I remember, not too long ago, devouring a futuristic think-piece by Dr Andile Ngcaba, in the pages of the Daily Dispatch. Ngcaba, the Eastern Cape’s own code-slinging oracle, laid down the digital manifesto masquerading as an article, unpacking the rise of machine learning, the Internet of Things, predictive analytics and the neural-network-powered economies waiting just around the corner.
Years later, on another digital platform, he doubled down: “The future of the world is technology.”
You do not forget pronouncements like that.
To avoid boring you with his executive origin story, telecommunications pioneer, venture strategist, Silicon Valley whisperer, let us instead teleport straight to East London, into the Cortex Hub, his innovation crucible. A space where binary meets imagination. A sandbox where yesterday’s ideas are reverse-engineered, optimised and deployed into tomorrow’s world.
The Cortex Hub is essentially a start-up Graphics Processing Unit accelerator for human potential, incubating socially impactful entrepreneurs, plugging them into venture pipelines, and turning township ambition into scalable, cloud-ready enterprise.
Long before “AI-enabled value chains” and “4IR transformation matrices” became political punchlines, another maverick, Motse Mfuleni, was laying digital future with his ICT Summit, launched 20 years ago.
Today, as the new chair of the EL Industrial Development Zone board, he is tasked once again with wrestling global tech headwinds: decentralised finance, smart manufacturing, quantum-flavoured automation and the geopolitics of data sovereignty.
Some of you remember when this province only produced wool and poets. Now we manufacture future-proof intellectual capital.
And then there is my personal favourite disruptor: Luvo Grey, a broadband evangelist and policy gladiator. If you ever wondered what it looks like when an Eastern Cape boy decides the metaverse must include Mdantsane, look no further.
As MD of EC Internet and president of the National Youth ICT Council, he is wiring communities from the ground up. Fibre trenches in forgotten streets. Local ISPs. Micro-edge nodes. Wi-Fi democratised.
And yes, he even slung stones at the world’s richest man. When SpaceX’s Starlink attempted market entry without respecting SA spectrum compliance and localisation policies, Grey stood up like a digital David and said, “Not here. Not our skies. Not without our laws.”
He reminds me of my friend Luthando Bara, a man armed with a postgraduate diploma in telecommunications technology and information policy, who could have helped architect the future network layer of this province, had the stars aligned differently.
Just as the bandwidth frontier expanded, media followed. When Keith Ngesi left the air-conditioned shelter of the Buffalo City metro and leapt into digital radio back in 2015, people thought he was mad.
Today, Keith Ngesi Radio sits not just as a broadcaster but as a content-delivery ecosystem. Streaming. Podcasting. Digital syndication. Monetised communities. A blueprint for provincial media renaissance.
Now enter Naldovision, a multimedia hub wired with a podcast suite, an online radio node, and a postmodern audio studio capable of producing Dolby-grade creativity. When Ngesi cracked open the gates, the content flood came, creators, cultural architects, hustlers with microphones, villages learning to speak to the world.
But not everything in our digital revolution has been sexy. When the Daily Dispatch exposed the provincial digital transformation strategy plagiarism scandal, it reminded us that copy-paste governance cannot blueprint a cloud-native future. Perhaps, there is a plot twist.
Premier Oscar Mabuyane still has an opportunity to redeem the policy stack, convene Grey and our innovators, architect of our rural AI-IoT-connectivity framework, and reimagine the digital economy beyond 2025.
And speaking of plot twists: TruFM’s axed station manager, Thobeka Buswana, exits the SABC in 2019 with a CCMA-endorsed cheque and re-enters as the force behind The Voice Lounge in 2025. If this were a Netflix arc, this is where the suspense music swells. Because while Ngesi and SABC-EC’s Loyiso Bala have mutual respect, Buswana has every reason to return with vengeance-flavoured innovation. Her platform’s urban cosmopolitanism may disrupt a public broadcaster already wobbling under legacy systems and analogue thinking.
This is not competition. It is creative collision. The kind that births markets. So here we are, one rural province, once dismissed as a backwater, now quietly iterating a digitised socio-economic operating system. Start-ups incubating. Networks expanding. Platforms rising. Culture streaming. Influence stacking.
Just as Ngcaba said years ago: The future is technology. Embrace it.
And judging by the bandwidth, firewalls, fibre trenches, media studios and AI dreams humming across the Eastern Cape right now, we have no intention of going bust. End of Transmission. Province Loading… Future Province: Active.
Vukile Pokwana is a starry-eyed fan of Luvo Grey.
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