Information is a non-rival commodity. It knows no scarcity. Yet the market vultures would like to create scarcity and do what markets do with regards to demand and supply. Increase price when demand increases, and squeeze competition and rivals out. It is a story of David vs Goliath. It is a story of one South African fighting the greed and injustice of the multinationals, and this South African came out victorious.
Not only that, but he has also made the African dream possible by seeking truth. Seeek.ai is an innovation, currently in beta form but to be unleashed in early 2025. It was born and earned its stripes through a history of stubborn perseverance and resilience in seeking justice and has quenched the African thirst to participate as a full citizen in what was a dwindling possibility in the world of data.
Eldrid Jordaan ignited my dimming lamp and I have never been this excited by the prospect of a good African dive in the eye of the storm of big data, the internet of things and artificial intelligence. Jordaan has won the stripes and deep scars are there to show in the experience of the data battlefield. Jordaan is a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg. He is a design thinker and fully immersed in system thinking, one who pursues a mission and seeks to be human at all material times.
We produced our report in November 2014 and noted the dark side of the data revolution and the possibilities of leaving many more behind.
I was the representative of Africa on the Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution, which was established by Ban Ki-moon in 2014. We produced our report in November 2014 and noted the dark side of the data revolution and the possibilities of leaving many more behind.
When two years later I failed in March of 2016 to table the resolution on data revolution and the plight of Africa at the 47th UN Statistical Commission I saw lights dimming in Africa. I felt at the time I fell on my sword. I knew that tabling this would have not immediately resolved the issues, but at least this would keep the matter on the development agenda. The resolution was taken in the context of our awareness as Africans that we are going to be breakfast, lunch and supper for the developed world. The wild west of a single train ambush no longer exists and it is replaced by information technology that in one swoop can enable continental capture.
This is the risk we faced and in Libreville, Gabon, we crafted the following resolution at the 11th African Symposium for Statistical Development, and the resolution read:“The Independent Expert Advisory Group (IEAG) recommended that a UN-led Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data be established to mobilise and co-ordinate the actions and institutions that are required for data revolution to serve sustainable development.
“The African Statistical Community is concerned that the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data has since been launched outside the recommendations of the IEAG and in exclusion of countries and key stakeholders within the national statistics systems, National Statistics Organisations, Regional Statistics Systems, UN Statistics Division and the UN Statistics Commission. The African Statistics Community, therefore, petitions the UN secretary-general to establish a Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data consistent with the recommendations of the IEAG.”
It was in this regard that in early January 2016, I had the opportunity to meet the AU chairperson Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma on our resolution. She was incidentally at the time having the secretary-general of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, as her visitor. So she put the item I brought up on the agenda. The item did need not to have been canvassed beforehand at the Statistical Commission. Unfortunately, it was not to be and space and time did not allow for me to unfold the intricacies. Suffice to mention that I did not know where next to knock.
Six years on, in 2022, I was accosted by Jordaan and his partner in innovation and rocky adventure Goitse Konopi at the University of Johannesburg about some ideas. Fast forward to 2023, Suppple was born and was listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange. As if that was not enough, in three months’ time Seeek.ai will launch. I am the non-executive chairperson of Suppple. But here is the story behind my trepidations about Africa being breakfast, lunch and dinner including tea breaks of big tech. I am convinced that is going to be behind us, and my low spirits have been emboldened by the serendipitous association with Jordaan and Konopi.
On August 2 2023 in an interview, Jordaan said GovChat, which he founded, was in business rescue.
“This [business rescue] is sad because the platform was created for social impact and that impact was felt by well over 13-million South Africans. I am happy and excited from a legal perspective, but not so excited about where GovChat is right now. It’s like a double-edged sword. For a start-up needing to go this way and against the largest and most popular technology company in the world, what does that say?”
But Jordaan has long characterised the features of the challenge. He is a disciple of Albert Einstein. Einstein says if you face an existential problem, and you have an hour to perish, you should spend the first 55 minutes understanding the problem and the last five minutes in execution. This is how Seeek.ai defines Jordaan's strategic mind.
Jordaan’s was not a typical lamentation but a reflection to gather strength, and like Sun Tzu he used his lamentation as a weakness to deceive the opponent. “I’m saddened by the current position of GovChat, and Facebook and WhatsApp had a huge role to play in where it is, which is in the business rescue process. It shouldn’t be that way. My dream for GovChat was to be able to connect citizens with the government, and I did that. That dream has now turned into a nightmare.”
Jordaan struck back and noted: “Every legal course that we’ve taken, we have won. It’s four-zero if you count what we had to go through and millions of rand’ worth of legal fees to get to this point.”
The hunted becomes the hunter and finally Jordaan won against the mighty in a David and Goliath encounter: “GovChat eventually came out victorious when the Competition Commission referred Meta Platforms and its subsidiaries, WhatsApp and Facebook SA, to the Competition Tribunal for prosecution for abuse of dominance.” So Jordaan has in one swoop answered an existential problem that seized African statisticians.
He has liberated us as a continent from being breakfast, lunch, supper and tea breaks for the mighty. But there is more on the menu from seeek.ai as Jordaan makes the bold move not only to stop the mighty from being spoilers, but to lead the way on responsible deployment of technology for the common good. It was always going to come from Africa, and Jordaan sets the pace and path through AI that he says is designed for Africa. “Seeek.ai is designed to provide a more intuitive and conversational experience, one that feels like a real dialogue rather than a typical online search.”
Users can receive accurate, real-time answers in their preferred languages — including French, Swahili, Arabic, English and five South African languages — making seeek.ai uniquely accessible across Africa’s diverse linguistic landscape. Beyond individual use, Suppple envisions seeek.ai as a strategic asset for government collaboration, transforming complex information portals, such as government websites, into user-friendly, AI-enhanced experiences.
“With seeek.ai, government bodies can now bridge the digital divide, providing transparent and accessible information to millions of people,” Jordaan said. He added: “The multilingual capabilities set this technology apart from any other solution available today. Africa is now at the forefront of technological innovation — long gone are the days when Africans were mere consumers of technology. Today, we are creating solutions with a global impact.”
When I learnt of Jordaan’s bold solution-driven move of taking on the giants of the North and winning, I knew that the resolution of the African statisticians of Libreville seven years ago, while still needing to serve before the current UN secretary-general more as a matter of record for future reference and global practice, Jordaan had emulated that and placed the solution before society. He saved me from prematurely falling on my sword, and he has created conditions for a formidable force into the future of practicalising, leaving no-one behind.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the on-executive director of Suppple, 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 Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa
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