Tag: National Security

Buying Solutions Without Understanding Ourselves: Strategic Culture and the Benchmarking Trap

Given SHINGANGE

There is no shortage of enthusiasm in South Africa, and across the developing world, for adopting new technologies. Governments procure systems. Delegations travel abroad. Study tours are arranged. Benchmarking reports are written. And yet, time and again, the tools and frameworks acquired from elsewhere fail to deliver the promised results. The question worth asking is not whether the technology works. Often it does, somewhere else. The more important question is: why does it not always work here?
Part of the answer lies in a concept that rarely features in procurement discussions or policy briefings: strategic culture.

What Is Strategic Culture?

Strategic culture refers to the accumulated beliefs, historical experiences, institutional habits, and collective values that shape how a nation approaches decisions, particularly consequential ones involving governance, security, and development. It is not a policy document. It is not an ideology. It is the sediment of history that settles into how a society thinks, what it trusts, how it organises itself, and what it assumes to be normal.

For South Africa, strategic culture is inseparable from the legacy of apartheid, a system that deliberately fragmented institutions, created parallel structures of governance, cultivated deep distrust between citizens and the state, and produced a security establishment that was as much an instrument of repression as it was of protection. The transition to democracy was historic, but transitions do not erase strategic culture. They layer over it: the assumptions, the reflexes, the institutional memories, these persist, sometimes visibly, often not. This matters enormously when a country decides to look outward for solutions.

The Benchmarking Assumption

Benchmarking, as a practice, is not inherently flawed. Learning from others is sensible. The problem arises when benchmarking is conducted without asking a foundational question: does the country we are learning from share our strategic culture, and did that culture contribute to the success we are trying to replicate?

When a South African delegation visits a Scandinavian country and observes a highly functional public institution, one with transparent processes, high citizen trust, and effective outcomes, it is not only observing a system. It is observing the product of centuries of institutional development, civic culture, relatively homogeneous historical experience, and a particular relationship between the state and its citizens. The system works, in part, because of who built it, why they built it, and the cultural soil in which it was planted.

To return home and recommend adopting that system, without interrogating whether our soil is comparable, is to misunderstand what benchmarking is for. It is to mistake the fruit for the tree.

The New Variable: Technology Is Moving Too Fast for Anyone to Lead

There is a second, more contemporary dimension to this problem that makes it even more urgent. For much of the twentieth century, the benchmarking hierarchy was relatively stable. Certain countries were clearly ahead in technology, institutions, and the economy, and it made sense to look to them for models.

That hierarchy is no longer what it used to be. The pace of technological change has become so rapid that the old leaders are no longer necessarily leading. Artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, digital infrastructure, surveillance technologies, data governance; these domains are evolving so quickly that no country has definitively “solved” them. Many of the countries we might traditionally benchmark with are themselves scrambling, piloting, reversing course, and learning in real time.

This changes the terms of the conversation. We are no longer in a world where the developed world has the answer and the developing world needs to import it. We are in a world where, in many critical technology domains, everyone is figuring it out together. The playing field has not been levelled, inequalities in resources and capacity remain real, but the epistemic hierarchy has shifted. No one has a working model we can copy.

What This Means for How We Choose

Taken together, these two observations, the persistence of strategic culture and the instability of technological leadership, should fundamentally reframe how South Africa and similar countries approach the adoption of new technologies and governance models.

First, before benchmarking, we should understand ourselves. What are our institutional realities? What does our strategic culture predispose us toward, and what does it make difficult? What historical conditions shaped the way our public institutions behave? These are not soft questions. They are the foundation on which any imported solution will either stand or collapse.

Second, we should be more selective about who we benchmark with. Countries with comparable historical experiences, similar institutional legacies, and similar relationships between state and citizen may offer more transferable lessons than those we traditionally regard as models. A country that has navigated post-colonial institution-building, managed deep social inequality, or rebuilt public trust after a period of authoritarian governance may have more relevant insights than one that has not.

Third, we should approach the current technological moment with appropriate humility and appropriate confidence. Humility, because no one has the answers. Confidence, because South Africa is not behind in the ways we sometimes assume. In many emerging technology domains, we are at the same starting line as everyone else.

Conclusion

The instinct to look outward for solutions is understandable. It reflects ambition and a desire to improve. But looking outward without first looking inward, without understanding our own strategic culture, our own institutional DNA, our own historical conditioning, is how we end up with systems that work beautifully in their country of origin and struggle to take root in ours.
Technology will keep advancing. The opportunities to adopt, adapt, and innovate will multiply. The countries that navigate this moment well will not necessarily be those who benchmark the most. They will be those who benchmark most wisely, with clear eyes about who they are and honest questions about whether the comparisons they draw actually hold.

The Invisible Architecture of Dependency

What South Africa’s ICT Procurement Practices Mean for National Sovereignty

Given SHINGANGE

There is a particular kind of vulnerability that does not announce itself. It does not arrive with a cyberattack or a diplomatic incident. It accumulates quietly, one procurement decision at a time, buried in departmental budgets and IT specifications that no one outside a technical committee ever reads. South Africa has been building this kind of vulnerability for decades. We have constructed a digital government on a foundation of disconnected systems, unexamined dependencies, and procurement practices that serve institutional convenience more than national interest. The time for a frank accounting has come.

