REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK: Estonian echoes — SA’s digital public infrastructure looks like it was made in Estonia

Estonia’s ambassador to Kenya and South Africa, Daniel Erik Schaer, is rarely seen without a flamboyant bowtie. Except when he arrived at the GovTech 2026 day two plenary a little late. It was the big, black-tie gala dinner the night before and there may have been some Nkalakatha playing. The sun had also come out in the Durban sky, which makes challenging conditions for detoxing.

That the Estonian ambassador was at GovTech was already a strange sight, and that was only compounded by his slick moves. When I asked Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies Solly Malatsi whether the State Information Technology Agency (Sita) is integrating Estonia’s X-Road architecture (read: the backbone of its e-governance platform that allows different government departments to share citizen data while only asking for authorisation once) within South Africa’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and Home Affairs digital identity framework, he clarified that observing global best practices is vital, but backroom deals or blind copying do not exist:

“I think Estonia is a reference point for a lot of DPI development that is happening, and there’s nothing wrong with observing best practice and how it can be useful for our context. It’s not just a cut-and-paste because environments are different... societal digital skills proficiency is also different.”

Cool.

When a similar question was posed to Sita MD Magatho Mello, he was willing to walk a little closer to the disclosure line, saying that if there is already technology in use available from the Estonians, and a local vendor tries to sell similar systems that don’t work as well, then it’s an immediate non-starter. But he warns that chasing the global e-governance standard, there are some trade-offs that would need to be made:

“If you want to have what they are having, you must be willing to do what they are doing... It’s not enough for us to say we want to have the digitisation of Estonia, but we don’t suffer the pain, we don’t make the investments, we don’t give up the liberties in terms of autonomy of decision-making that they have. Because for us to have harmony, everyone has to give up a little bit of autonomy in the things they do.”

Integrated thinking

Mello also pointed to a yawning chasm that he is trying to bridge: each government department has, in the past, done its own ICT planning in isolation. “To get an operation and a vision like an Estonia or a Singapore, you have to plan together.”

When we spoke later on day two, there seemed to be no ill effects of too much Nkalakathing and he was quite clear-eyed when he gave his assessment of Estonia as a technology vendor:

“Imagine if you are a country, and every week you are hosting a delegation; in return, you are going to start saying, ‘Well, why don’t we get some of our companies to sell solutions to them?’ It’s a fair and reasonable approach for them... But we must also be a little bit selfish in how we approach it. In South Africa, we have great technology companies.”

One such company happened to be a headline sponsor of GovTech this year, and word is that it was not too impressed by the foreign presence.

Okay, disclosure time…

The Estonian foreign ministry hosted me at its e-Governance Conference last year, and I attended one of those briefing sessions where it pitched X-road and its other DPI tech to those delegations Mello mentioned.

It’s very impressive and unlike anything I have ever seen. But that also makes the DNA easy to spot for those who have seen the matrix. I see it in the digital ID Dr Leon Schrieber is installing at Home Affairs, and one of the MyMzansi app presentations by the Presidency was definitely at least a kissing cousin (and maybe a step backwards from what was demoed at GovTech 2025).

But you must rewind to the morning before Schaer jived to Mandoza to see where the Estonian influence was more than evident.

Kule Duma, representing the Digital Services Unit (DSU) within the Presidency, presented South Africa’s national roadmap for Digital DPI under Phase 2 of Operation Vulindlela.

Duma outlined how the centre of government is adapting global best practices – specifically citing Estonia and giving the ambassador a shout out – to transition South Africa from fragmented departmental silos into a single, seamless, “one-touch” digital service channel.

That phrase again

Central to Duma’s address was the assertion that DPI is fundamentally an issue of national digital sovereignty, ensuring the state retains democratic custody over core identity, data exchange and payment infrastructure while removing the administrative burden from citizens.

“It is about making sure that the key components that enable seamless services, that enable the heartbeat of a nation in the 21st century, are owned by the public, controlled by the public, and the rules are defined for how industry supports and how our stakeholders support going forward.”

The Presidency man detailed how South Africa is implementing Estonia’s pioneering administrative philosophy – often termed the “once-only” principle, and I promise I did learn the Tallinn colloquialism for it (it just escapes me now) – where a citizen provides personal information to the state once, and internal data highways handle cross-departmental verification.

Then there’s the unmistakable second component, which Duma described as a “data exchange which operates as a digital highway which allows information to flow at fast pace between government departments”. Or in other words: X-road.

But then he added some unexpected local flavour where the DSU in the Presidency orchestrates inter-agency alignment while leveraging Sita for platform hosting to prevent vendor lock-in and safeguard sensitive citizen data.

What he didn’t say, but what my mind was racing to anyway, is that it seems like Ramaphosa’s Government of National Unity is doing something previously unthinkable: co-ordinating Cabinet members from opposing parties towards a common goal.

But here’s the kicker: they already have a three-phase roll-out strategy to take the concept of e-governance from plenary presentation to lived reality – and it seems to fully bypass what Sita in its previous form demonstrated last year.

Ramaphosa’s grand DPI plan:

Phase 1: Capability and mandate mapping (months 1–6)
Mapping existing technical capabilities, departmental mandates, and institutional responsibilities across the state.

Phase 2: Tiered data sovereignty controls (months 6–12) 
Establishing clear data classification rules determining which sensitive datasets (read: biometrics) must remain strictly on-premises in state-owned infrastructure.

Phase 3: Ecosystem scaling (months 12–24)
Partnering with industry to scale service delivery across the MyMzansi app layer while keeping core data under state custody.

And if you allow yourself the room to connect some conspiratorial strings, suddenly Schreiber’s digitisation push and Malatsi’s ad valorem tax waivers look like a choreographed dance. Hell, even the ham-fisted attempt to force Starlink through the back door and the tag-team assault on the Competition Tribunal to get the Vodacom/Maziv deal over the line make sense when viewed through a lens with this particular rosy hue.

South Africa’s post-democracy presidents rarely see the end of their final term, but if everything I believe the Presidency is planning comes to pass, Ramaphosa has built something that will outlast even his successors. Cue the Nkalakatha. DM