Abstract
D.Litt. et Phil.
South Africa’s relationship with the African continent, in the post-apartheid era, has been the subject of a growing body of research focusing on the nature of these relationships. Its corporate presence is felt almost everywhere from Khartoum to Maseru, and in various economic sectors.
It has been established that South African companies are well placed to invest on the rest of the continent, as they have access to capital, infrastructure and technology. Their efforts are further spurred on by the ideology of ‘African Renaissance’, the principles espoused in NEPAD and the moral capital that South Africa gained at the end of apartheid.
This thesis considers the role that South Africa’s African corporate expansion, in the area of mobile telephony, plays in shoring up its projections of leadership status on the continent. Hegemonic stability is used as the theoretical framework underpinning this research.
The mobile telephony sector is mushrooming across the continent, thanks in no small part to the weakening of fixed line telephony services within the last two decades. Consequently, South African mobile telephony multinational companies are well placed to fill the gap, with the added advantage of being identifiably ‘African’.
Analysis of the relationship between mobile telephony multinationals and the South African government underscores its complexities. As much as mobile telephony corporations have been given implicit support by the State to spread their wings on the continent, there is no concrete framework to legislate their behaviour beyond South Africa’s borders. Therein lies the dilemma for South Africa; on the one hand the State needs the private sector to give expression to its vision for the continent, but at the same time the State has no real control over the actions of these companies.
This interpretive research is primarily qualitative relying on a mixture of primary and secondary data as well as some interviews. Furthermore, the thesis considers South Africa’s current regulatory frameworks for its multinationals...