South Africa has been talking about accountability for far longer than the democratic era. The Madlanga Commission and the parliamentary Ad Hoc Committee to Investigate Allegations made by Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi may once again place the issue at centre stage, but the national lament about corruption is hardly new. From Nkandla to Bosasa to Eskom - and long before that, from Cecil John Rhodes to Paul Kruger - each generation of South Africans seems convinced its moment is uniquely rotten. South Africans consistently believe the present is corrupt and the past was pristine. The past, of course, never was.

The real question is therefore not whether corruption exists (it always has) but whether we understand what actually curbs it and how to get rid of it.

What causes corruption?

Last week I attended a SALGA conference where representatives from various local governments, academia and non-profit organisations discussed new approaches to the legacy problems facing municipalities. Accountability rightly dominated many of the discussions. Local government across much of the country is visibly collapsing, and corruption is undeniably central to that failure.

The reflexive proposed solutions to corruption, however, remains predictable: more rules, more laws, more regulations. The national response to municipalities failing is to for example broaden the Public Service Commission’s mandate, introduce new procurement frameworks, or rebrand coordination and oversight through initiatives like the DDM. Add more policies as if corruption is simply the result of insufficient paperwork.

Yet South Africa does not suffer from a shortage of rules. This is best illustrated at local government level. Local governments have no less than 250 odd pieces of legislation that govern their workings. This heap of legislative paperwork has not stopped rampant corruption at municipal level. South Africa clearly suffers from a shortage of implementation and, above all, a shortage of consequences, not rules.

This fixation on regulatory and legislative overproduction reflects what I have come to call our policy romanticism: the belief that sophisticated plans on paper can substitute for effective enforcement in reality. Hermann Pretorius has argued persuasively that it is often precisely the proliferation of regulation that incubates corruption. The more procedural choke points inserted between citizens and service delivery or between entrepreneurs and lawful economic activity the more opportunities arise for bribery, rent-seeking, and political gatekeeping. Complexity is corruption’s currency.

In this sense, our instinct to fight corruption with ever more rules or laws frequently achieves the opposite.

But this impulse to respond to failure with ever more laws and regulations does not come from the electorate, it comes from the bureaucracy itself. Officials and policy technocrats, confronted daily with collapsing systems and weak enforcement capacity, reach instinctively for the tools they have available: drafting rules, frameworks, strategies, and compliance layers. Their power is administrative, not electoral, so their lever is rule-making. In that sense, the proliferation of regulation is understandable as an attempt to “do something” within the confines of bureaucratic authority. It would be misplaced to simply assign blame here. The bureaucracy is reacting to dysfunction using the only instruments it controls.

But this is precisely where the structural disconnect arises. Rules do not substitute for accountability, and bureaucratic fixes cannot replicate democratic discipline. In contrast, the electorate’s lever is not regulation but elections and the ability to remove failing leaders altogether. Yet our public conversation increasingly treats corruption as a technical governance or structural problem rather than a political one,. This is even more so now that the performance of accountability is increasing even though we don’t have much to show for it.

On this score it must be said that electoral accountability does not discipline bureaucrats directly but it disciplines the political leadership that controls the environment in which bureaucrats operate. When electoral competition is real, politicians suddenly have an incentive to professionalise appointments, enforce consequence management, insist on transparent procurement processes, and support internal disciplinary mechanisms that would otherwise be politically inconvenient. Municipal managers are removed instead of recycled, officials are suspended rather than quietly redeployed, and supply-chain irregularities are escalated rather than buried. Electoral vulnerability sharpens the political will to assert oversight over administration and this political will is the difference between rules that exist only on paper and systems that function in practice.

It is true that bureaucratic corruption often survives political transitions. But elections remain the only force capable of breaking that insulation. The contrasting experiences of reformist and stagnant municipalities demonstrate that institutional rot is not immutable, it persists primarily where political leadership lacks either the courage or the incentive to confront it.

