Communications minister Solly Malatsi could be summoned to parliament to account for the AI-generated hallucinations that forced the embarrassing withdrawal of South Africa’s draft national AI policy.
The ANC study group on communications & digital technologies late on Tuesday called for the minister to appear before parliament’s portfolio committee on communications at the earliest available opportunity to explain how a flagship policy intended to govern artificial intelligence had itself been drafted partly using it.
“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,” study group chief whip Imran Subrathie said in a statement.
“The fact that a policy designed to regulate and set national standards for AI was itself produced through the uncritical and unverified use of AI is an indictment of the governance standards minister Malatsi has presided over at the department.”
Subrathie, who also sits on the portfolio committee, said the group was “deeply troubled” that a document intended to guide South Africa’s approach to “arguably the most transformative technology of the 21st century” had been produced this way.
The study group has no power to compel the minister’s attendance – that authority sits with the portfolio committee itself, which can summon a minister under section 56 of the constitution. The committee is chaired by Khusela Diko, who has herself publicly demanded that Malatsi withdraw and redraft the policy.
‘Shortcuts’
The study group wants Malatsi to provide a full, transparent account of the internal review, name the officials responsible for drafting and quality assurance, and detail the consequence management measures he has himself promised. It also wants the department of communications to commit, in any redraft, to a process driven by human expertise and rigorous evidence rather than what it called “AI-generated shortcuts”.
Malatsi, a senior DA figure in the government of national unity, withdrew the draft on Sunday evening after an internal review he had ordered confirmed that its reference list contained various fictitious sources. The minister said the likely cause was AI-generated citations being inserted without proper verification and promised consequence management for those involved in drafting and quality assurance.
Read: Malatsi withdraws AI policy after fictitious sources scandal
The 86-page document listed 67 references. Several pointed to journals that either had no record of the cited work or did not exist at all. Editors of the South African Journal of Philosophy, AI & Society and the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy independently confirmed to News24, which broke the story, that the articles credited to them had never appeared.
Public comment had been due to close on 10 June. It is unclear when a revised version will be published.
Tuesday’s intervention sharpens what has been a politically bruising week for the minister. Diko, who is in effect Malatsi’s most senior parliamentary overseer, had earlier demanded on X that the policy be scrapped, telling the minister to subject any redraft to a proper review “without using ChatGPT this time” and accusing him of hunting for a “scape-bot”.
Public works & infrastructure minister Dean Macpherson, a DA cabinet colleague, leapt to Malatsi’s defence on the same platform, dismissing Diko’s intervention as grandstanding. Diko retorted that DA ministers epitomised populism and would soon discover governance was harder than it looked.
Malatsi is the first non-ANC minister to lead the communications portfolio since 1994. He and his ANC counterparts in parliament have locked horns on a number of occasions, with the application of black economic empowerment laws in the ICT sector and Starlink’s related pursuit of a South African operating licence the thorniest issue.
Already under fire
The substance of the withdrawn policy had already drawn fire. Technology investor Stafford Masie last week published an open letter arguing that the draft risked regulating South Africa out of the global AI economy by prioritising governance over infrastructure investment. The document had proposed an entirely new architecture of seven bodies to oversee AI, including a National AI Commission, an AI Ethics Board and an AI Safety Institute, despite government having committed no money to compute infrastructure.
Read: The AI policy that AI broke
Phumzile van Damme, the former DA MP turned digital rights commentator, has described the affair as another example of the tech illiteracy of government, warning that it risked becoming a global story about the pitfalls of AI. She invoked the recent Deloitte Australia precedent, in which the consultancy was forced to refund part of a federal fee after a report it produced was found to contain fabricated academic references. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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