When Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014, the final transaction was valued at approximately $22 billion.
At the time, WhatsApp had extraordinary reach but a limited commercial model. Its strategic value lay primarily in its rapidly expanding network of users and the communications infrastructure that could ultimately be built around them.
More than a decade later, the implications of that acquisition deserve renewed scrutiny.
Changes to WhatsApp Business pricing in South Africa will mean businesses paying for categories of messages that have previously benefited from different charging arrangements.
Marketing messages can cost approximately 62 cents each, while utility and authentication messages attract their own charges.
Viewed individually, these amounts appear insignificant. At scale, they are anything but. At 62 cents, one million messages cost R620,000. Ten million cost R6.2 million.
But the more important issue is not the price of a WhatsApp message. It is dependency.
South African organisations have embraced WhatsApp for understandable reasons. It is widely adopted, familiar to consumers and relatively easy to integrate into customer service environments.
Banks have developed WhatsApp banking services. Government departments communicate with citizens through the platform. Businesses use the WhatsApp Business Platform for authentication, customer support, marketing and transactional communication.
The difficulty arises when a useful communications channel gradually becomes critical infrastructure.
Once an organisation has redesigned customer journeys, integrated contact centres, trained customers and constructed digital services around a privately controlled platform, switching becomes increasingly difficult and expensive.
This is a classic platform economy problem. Network effects create convenience, convenience creates adoption, adoption creates dependency, and dependency shifts bargaining power towards the platform owner.
The platform owner controls access conditions, technical standards, commercial terms and ultimately the rules governing participation in its ecosystem.
This is precisely the question at the centre of my research and my book, The Silicon Empire vs Social Impact: The David & Goliath Battle, which examines the GovChat experience and the broader tension between public interest innovation and privately controlled digital infrastructure.
GovChat demonstrated the extraordinary possibilities of using widely adopted digital platforms to deliver public services at scale. It also demonstrated the structural vulnerability that arises when public interest technology becomes dependent on infrastructure over which neither the innovator nor the state has ultimate control.
This raises a fundamental question for governments and corporate boards: Who controls your digital infrastructure when your organisation does not own the platform on which it operates?
Digital sovereignty is sometimes misunderstood as an argument for technological isolationism. It is not.
South Africa cannot and should not disconnect itself from global technology platforms. The question is whether participation becomes dependency.
Digital sovereignty is about maintaining sufficient control, choice and strategic autonomy over the infrastructure, data and technologies upon which increasingly digital societies depend.
A government should not have a single privately controlled digital doorway through which citizens access essential public services. Similarly, a bank should not regard WhatsApp as its customer engagement infrastructure. WhatsApp should be one channel within infrastructure controlled by the bank.
The appropriate response is therefore not to abandon WhatsApp. It is to abandon WhatsApp dependency.
South African enterprises should accelerate genuinely omnichannel communications architectures incorporating WhatsApp alongside SMS, USSD, RCS, email, mobile applications, web interfaces and emerging AI powered conversational channels.
Organisations should be able to determine which channel is most appropriate according to cost, customer preference, language, accessibility, security and the nature of the transaction.
This also represents an important opportunity for African telecommunications operators such as MTN and African technology companies to combine existing infrastructure with AI, multilingual communication and intelligent orchestration to create locally controlled alternatives.
For much of the platform era, Africa has primarily consumed technologies developed elsewhere. We download the applications, integrate the APIs and build businesses and public infrastructure on top of them. When commercial terms, algorithms or access conditions change, however, we are reminded of an uncomfortable reality: we never controlled the underlying infrastructure.
Africa must continue participating in global technology ecosystems, but we must simultaneously invest in African platforms, telecommunications infrastructure, interoperable digital public infrastructure, local AI capabilities and open standards.
Use global platforms where they create value. Partner with global technology companies where appropriate. But build alternatives, maintain interoperability, own the customer relationship, protect the data and preserve the ability to switch.
Because ultimately, if you do not control the infrastructure, you do not control the rules.
And that is why digital sovereignty must become an economic, corporate and public policy priority for South Africa.
Prof. Eldrid Jordaan is the founder of GovChat.
**The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Media Group.