Basic accountability

When talking about plans to address corruption we obsess over elaborate solutions to the hardest 20 per cent of the problem, while neglecting the simplest tool that addresses the remaining 80 per cent. There is a tendency to concentrate reform efforts on complex policy interventions while neglecting foundational accountability mechanisms. Our policy discourse devotes outsized energy to designing ever more sophisticated regulatory architectures while underestimating the potency of basic democratic discipline. The fact remains that the most effective and basic accountability mechanism is elections.

Basic democratic accountability remains the most powerful anti-corruption mechanism any society possesses. Officials who govern badly or corruptly should be voted out. No commission, amendment, procurement regulation or strategy document ever approaches the disciplining power of electoral consequences.

And whatever its flaws, South Africa’s democracy remains functional. The dire predictions of a “nag van die lang messe” following the ANC’s electoral decline did not materialise in 2024 as many of the early 00s doomsdayers predicted. Political power is no longer largely monopolised by a single party. And although coalitions are messy and South Africa has had to navigate the arrival of coalition politics and governance, ultimately this signals a maturing of our electoral system. Our democracy still provides citizens with the ultimate lever of accountability.

And this type of accountability in South Africa it is demonstrably possible. Where political competition has had real consequences standards have improved. The Western Cape and various local governments in the province provides the clearest example: successive clean audits, stable infrastructure delivery, consistently better service outcomes, and lower levels of maladministration have coincided with uninterrupted DA governance. At a local level municipalities like Cape Town and uMngeni show how institutional stability combined with political incentives can translate into competent administration. These cases confirm the basic democratic truth that when voters reward performance and punish failure, parties adapt or are replaced. And the DA does not take this for granted.

The DA and its coalition partners operate under continuous electoral pressure. They cannot rely on historic loyalty to excuse dysfunction. For the DA and its coalition partners, good governance is not merely an ethical preference, it is a matter of electoral survival. Clean audits, functioning procurement systems, and visible service delivery are not PR luxuries but political necessities.

No party in South Africa is subjected to the level of scrutiny faced by the DA. Every procurement misstep, service outage, or internal administrative failure is interrogated intensely by opposition parties, civil society, national government, and major media outlets often with a ferocity unmatched elsewhere in the political system. Even the hint of lapse involving a DA politician is treated as morally equivalent or at the same level of scrutiny to the large-scale, systemic corruption that has wholly characterised ANC governance over the past two decades.

This relentless oversight creates a political culture in which systems are constantly stress-tested, deviations corrected quickly, and incompetence is far more likely to trigger consequence management rather than quiet redeployment elsewhere. But in the long run this benefits the DA by institutionalising competence as an electoral asset.

And despite what many of the commentariat suggest, the DA still retains the confidence of the electorate there where it governs.

Accountability is not produced by layered regulations or moral exhortation, but by the incentives created when political power is genuinely contestable. Where that incentive exists, clean governance follows.

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The year 2026 is shaping up to be another major election year across the globe. Two years ago in 2024 there were no less than 60 elections held across the world with a cumulative population of nearly 4.2 billion who participated in elections. And 2024 was indeed a consequential election year all over the globe. At home we witnessed our own seismic election change with the ANC’s three-decade dominance finally broken, thrusting us into an era of coalitions.

From Washington DC to Wellington, voters are clamoring for change, testing the strength of democracies and the appeal of dissentient politics. All these elections may be happening oceans away, but their outcomes will have an effect on South Africa’s economy, security, and even our political imagination.

US Midterms

Take the United States midterm elections due to be held in November 2026. Midterms in the US normally get less fanfare than a US presidential race, but this one could be momentous. After the shake up of the 2024 U.S. vote, America is under the leadership of President Donald Trump once again with all the expected fireworks. With narrow Republican majorities in Congress enabling Trump’s agenda, the midterms will determine if his grip on power tightens or slips. Should Democrats seize control of even one chamber, it would slam the brakes on Trump’s legislative plans and flood Washington with oversight investigations (as was seen during Trump’s first term).

For a White House that thrives on projecting strength, that kind of check could be a major blow. Conversely, if Republicans hold on, Trump would feel emboldened, and will no doubt double down on the vigorous policy agenda that has defined his second term.

