By Levy Masiteng
Higher Education and Training Minister Buti Manamela has warned that artificial intelligence could deepen inequality in South Africa and across the Global South unless developing countries help shape the rules governing the technology.
Speaking at the World Digital Education Conference in Hangzhou, China, on Tuesday, Manamela said AI and digital innovation must become tools of liberation rather than another mechanism of exclusion for millions of young people.
Manamela said the governance of artificial intelligence was being shaped mainly by a small number of technologically advanced countries and powerful corporations.
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“The Global South is, for the most part, an observer of this process rather than a participant in shaping it. This must change, and it must change urgently,” Manamela said.
He said South Africa approached digital transformation and artificial intelligence not as a neutral technical exercise, but as a political project shaped by the country’s history of colonial dispossession, racial exclusion and structured inequality.
Manamela warned that artificial intelligence would reproduce and intensify existing inequality if governments failed to govern it “deliberately, with justice and inclusion as organising principles”.
“What does digital exclusion look like in practice? It looks like a student without affordable connectivity who cannot access a virtual lecture. It looks like a TVET college without adequate devices, bandwidth, or digital learning systems, competing in name only against institutions that have all three,” he said.
Manamela said the future economy would not be built only by data scientists, AI researchers and elite universities, but also by artisans, technicians, renewable energy specialists, robotics engineers, healthcare technologists and digitally capable workers across every sector of production and service.
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He said this made technical and vocational education central to any serious African development agenda, especially as tens of millions of young people enter labour markets every year, many without access to university education.
“If AI and digital transformation are to contribute meaningfully to African development, they must connect directly to industrialisation, manufacturing, infrastructure, and employment creation,” Manamela said.
He said South Africa was increasingly prioritising industry-linked learning, work-integrated learning, micro-credentials and flexible pathways that allowed people to enter, exit and re-enter learning throughout their lives.
Manamela also pointed to South Africa’s growing cooperation with China in vocational education, technical training and digital skills development.
“China’s experience with large-scale technical education, including the Luban Workshop model and the deliberate integration of digital skills into vocational curricula offers genuine lessons for the African context,” he said.
He said responsible AI governance required transparency, accountability, redress when AI systems caused harm, and protection against algorithmic discrimination.
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He also warned against the unchecked commercialisation of educational AI, saying education must remain a public good and a human right.
“When AI systems in education are designed primarily to extract profit, the interests of learners and the public interest are subordinated to the interests of shareholders. That is not a technical failure. It is a political failure, and we must name it as such,” he said.
He said Africa could not simply consume technologies designed elsewhere or be governed by frameworks it had no hand in crafting.
“We must be producers of the norms that will define this era, not merely subjects of them,” Manamela said.
