From Nesstar to ubuntu: reshaping Africa's digital future
In 1998, a team of African demographers, under the leadership of Professor Tukufu Zuberi and I, convened at Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) and subsequently established the African Census Analysis Project (ACAP).
Zuberi is the Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations and a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, US. He made his mark in mobilising African scholars to study demography at the University of Pennsylvania.
Zuberi undertook to lead the revival of African census data, which was stored on rolls of paper and tapes that were no longer machine-readable. Together with African scholars, he painstakingly compiled these and handed them back to African authorities. South Africa was a beneficiary of this effort, particularly regarding some of the pre-1996 census data.
In 2001, StatsSA searched for a pathway to establish an online dissemination system to make the SuperCross tabulation system accessible. The cross tabulation tool of choice for statisticians around the world. This was prior to SuperCross creating a SuperWeb online pathway for tabulation.
Zuberi introduced Nesstar to StatsSA. Nesstar is a platform that provided access to downloadable data flat files, together with the associated metadata.
Over two decades, access to StatsSA data was made possible to the public primarily through SuperWeb and Nesstar.
On December 19, StatsSA announced the demise of Nesstar as a platform. The message read:
“Nesstar data access service, the primary platform for accessing unit record data, will be discontinued on December 31, 2024. The service discontinuation is due to the closure of the organisation that provided Nesstar licensing and support services over the years .
“SuperWeb2 and SuperCross will remain the main tools dedicated to generating estimates from published databases through cross-tabulation. An alternative platform will be available for data access at the end of January 2025.”
Whilst Nesstar served us very well and bore no hallmarks of rivalry, its demise reveals opportunities for Africa’s Ubuntu designs. One such opportunity is glaringly illustrated by Eldrid Jordaan’s GovTech, which was attacked and weakened by big global tech. However, paradoxically, this provides evidence that Africa remains vulnerable in one of the most strategic and existential disciplines of the 21st century: data systems.
The implications of this vulnerability are massive. The question Africa and South Africa must answer is what must be done in the 21st century to ensure Africa is not left behind. No doubt, working alone in the world of information technology in the 21st century is foolhardy.
Marx observes in the longest chapter of Capital, Chapter 15, titled “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry”, that an equal level of attention—if not more—than Darwin gave to natural technology is necessary. This is because, as Marx tells us, “Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.”
At our 11th Africa Symposium for Statistical Development, held in Gabon in December 2015, we addressed this existential risk: that Africa will become a meal for other nations. And indeed, we remain such a meal. Yet we deserve not to be, as Jordaan, now the CEO of Suppple, demonstrated in the case against Meta et al.
Jordaan said on the platform of Ubuntu victory: “We won that argument.” “The Competition Commission found that they had sufficient evidence to recommend to the Competition Tribunal that Meta be prosecuted and fined up to 10% of its turnover on the African continent. This could see billions of rand being paid into the South African fiscus.”
We so often talk about use cases that relate to what the tech does. We now have a significant use case of how Africa can be an active participant and value creator in the tech industry, as Jordaan illustrates—not only in winning the case but in going further to create Suppple.
On the ashes of Nesstar’s closure is fertile ground for Africa to discover the meaning of appropriating what “the active relation of man to nature” should be. In winning the Meta case and creating Suppple as an African platform, Jordaan is granting to technology the very essence of the active relation of man to nature—Ubuntu. This is what the origins of the African Census Analysis Project, led by Zuberi and me, envisioned: rediscovering Ubuntu.
Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, a board member of the Institute for Economic Justice at Wits, and a distinguished alumnus of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa.
BUSINESS REPORT