The election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City, a self-described democratic socialist of Ugandan-Indian descent, has shaken the political establishment. His rise hints at a growing appeal of left-progressive politics that focuses less on identity politics and more on economic issues like affordability and housing. Mamdani’s election along with the two gubernatorial Democratic victories in Virginia and New Jersey could signal a broader shift or backlash depending on how these midterms go.

This will also gauge how Americans view their political extremes. While the MAGA movement and the democratic socialist left are often cast as polar opposites, there are signs that voters perceive them as sharing a common scepticism of elite institutions, entrenched interests, and the political status quo. In this sense, the midterms may also reveal how deep and how wide the country’s appetite is for anti-establishment politics, irrespective of ideological flavour.

Given that South Africa has certainly faced the Trump administration’s headwinds, the outcome of these midterm elections, taking place nearly simultaneously with our own local government elections, will be of local consequence.

Brazil

Shift to South America, where Brazil’s general election in October 2026 might turn out to be historic. On one side stands Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, the leftist incumbent who has been a leading voice for the developing world and a partner in forums like BRICS. Lula has been particularly vocal in taking a stand against the Trump administration. He is seeking his fourth term.

On the other side a new standard-bearer of Brazil’s right wing has emerged: Senator Flávio Bolsonaro – yes, the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president now jailed for plotting a coup after refusing to accept his 2022 defeat. With Jair Bolsonaro barred from politics and serving a 27-year sentence, his family legacy and politics lives on in Flávio’s candidacy. Early polls indicate a deeply divided electorate, with Lula maintaining an edge in urban and working-class strongholds, while Flávio Bolsonaro draws fervent support from rural regions, evangelical communities, and a growing online youth base disillusioned with traditional politics.

For Brazilians, this election is a showdown over the direction of their democracy after a period of intense polarisation. For the world, Brazil’s choice will influence the global climate change approach, the unity of the BRICS bloc, and the momentum of the Latin American leftward shift. We’ll be watching to see whether Brazil reaffirms the progressive, multilateral path charted by Lula, or pivots back toward the nationalist, anti-establishment politics associated with the Bolsonaro era.

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom 2026 will bring crucial elections in the nations of the union, Scotland and Wales. Britain’s politics since Brexit have been stormy, and by 2026 the turmoil will likely extend beyond Westminster. In Scotland and Wales, voters will elect their devolved governments in what promises to be a dramatic departure from the old order. In Wales, the once-invincible Labour Party (which has governed for a century) is watching its support crumble. Polls put the pro-independence Plaid Cymru and Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK neck-and-neck at around 30% each, while Labour has plunged to barely 14%. Plaid Cymru’s leader has framed the contest as a two-horse race between “vision and division,” casting Reform UK’s rise as part of a broader global wave of anti-establishment politics. Meanwhile, Reform UK continues to gain ground, buoyed by growing support among blue-collar voters and a widening dissatisfaction with traditional parties.

A similar dynamic is playing out in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party (SNP) remains ahead but is no longer unassailable. After years of dominance, the SNP now finds itself navigating voter fatigue, internal fractures, and a more competitive political field. Remarkably, Reform UK has gained traction north of the country, an area once seen as inhospitable to its brand of politics. By tapping into unionist disillusionment and anti-establishment sentiment, it is drawing voters away from the once-dominant Conservative Party and the SNP. This shift signals a broader erosion of traditional party loyalties, as more Scots, unionist and nationalist alike, seek alternatives to the status quo in an increasingly fragmented landscape.

Hungary

Meanwhile, on the European mainland, Hungary is set to have parliamentary elections. Hungary in 2026 could mark a pivotal chapter in the global reckoning with establishment politics and the rejection of entrenched elites and political stagnation.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has ruled for 15 years, advancing a model of governance he describes as “illiberal democracy”, one that has centralised power and often placed Hungary at odds with mainstream European Union positions. Yet for the first time in over a decade, Orbán faces a serious challenge at the ballot box. A new, centre-right opposition party called Tisza, led by former Orbán ally Péter Magyar, has surged in the polls by tapping into frustration over corruption and advocating for closer alignment with the EU.

A renewed Orbán mandate would affirm a broader political trend that questions traditional liberal institutions and champions national control over supranational influence. But a Tisza victory could signal a public appetite in the central European country for reform and reconnection with Brussels, potentially reshaping EU debates on everything from Russian sanctions to migration.

