Resolving conflicts around surveillance and sustaining public oversight in South Africa, Angola and the DRC

Through an examination of digital surveillance controversies in South Africa, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), this article explores the factors explaining differences in the settlement of conflicts over digital surveillance overreach and the sustainability of public oversight practices across three countries with similar authoritarian histories. In South Africa, activism around surveillance overreach peaked and then declined during Jacob Zuma’s presidency, to be replaced by strategic litigation around digital surveillance in the absence of a mobilisation strategy. In Angola, a group of young activists was arrested and charged with incitement to rebellion and attempted assassination of the then-president after the state placed them under surveillance for organising a reading group. A public backlash against the DRC government’s introduction of the Registry of Mobile Devices (RAM), as well as the conviction of journalist Stanis Bujakera Tshiamala after becoming a surveillance victim by the state, demonstrates growing capacity for public oversight in that country. Using a critical approach and a comparative case study methodology supplemented by political process and agency theories, this article examines these conflict scenarios and what they tell us about capacities to sustain public oversight of digital surveillance. Public oversight has been less sustainable in Angola than South Africa or the DRC. The key factor in its sustainability is explained by the agency theory of affected interests, in which a political community is more likely to take action when common interests are affected by a national decision.