Who Really Owns Our Digital Economy? Crypto Rules, the Invisible Data Mine, and Why Africa Is Saying No to Starlink
Last entry, Zimbabwe wrote its first rulebook for crypto. But if we only tax the trader sending a remittance and never the giants harvesting our data, we have aimed the law at the small fish and let the whale swim free. This entry steps back to see the whole digital economy — and makes one quiet, important point: on this question, the government and the ordinary citizen are not on opposite sides. They are on the same side of the table. The other side is occupied by the platforms that mine our attention and our data without ever opening a company, or paying a cent of tax, in the country where the value is born.
First, a Change of Vibe
In our last entry, on Zimbabwe’s new crypto law, there was an unavoidable tension: the state reaching to tax and watch the digital hustles of ordinary, scarred citizens. Today I want to widen the lens, and in doing so, dissolve that tension. Because once you see the whole digital economy clearly, a surprising thing happens — the government and the citizen stop looking like opponents and start looking like fellow passengers on the same boat, watching the same cargo being carried off by someone else.
This entry is written to be understood by everyone: the kombi commuter scrolling TikTok, and the Treasury official drafting the next Finance Act. Both need the same picture, because the answer requires both of them. So let us build that picture together, plainly, and then look at why — from Windhoek to Yaoundé — African governments are increasingly saying a careful “not like this” to the world’s most famous satellite internet. It is all one story.
Social Media Is an Industry — and You Work In It
Here is a way of seeing it that, once seen, cannot be unseen. A social-media platform is not a noticeboard. It is a factory. And like any factory, it has a structure:
Look at what is actually happening. Every Zimbabwean scrolling, liking, posting and watching is doing unpaid work in a factory whose product is their own attention and data. It is, in a strange and literal sense, “working from home” — the value is produced in our living rooms and villages, on our phones, with our electricity, our culture and our private lives as the raw material. But the wages of that work — the advertising billions — and the product of that work — the data — both leave the country entirely. The factory was never built here. No company was registered. No payroll runs through Harare. And so no tax is paid where the value is made.
Why They Pay No Tax: a 100-Year-Old Rule
So why does this extraction go untaxed? Not by accident — by an old rule that the digital age has quietly broken. For roughly a century, the world agreed that a country could only tax a company’s profits if that company had a “permanent establishment” there: a factory, a branch, an office — something physical you could point to. It made sense when business meant ships and warehouses. It is obsolete the moment business becomes data and eyeballs.
Today a platform can earn enormous sums from millions of Zimbabwean users while having no office, no staff and no “permanent establishment” anywhere near Zimbabwe — and so, under the old rule, Zimbabwe may tax none of it. The profit is booked in a low-tax island; the value was created in Mbare and Murewa. As one South African analyst put it bluntly, every time you click an ad, money silently leaves the country down a fibre-optic cable. A digital services tax, properly understood, is simply a toll for access to our market, our infrastructure and our citizens’ data — a digital tariff.
Data Is the New Gold — and We Are Exporting It Raw
Zimbabwe knows, in its bones, the tragedy of exporting raw minerals — digging up gold, lithium and platinum and shipping it abroad to be refined, so that others capture the real value. This journal has argued many times for beneficiation: refine it here, keep the value here. Now apply that exact lesson to data, because data is simply the newest mineral on the Plateau.
And this is not folk metaphor — it is in the law. The United Nations’ own model tax convention, in its Article 12B, explicitly names “the supply of user data” alongside online advertising, social media and search as digital services a country has the right to tax. The world’s tax authorities already agree, on paper, that your data is a taxable economic resource being extracted from your country. The question is only whether we will collect what is ours.
The rural frontier: a genuine double-edged sword
Here lies the most delicate part, and I will be honest about both edges. As connectivity finally reaches rural Zimbabwe, the gains are real and precious: a grandmother video-calling her children in the diaspora; a farmer checking the real maize price before the middleman lies to him; a clinic reaching a doctor; a child reaching a library that was never built. No one who loves this country wants the village left in the dark.