Israel

By law, Israel must hold a general election by October 2026, and barring surprises it will be a referendum on the era of Benjamin Netanyahu. As of late 2025, Netanyahu, a consummate political survivor, has been in power almost continuously since 2009, a tenure so long that many Israelis voting for the first time have known no other leader.

A divisive judicial overhaul that sent hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets, then the war in 2023 in response to the Hamas attack on 7 October that shattered Israelis’ sense of security, and an emergency unity government that brought opposition figures into the fold temporarily, all form the backdrop of the election.

Netanyahu’s base seems still persuaded by his message that only he can keep Israel safe, a narrative he’s pushing even harder after claiming victory in a brutal conflict and a successful campaign against enemies like Hamas and Hezbollah. On the other side, a broad swath of Israelis are demanding political accountability and national unity after the October 7 trauma.

There’s talk of a new “Zionist alliance” – an unprecedented coalition of centrists, moderates, perhaps even former rivals united by one goal: unseating Bibi.

The outcome of the election could determine the fate of any future peace negotiations with Palestinians. It will also signal whether Israel’s democracy can withstand the strain of internal upheaval and the massive international pressure the country has faced following the Gaza conflict. Moreover, the result of the election will undoubtedly influence how ongoing talks between the US and Middle Eastern nations evolve, particularly around normalisation deals, regional security frameworks, and the future of a two-state solution, issues with global resonance, including here in South Africa.

New Zealand

And then there’s New Zealand, holding elections in late 2026. This small island nation often feels like a world apart, but its political currents are part of the same global tide. New Zealand’s last election, in 2023, swept out Jacinda Ardern’s progressive Labour Party and ushered in a coalition of the conservative National Party with two smaller allies – the right-leaning ACT Party and New Zealand First, often described as populist for its blunt rejection of establishment orthodoxy. It was a striking turnaround for a country that, just a few years earlier, was globally admired for Ardern’s progressivism.

By 2026, Kiwi voters will be assessing whether this three-party arrangement delivered the “reset” many hoped for. The new government in Wellington has had to navigate the ideological tug-of-war between a libertarian economic agenda and nationalist social policy, all while facing mounting economic headwinds. Cost-of-living pressures remain acute, housing unaffordability is still widespread, and a growing number of New Zealanders have begun migrating across the Tasman Sea to Australia in search of better pay and opportunities, a trend that speaks volumes about public frustration with stagnant prospects at home.

Voters there were not necessarily endorsing any single ideology, but rather expressing impatience with the political status quo, inflation, and a sense that Labour had grown out of touch. The coalition they elected was as much about shaking things up as it was about any unified vision.

Other elections

Beyond the headline races, several other countries will face pivotal moments in 2026.

In Nepal, the political landscape remains unsettled following the “Gen Z revolution” that toppled the previous government. This year’s elections will be the first since that uprising, with a surge of youth-led parties challenging a political class long dominated by dynastic elites and their “nepo kids.” Public frustration over corruption, the soaring cost of living, and a stagnant economy has made political renewal in the country urgent.

In Colombia, voters will decide whether to continue the leftward shift begun under President Petro (who is ineligible for another term) or revert to conservative rule, all happening within a very crowded field of parties. Armenia heads to the polls under intense geopolitical pressure, with Prime Minister Pashinyan’s West-facing agenda clashing with resurgent pro-Russian sentiment. Uganda’s “election”, likely to hand 80-year-old President Museveni another term, highlights the continent’s ongoing struggle with entrenched leadership and democratic erosion. In Bangladesh, a post-revolution vote could mark the revival of democracy after years of authoritarian rule. And in Thailand, still reeling from the judicial ouster of its most popular party, democratic hopes hinge on whether the military-backed establishment loosens its grip.

Conclusion

Looking across this global map of elections it’s quite clear that voters are demanding accountability, some turning to reformers, others to disruptors. What’s often called “populism” may, in many cases, reflect a reasonable impatience with disconnected institutions. Long-standing incumbents are being challenged, coalitions are becoming the rule rather than the exception, and electoral volatility is testing traditional politics.

