Data & South Africa

Data-driven pieces on South African markets, money, and public data.

• South Africa’s rooftop solar boom outlived load shedding

  Rooftop solar passed 8.3 GW in 2026, still climbing two years after the blackouts stopped. The numbers say tariffs took over from desperation.

  August 3, 2026

• Everyone is online. Almost nobody has home broadband.

  South Africa: 82%+ internet access, 17.4% fixed-line home internet. That is not a rounding gap, it is two entirely different products serving the same "online" statistic.

  July 29, 2026

• Two-pot withdrawals: what the numbers actually say

  R57 billion left South African retirement funds in year one of two-pot. The second year’s data says more about how people actually use it.

  July 27, 2026

• I tried to predict gold prices with a trend line. It lost to doing nothing.

  A fitted least-squares line on ten years of gold-in-rand data. Tested against the dumbest possible baseline. The baseline won by 23 points, and the reason why is the actual lesson.

  July 24, 2026

• Your SaaS bill has a hidden 64% swing and it has nothing to do with the vendor

  A $20/month tool cost South African buyers R234 in February 2018 and R385 in February 2024. The vendor never touched the price. This is what budgeting in a second currency actually looks like.

  July 23, 2026

• What ten years of gold prices actually say about the Rand

  Gold returned 215% in dollars over the last decade. In Rand, it returned 273%. The gap is not noise, and it tells you exactly what "gold as a hedge" is actually hedging.

  July 22, 2026

• South Africa’s gambling statistics

  South Africans put R1.5 trillion through gambling operators last year. That headline number misleads. The regulator’s own data tells a sharper story.

  July 16, 2026