A Government of Silos

Walk through any government department and you will find a familiar story: a system procured five years ago that cannot talk to the system procured three years later, which in turn cannot share data with the platform introduced last year. Each department has its own ICT architecture, its own vendor relationships, and its own logic for why its approach makes sense. What no one has done systematically is ask what all of this looks like from above, what the aggregate picture of our digital government actually is.

The Public Finance Management Act (PFMA) and its accompanying Treasury Regulations do provide a framework for government procurement, including ICT procurement. The intent is sound. But the framework was not designed with systems integration as a primary objective. The result is that departments procure in compliance with the law while simultaneously creating a national ICT landscape that is, in aggregate, fragmented, redundant, and strategically blind. Compliance and coherence are not the same thing, and we have optimised relentlessly for the former at the expense of the latter.

It would be naïve to treat this entirely as a coordination failure. Fragmented procurement concentrates revenue in specific channels. Consolidated, interoperable government systems would disrupt established commercial relationships. This is not an accusation, it is an observation about incentive structures that any serious reform effort must confront honestly. The question of who benefits from the current architecture is as important as the question of who bears its costs.

The Geopolitics Hidden in Your Server Room

Here is something that rarely appears in procurement policy discussions but should sit at the centre of them: the interoperability of technology systems is not a purely technical matter. It is a geopolitical one. The major technology ecosystems of our time are not neutral. They are built by states and corporations with specific interests, and the systems they produce are designed to work seamlessly with each other, and less seamlessly, sometimes not at all, with systems from competing ecosystems.

What this means in practice is that early procurement choices are not just purchases — they are ecosystem commitments. Once a department’s foundational infrastructure is built on a particular technology stack, subsequent procurement is constrained. You cannot simply choose the better or cheaper product from a different ecosystem if that product will not integrate with what you already have. The architecture of your existing systems becomes, in effect, a procurement policy, one that nobody voted for and that most officials are not even aware of.

South Africa’s digital government infrastructure is, broadly speaking, Western-origin in its foundational layers. This is a historical reality, not a conspiracy. But it carries a consequence: our effective range of procurement choices is narrower than our stated policy of non-alignment would suggest. When we speak of an independent foreign policy and strategic autonomy in international affairs, we should be asking whether our technology infrastructure gives us the flexibility to actually exercise that autonomy, or whether our server rooms have already made certain choices on our behalf.

Mapping What We Do Not Know

Before South Africa can make strategic decisions about its ICT dependencies, it must first know what those dependencies are. This sounds obvious. It is not being done. There is no comprehensive, current map of the technologies deployed across government departments, their countries of origin, their underlying architectures, their interdependencies, and the risks they introduce. Without this map, every procurement decision is made partially blind.

The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) has, to its credit, forced some degree of discipline around data governance and the systems that process personal information. But POPIA is a data protection instrument, not a national technology sovereignty instrument. It asks “how is data handled?” It does not ask “where does the underlying technology come from, who controls it, and what happens to our ability to operate if that relationship changes?” Those are different questions, and they require a different framework to answer.

A national technology dependency audit, covering all organs of state, cataloguing the origin and architecture of critical systems, and identifying single points of failure or external control, is not a radical proposal. It is basic due diligence for a state that takes its sovereignty seriously. It should be a standing function of government, not a once-off exercise. The National Cybersecurity Policy Framework provides a basis for this kind of work; what has been missing is the institutional will and the designated mandate to actually do it.

The Autonomy Trap

A tempting response to all of this is to pursue technological self-sufficiency, to build our own systems, develop our own platforms, and reduce dependence on foreign technology. The instinct is understandable. The outcome, however, is likely to be the opposite of what is intended. Attempting to develop and maintain critical technology infrastructure in isolation, without the scale, investment, and talent pipelines that the major technology powers have built over decades, does not produce sovereignty. It produces fragility.

The strategic goal is not independence from technology ecosystems. It is deliberate, mapped, and diversified interdependence. This means knowing which systems are critical to state function and ensuring that no single external actor has the ability to switch them off or compromise them unilaterally. It means building procurement policies that consciously distribute risk across ecosystems, rather than consolidating it. It means investing in the human capital to understand, manage, and where necessary adapt the systems we depend on. And it means engaging in the international governance of technology, at the African Union, at the United Nations, in bilateral agreements, with the same sophistication we bring to trade or security negotiations.

What We Should Be Obsessed With

South Africa occupies an unusual position in the world. We are active in the geopolitical space, we carry significant weight on the African continent, and we have a stated commitment to a foreign policy that is independent of great power blocs. That position has value. But its value diminishes every year that our technology infrastructure becomes more entrenched in dependencies we have not examined and cannot easily exit.

Policy makers and legislators should be asking three questions with far more urgency than they currently do. First, do we know what we depend on? Not in a general sense, specifically, systemically, and with a clear picture of the risks each dependency carries. Second, does our procurement framework actively shape our technology exposure, or does it merely regulate the process by which we accumulate it? And third, do we have the institutional capacity to manage our technology dependencies as a strategic asset, rather than as an administrative function?

The invisible architecture of our digital government is not invisible because it is hidden. It is invisible because we have not chosen to look. That choice, to look, to map, to govern deliberately, is available to us. It requires political will more than it requires resources. And the cost of continuing not to make it grows with every procurement cycle that passes without a strategic framework to guide it.

Given Shingange writes on South African governance, national security, and digital policy. This post reflects his personal analysis and does not represent the views of any institution.