While it might not suit the established order, this turbulence signals a new political era—less defined by left vs. right, and more by trust vs. mistrust. In this post-progressive era, voters are rewriting the rules of engagement, demanding not just promises, but proof of relevance and responsiveness.

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READ ELSEWHERE

Five reads that stood out in November:

1. Confessions of a Heritage American by Michael Lind in UnHerd

2. Slopmaxxing by Ben Sixsmith

3. Universalism Is Not White and Indigenous Worldviews are Not Beyond Scrutiny by Mike Strambler

4. Being “anti-woke” as a protected philosophical belief by James Murray en Eric Kaufmann in The Critic.

5. What the Left can learn from Argentina by Thomas Lambert in UnHerd.

WHAT I’M CURRENTLY READING

I’m currently working my way through No Country for Old Men, which I must say is a bit of a difficult read to me. I’m generally a fan of Cormac McCarthy but in this book (or at least the Kindle version I’m reading) he writes like someone chiselling dialogue out of stone, which is usually extremely good, but No Country for Old Men reads more like a movie script than a novel.

I’ve been less diligent with my non-fiction reading this month, mostly because a flurry of writing deadlines swallowed the end of November: a chapter on the role of civil society organisations in ideological diversity for a forthcoming book on 30 Years of Democracy, a conference paper on Cape Town’s Ease of Doing Business Index, and a handful of shorter pieces. But I’m inching my way back into the stack.

In between, the sparse minutes that I have for TV (other than the delight of the past month’s international rugby) I’ve been watching Slow Horses and having read Herron’s books a few years ago, I’m prepared to say that the series might actually be better.

MY WRITING THIS MONTH

• Have we really reached peak woke? - The Critic

• Milei’s second wind and why many mainstream commentators were wrong - BusinessDay

• Three Lessons for South Africa from Mamdani’s Election - The Daily Friend

• Exit homeless as stage cleared for G20 performative politics - BusinessDay

And for my Afrikaans readers, my November articles:

• Drie lesse vir Suid-Afrika uit Mamdani se verkiesing - OntLaer

• Suid-Afrika het ‘n nuwe kiesstelsel nodig - OntLaer

• Ken jy die vierde Afrikaner? Hý kan ’n brug oor die kloof in SA bou - Rapport

• Groot Geraas vs. Stil Bouwerk - OntLaer

SOME RADIO AND TV

I was on Izak du Plessis’ YouTube channel Nuuspod to discuss my article in Rapport.

If you found this newsletter worthwhile, feel free to share it with someone who might appreciate it.

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As the final potholes are filled and the homeless are quietly removed around the G20 venues, it is the perfect metaphor for what the G20 has become: an expensive stage production still performed even when the general public has stopped paying attention. A city is cosmetically tidied up for a summit whose outcomes will be forgotten within days. If we are brutally honest it is just a kind of global political theatre where the set is real but the plot never moves forward.

The national government temporarily making things look functional, coordinated, and well-governed illuastrates perfectly the performative nature of the G20. Once the delegations leave, the cones come down, the roads are reopened, the underlying reality returns and the G20’s sweeping commitments evaporate back into domestic inertia and geopolitical tension.

History of G20

To understand the nature of the spectacle, one must start with a bit of history. The G20 group was created in 1999, initially as a meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors. The backdrop was a string of severe financial crises: Mexico in 1994, East Asia in 1997, Russia in 1998. The G20 was meant to be the world’s economic early-warning system, a place where policymakers from major advanced and emerging economies could coordinate to prevent future shocks.

Then came the 2008 financial crisis. As markets imploded, the G20 was elevated to leaders’ level. Suddenly, presidents and prime ministers gathered around a single table in Washington, London, and Pittsburgh, declaring themselves the new stewards of global economic stability. This was arguably the G20’s finest hour. The moment it claimed to have stepped into the breach to avert systemic collapse. It coordinated fiscal stimulus, expanded IMF resources, and oversaw the creation of the Financial Stability Board. In the steelman version of the G20 story, these were real achievements.

