. The forms differ. The architecture does not.

In both cases, the danger lies in a small group of actors, inside and outside the state, acquiring disproportionate influence over public resources and institutions, while oversight bodies, regulators and public-interest institutions struggle to keep pace.

Democracy is not decided at the ballot box. Increasingly, it is also decided in the infrastructure of data: who collects it, who controls the systems through which it moves, who has access to it, and  who gets to say what it means.

If that infrastructure is allowed to consolidate quietly among institutions with deep economic and political connections, then the “truth” South Africans are offered about their own society, about employment, need and inclusion, risks becoming a truth increasingly authored by capital rather than by the people it is meant to describe.

The task ahead is therefore not simply to contest another election cycle. It is to insist that data governance, like land, like the airwaves, like any other strategic public resource, remains a contested, democratised space.

South Africa cannot afford another generation of weakened institutions. The poor are already left to scramble for the remnants of institutions damaged by the last era of state capture.

Written by: Community activist, Lesego Mahlangu, in her personal capacity.