POETIC LICENCE RABBIE SERUMULA

IT IS NOT the government’s job to give every household 10GB of free basic data per month; they are supposed to fix the roads, parks, Eskom, provide services to citizens, and build houses and schools, said a 13-year-old.

I told him people need the internet to apply for jobs, connect with their families, entertainment, and to access better education, social services, and healthcare.

He said in Meadowlands, Soweto, where he used to live, people would go to the clinic to stand outside, but close enough to connect to the clinic’s WIFI, affecting the connection just to access social media.

What sense does it make to give 10GB of data to a household held hostage by hunger pangs?

They can’t eat hashtags, how about giving them 10 different vegetable and herb seeds?

A household that had uncapped fibre during the harshest of Covid-19 times would easily substitute that luxury for groceries when salaries went under the guillotine and were chopped in half.

Yes, the growing digital divide in South Africa is a problem, but let's stop acting like access to the internet on your phone is so high up on our collective priorities as a country that it dances on the same floor with food insecurity, like it peddled ahead of water and electricity. Let's call data what it is – a utility. How about restoring the always overloaded transformers?

What sense does it make for a citizen to be using free data on a phone, while sitting on a pit toilet? Is this your technological advancement?

Johannesburg, is this how you become a world-class African city?

The internet has made us forget that we are hungry.

We are grasping at straws seeking world-class quality at the expense of actually improving the daily lives of our people, over the image of our country.

It is not the hungry person who wants free basic data, it is not the homeless person who wants access to 10 GB of data per month.

Apparently, being digitally disadvantaged is more brutal than poverty, a statement as bitter to the tongue as the South African euphemism of being “historically disadvantaged”.

How can it be historical when those said to be previously disenfranchised, are disenfranchised now?

Let's call data what it is; a utility that can not be placed on top of a list above water, electricity, food security and housing for the poorest.

Eagerness to bridge the digital divide is turning us into machines, mindless drones, while computers keep asking us to prove that we are humans; what robot talk is that?

Humans want data, but they need food.

The internet is not the great leveller it was envisaged to be, instead, the digital divide is an amplifier of the wealth divide.

Of course, the importance of accessing computers and the internet to immerse oneself in the economic, political, and social aspects of the world cannot be doubted.

For a country with more than half of our population living in poverty, without access to computers or the internet, is free data what we really need?