And to be fair, some were. Raising bank capital requirements under Basel III did improve resilience in the financial sector. Strengthening the IMF gave distressed countries more room to manoeuvre. The Financial Stability Board, for all its bureaucratic opacity, helped impose some order on cross-border banking risks. Even during COVID-19, the G20 managed a modest debt-relief initiative for low-income countries. These are not trivial accomplishments.

But they are accomplishments of a very particular sort: system-preserving, technocratic, and largely invisible to ordinary citizens. They are the achievements of a crisis-management cartel, not the reformative architects of a more dynamic global economy. And they raise an uncomfortable question: if the G20 was created to prevent crises, why has the world seen such a parade of them during its quarter-century of existence?

Since 1999, we have lived through the dot-com crash, the 2008 collapse, the Eurozone crisis, the COVID crash, and now a grinding affordability crisis across the globe affecting almost every major economy. Cynically seen the G20 has not prevented crises, it has merely presided over them. It has moved from one emergency to another, issuing communiqués filled with grave concern and lofty commitments, before quietly acknowledging that the next crisis has already arrived.

Performative politics

I have often written about the performative nature of South African politics, both by many formal political parties and many informal political organisations. Performative politics is the phenomenon of political players performing rituals of responsibility, competence and moral seriousness in place of actually governing. But the performative nature of politics is not limited to our sunny shores here at the southern tip of Africa. The G20 has become the globalised version of this instinct.

Consider the structure of a typical G20 summit. Leaders arrive to carefully choreographed handshakes and group photographs and the media report on the faint hot mic comments heard between the world leaders. These world leaders then sit around a circular table under a global collectivist slogan – “One Earth, One Family, One Future”, “Building our Common Future”, “Global Sustainable Development”, or this year’s evergreen favourite: “Solidarity, Equality and Sustainability” Behind them, hundreds of journalists report on the atmospherics. The communiqué, negotiated months in advance, always promises historic plans, inclusive growth and actionable frameworks.

Then everyone flies home. The frameworks remain un-actioned. The poor and struggling middle class remain unsupported. And the crises, far from prevented, continue.

The problem is not merely that the G20 fails to do what it claims. The deeper issue is that it does not even attempt the kind of reforms that genuinely improve prosperity. The G20 is not, and has never been, a champion of economic freedom or market liberalisation. It does not push countries to cut red tape, ease business formation, liberalise labour markets, reduce trade barriers, or create room for entrepreneurial dynamism. On the contrary: its agenda tends toward global tax coordination, regulatory harmonisation, and expanding multilateral financial conditioning, all measures that strengthen incumbent states, incumbent corporates, and incumbent bureaucracies.

In other words, the G20 is not a forum of reformers. It is a forum of incumbents. And incumbents rarely vote to disrupt themselves.

This helps explain why there is such a vast gap between the G20’s grand language and the economic realities experienced by ordinary people. The unprecedented fall in global poverty since the 1990s was not driven by G20 communiqués, but by domestic liberalisation in places like China, Vietnam, India and Eastern Europe. The G20 did not unlock their growth. Unilateral domestic reforms did. Likewise, the current affordability crisis burdening households from Cape Town to California is not being meaningfully addressed by G20 action. Inflation stabilisation, supply-chain resilience, and energy affordability are being tackled domestically while G20 declarations remain lost in the footnotes of summit documentation.

It demonstrates precisely how institutional performance has displaced institutional purpose. We know this pattern well at home: the ritual of promising transformation while entrenching stagnation. The G20 is simply the international version of the same instinct of symbolic politics detached from material improvement.

Conclusion

The tragedy is not that the G20 is malevolent. It is that it is comfortable. It is an institution insulated from consequences, whose primary output is performance. It succeeds at appearing busy, concerned and important. But it does not succeed at making the world’s economy more free, more competitive, or more resilient.

If the G20 wants to matter in the next 25 years, it needs something far rarer than diplomatic choreography. It needs intellectual courage. It must be willing to ask whether the global economy needs more competition, not more coordination and more freedom, not more frameworks.

Until then, the G20 will remain what it has become, a carefully lit stage on which leaders perform responsibility while crises continue behind its curtains.