But the same pipe that carries the video call carries something back the other way. When a platform reaches a rural community for the first time, it gains its richest, most untouched data seam yet — the lifestyles, the locations, the kinship maps, the beliefs and buying habits of people who were, until now, entirely off its map. The village learns the world; but the platform learns the village — intimately, permanently, and for profit. Connectivity is a blessing. Connectivity without sovereignty is a blessing that quietly bills you in a currency you did not know you were spending: yourself.
Africa — and the World — Are Waking Up
The good news: governments are no longer asleep, on crypto or on the wider digital economy. Globally, the rules are tightening — Europe now has a comprehensive crypto framework, and over 135 countries agreed in principle to a 15% global minimum tax on multinationals. But the most instructive movement is happening across our own continent, where one country after another has decided it will no longer wait politely for permission to tax the value taken from its people.
Behind these national moves sits a quiet diplomatic battle that matters enormously. The rich-country club, the OECD, has spent years on a “two-pillar” fix — but its showpiece reform reaches only a handful of the very largest firms and has stalled in the United States Congress. So Africa has opened a second front: through the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF), the continent is demanding that at least 35% of the giants’ residual profit be taxable where the users are, and a minimum effective rate of at least 20%. More importantly, African nations — led from the front by Nigeria — have pushed the writing of global tax rules out of the rich-country club and into the United Nations, where every country gets a vote. And the African Continental Free Trade Area now has its own Digital Trade Protocol, a first attempt to set our own rules for our own digital market.
Now It Makes Sense: Why Africa Says “Not Like This” to Starlink
All of this is why the Starlink story — which puzzles so many people — suddenly makes perfect sense. If social-media platforms extract value at the level of applications, a satellite internet provider operates at the level of the pipe itself. Whoever owns the pipe owns the deepest access to a nation’s data and the thinnest accountability to its laws. So watch what African regulators actually asked for — it is never “stay out.” It is “operate here, but under our laws, with local ownership, with our data answerable to our courts, and with a company we can actually regulate.”
The common thread is unmistakable, and it is the whole point of this journal: African governments want the connectivity, but not at the price of surrendering ownership, data and jurisdiction to a company that answers to no one within their borders. That is not backwardness or hostility to progress. It is the same instinct that makes a sensible nation insist a foreign miner register locally, share ownership, and obey the law of the land. The satellite is just a mine in the sky, and the ore, once again, is us.
What Zimbabwe — Government and Citizen — Should Do Together
If the citizen and the state are truly on the same side here, then the way forward must serve both: the people’s hunger for affordable, open connectivity, and the nation’s right to revenue and sovereignty. These are not in conflict. Here is the shared path.
We Have Seen This Before — and We Know How It Ends
My people, we have stood at this exact crossroads before, only the cargo was different. We watched our gold, our chrome, our platinum leave this Plateau as raw rock, refined and sold by others for a hundred times what we were paid — and we called it, correctly, a wound. Data is that same rock, in a new form, leaving by a new road. The lesson does not change because the mineral is invisible. Exported raw, it enriches everyone but us. Refined and governed at home, it could fund the very schools and clinics the village wanted the internet for in the first place.
And here is the heart of it, the thing I most want both the official and the citizen to hear: stop fighting each other over the small change while the treasure leaves. The vendor’s WhatsApp remittance is not the prize. The youth’s TikTok hustle is not the enemy. The prize is the ocean of value and data flowing, untaxed and ungoverned, out of every phone in this country to companies that have never so much as registered an office in Harare. The government that taxes its own struggling people while leaving that ocean untouched has mistaken the minnow for the whale. The citizen who resents his own government’s rules, while handing his entire life to a foreign platform for free, has mistaken the toll-collector for the thief.
So let us change the vibe, as the youth say. Not government against people. Not people against government. Zimbabwe — all of us, at one table — facing outward, together, to claim what is ours. Say yes to the satellite, yes to the platform, yes to the connectivity that lifts the village — but on our terms, under our law, with our data answerable to us, and our fair share of the value staying home. That is not hostility to the future. It is the oldest law of the Plateau, applied to the newest mine: ziva kwawakabva, and know what is yours. Pamberi nehwaro hwedu hwedijitari — forward with our own digital foundation.
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