28 April 2026
The ANC Study Group on Communications and Digital Technologies condemns the institutional embarrassment caused by the Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies, Mr Solly Malatsi, following the forced withdrawal of South Africa’s Draft National Artificial Intelligence Policy, a policy document riddled with fictitious hallucinations of “academic” sources now widely attributed to unverified, AI-generated content.
On 10 April 2026, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies published the Draft National Artificial Intelligence Policy in the Government Gazette for a 60-day public comment period on 25 March 2026. Within days, investigative reporting exposed that several of the 67 references cited in the policy document were completely fictitious, fabricated “academic” journals and sources that do not exist.
Internal investigations subsequently confirmed that AI-generated citations were inserted into the document and passed, unchecked, through multiple layers of departmental review, before the scandal came to light. On 26 April 2026, Minister Malatsi announced the withdrawal of the policy.
This debacle represents one of the most alarming failures of ministerial oversight and intellectual rigour in the recent history of South Africa’s digital governance. The fact that a policy designed to regulate and set national standards for Artificial Intelligence was itself produced through the uncritical and unverified use of Artificial Intelligence is an indictment of the governance standards minister Malatsi has presided over at the Department.
We are deeply troubled that a document of this magnitude that is intended to guide South Africa’s approach to arguably the most transformative technology of the 21st century, touching on sectors including manufacturing, energy, transport, and the digital economy, was drafted without the basic human oversight required to verify whether its foundational references and evidence base were real. This is a catastrophic failure of critical thinking and accountability at the highest levels of departmental leadership.
The ANC Study Group calls on South Africans and the Parliament of the Republic to reflect seriously on what this reveals about the culture of diligence, or the absence thereof, within the Minister’s office. Minister Malatsi’s public positioning as a champion of technological innovation rings hollow in light of this incident.
We are particularly troubled that this incident reflects a broader, troubling trend of substituting genuine intellectual work and evidence-based policymaking for AI-generated output presented as rigorous policy analysis. South Africans expect their government to do the work, not outsource the nation’s most consequential policy documents to tools known to hallucinate fabricated facts and non-existent sources.
As the ANC Study Group on Communications and Digital Technologies, we therefore call for:
a) That Minister Malatsi appear before the Portfolio Committee on Communications and Digital Technologies at the earliest available opportunity to account fully for the circumstances that led to the drafting and gazetting of a policy document built on fabricated references;
b) That the Minister provide Parliament with a full, transparent account of the internal review process, including which officials were responsible for the drafting and quality assurance of the document, and what “consequence management” measures, as promised by the Minister, have been or will be instituted;
c) That the DCDT, in redrafting the National AI Policy, commit to a genuine consultative process driven by human expertise and rigorous evidence, not AI-generated shortcuts.
The need for an AI policy has not vanished, but we cannot have an AI policy drafted by AI to regulate AI. It’s a cycle of doom. The ANC remains committed to ensuring that our people receive an AI policy they can trust, that is credible, and that has critical thinking embedded in its formative and substantive stages.
One may delegate drafting to an instrument; one may never abdicate the responsibility for intellectual leadership and human judgment over its output. As the Study Group, we wish to place on record that, before the withdrawal of the Draft National AI Policy, the Study Group had already reached an advanced stage of planning and was preparing to convene its own public participation process. This process was specifically designed to assemble a broad range of views and expert reflections from stakeholders, all of which were to form the basis of the Study Group’s substantive contribution to the formal public comment process before its original closing date of 10 June 2026.
South Africans deserve a Minister who leads with rigour and intellectual honesty. On this occasion, Minister Malatsi has failed that standard comprehensively, and the ANC CDT Study Group will hold him accountable through every mechanism available to this Parliament.
Issued by the Whip of the ANC Study Group on Communications and Digital Technologies, Cde I Subrathie.
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