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In August I argued that Argentina’s swift recovery under Javier Milei should puncture South Africa’s fatalism. I wrote then that a slow sinking ship can be turned around, and that the barrier to reform is not legal or institutional so much as political will.

Milei took office in December 2023 and since then, we’ve had the spectacle of an orthodox media narrative turning hard against Milei particularly before Argentina’s midterm elections held last week. Many declared the end of the free-market experiment with the certainty of a weather report. As the peso wobbled and markets fluctuated, an establishment chorus formed, forecasting inevitable collapse and a comeuppance for market liberalisation.

When Milei started he moved fast. He slashed spending, shut whole ministries, scrapped price and rent controls, eased exchange restrictions, began unwinding tariffs and red tape, and pushed privatisations. He aimed for a balanced budget and treated his country’s economic crisis like a crisis. Many predicted these reforms would be doomed but, as early indicators improved, that consensus frayed.

Then came a sharp reminder of Argentina’s old vulnerabilities. A stock-market sell-off followed an exchange-rate scare, and the Milei went abroad seeking support. It looked, for a week, like the same old Argentina. Then came Washington’s currency backstop but the commentariat found fresh steam to declare Milei’s project finished.

But then Argentinian voters spoke, again. Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party topped the midterm vote, expanded its footprint in both legislative chambers, and with allied blocs secured the numbers to keep his reform agenda alive. And now we are left with a more interesting question than why many mainstream commentators were wrong. Why is Milei popular at all?

Why Milei Won

Let’s start with the obvious. He did the thing. Argentines have spent years drowning in regulatory paperwork, economic slump and cynicism. Milei went into office stating the country was in an emergency and then behaved as if that were actually true. He cut spending, eliminated departments, pruned regulations, and moved to reopen markets that had been sealed by decades of policymaking. In contrast politicians here in South Africa like to declare an emergency and then appoint a panel, commission or host a dialogue. The lesson from the Argentine Republic is that people respond to clarity of leadership, even when it hurts.

He also levelled with voters about the pain. The early effects of Milei’s reforms were rough. Inflation did not vanish overnight and jobs tied to the state shrank. Yet the direction of change became legible. Markets, for all their nerves, could see fiscal discipline and fewer regulatory barriers. Households, for all their frustration, could see rent controls eased and prices starting to behave like organic prices. The Argentinian public did not need perfection but simply to see that things are moving in the right direction. And right-track/wrong-track polling remains one of the most reliable leading indicators of how they’ll vote next. So the midterm elections results should not actually have been a surprise.

There is another ingredient that many of the commentariat underestimate. Milei’s ideological profile can look theatrical, but his governing method has been more practical than his critics admit. He fights, then he cuts deals. He talks like a purist, then reaches compromise. Many predicted that temperament and ideology would doom him. Instead he has governed like a minority reformer must, piece by piece, taking what he can get through a legislature where his party does not control a majority. That mixture of conviction and compromise is politics at its best. Argentines have seen strongmen who bypass institutions. Milei, for all the sound and fury, has used these institutions for his reform. This is a big lesson for South Africa where our future reformers will likely not have the luxury of electoral majorities. It can be done.

The pre-midterm-election narrative particular outside of Argentina insisted the noise was the story. But Argentinean voters insisted the progress being made was. That is why dire forecasts from abroad, including sly suggestions that Argentines would slink back to Peronism at the first sign of discomfort, landed with a thud.

Moreover, it appears that a further source of Milei’s appeal was his insistence that the state must do less and do the less better. South Africans understand the opposite all too well. We have a state that promises a great deal, funds a great deal, and delivers very little. We’ve normalised service delivery failures, stagnant growth, and a public sector wage bill that crowds out service. Many here praise the idea of reform as if talking about reform were reform.

What does it mean for SA?

So what does any of this mean for South Africa, where reform agendas read like a broken record. First, our fatalism is learned, not natural. We have taught ourselves that the hard things cannot be done, that the various vested interests will never allow it, that coalition chaos makes change impossible, that social stability depends on endless subsidies and grants we cannot afford. Argentina had versions of all these obstacles. South Africa could choose the same route of change.

