Dear Minister Malatsi

We appreciate your efforts to convince TikTok to include South Africans in the Creator Rewards Program.

I'm a South African with a unique art form and a TikTok account (@beachscriber) with 152.5K followers and growing strongly. My account mostly celebrates South African indigenous language names and it seems to have touched on an emotional need, and one that I get a lot of personal satisfaction out of trying to meet. For example, in the last year Olwethu hit 1.5M, Onthatile is at 1.4M, Tumelo is at 1M, Tshidi is at nearly half a million, Siphesihle is at over 800K, etc. That's just in the past year. I struggle to cope with requests from our youth.

I have numerous vids with many millions of views, including one with 34.6M. I get nothing for any of it. I've worked hard on it since before the Creator Rewards program was a thing. I've kept at it in the hope of the Creator Rewards Program opening up to South Africans.

I'm an artist and it's not sustainable for me to devote so much time to it without reward. It gets to me that a US-owned company reaps all the rewards for my efforts. I'm losing hope.

Why am I telling you this? South Africans need this! We have a massive, talented base of youth that are unemployed and rearing to go on the international stage.

Please keep up the pressure.

Kind regards
Andrew van der Merwe
aka Beachscriber