Second, we should stop outsourcing political courage to the courts and to civil society. Both restrain abuse and preserve space for dissent and have been South Africa’s lifeline amidst state decay. But they cannot deliver growth or competence on their own. The core of a reform agenda is still political. Pick a few binding constraints and remove them at speed. Liberalise labour, get serious about ending cadre deployment, break the monopolies on rail and ports. None of this requires miracle laws. It requires taking the existing tools of a constitutional democracy and using them.

Thirdly, South Africa has normalised the ritual of accountability instead of accountability itself. Press conferences, hearings, task teams, and apologies are the moral currency of a politics that fears decisions. People can smell that fear and the Argentines did. Whatever one thinks of Milei’s manners or his friends abroad, his government has refused that ritual comfort. He has made choices and owned their costs.

Conclusion

None of this is a paean. The risks in Argentina remain high. The external support of the US creates dependencies and their political coalitions can easily shift. Most importantly austerity obviously hurts those with the thinnest margins the hardest. These tensions are real. But South Africans should resist the habit of assuming tensions are fatal. As Thomas Sowell famously said “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” Politics is the art of managing these trade-offs, but many of our politicians shy away from admitting that perfect solutions don’t exist.

The lesson is not that South Africa needs its own Milei. We need our own seriousness. We need leaders who treat crisis like crisis, who tell us what it will cost, who choose a sequence and then stick to it. And we need to be willing to back painful change when we can see the line from sacrifice to future success.

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MY WRITING THIS MONTH

• Clean audits do actually point to pro-poor governance - BusinessDay

• The Real Divide in South African Politics Is Between Builders and Breakers - My

Articles from late September (because this is the first newsletter and once again, shameless shilling):

• When the kids burn down the house - The Daily Friend

• You can’t have a Christian West without Christians - The Critic

And for my Afrikaans readers, my October articles:

• “#NotAllAfrikaners” - OntLaer

• Verkiesing 2026: Bouparty of Breekparty? - OntLaer

• DinkWeer Donderdag | Die Vredesverdrag - OntLaer

SOME RADIO AND TV

• KykNet In Gesprek of Monday 27 October to discuss whether ideological labels still matter in current South African politics. Only available on DSTV unfortunately.

• RSG interview regarding DA’s BEE alternative, South Africa’s greylisting, Fikile Mbalula and Libya and more

• RSG interview about the privatisation of public institutions

READ ELSEWHERE

Five reads that stood out in October:

1. “In a World Obsessed With Innovation, What If Most of It Isn’t Real?” by Sarah Majdov at Persuasion

2. “I miss the great philosophers” by Kathleen Stock at UnHerd

3. “Rage of the Falling Elite” by Rob Henderson

4. “Populism fast and slow” by Joseph Heath

5. “The progressive mindset has won” by Ben Cobley at UnHerd

WHAT I’M CURRENTLY READING

I’m hopping between fiction and non-fiction at the moment. On Kindle I’ve just started End Game, the latest in Jeffrey Archer’s William Warwick series. Archer remains my all-time favourite storyteller. When I switch back to non-fiction, I’ve been working through Chelsea Follett’s Centers of Progress: 40 Cities that Changed the World, a fascinating tour from ancient Athens to Song-era Hangzhou, showing how cities become engines of civilisation.

If you found this newsletter worthwhile, feel free to share it with someone who might appreciate it.

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In September 2021 the Electoral Commission of South Africa approached the Constitutional Court, followed by a litany of parties (no less than eight parties intervening and four as amicus curiae) and argued for an order that it could postpone the local government election, then scheduled for 27 October 2021, to February 2022. This was still in the long shadow of Covid restrictions.

And on one of the few occasions during that Covid period our judiciary kept its heads and the justices declined to distort the electoral timetable. Maybe it helped that we were eighteen months into the pandemic by then, long past the days of disinfecting groceries and not being able to go to an open air beach.

The election was subsequently held on 1 November 2021. The next local government elections must therefore now be held five years, plus or minus three months, after the last one held. That puts the window between September 2026 and February 2027.

Hence the palpable sense that the election season has effectively kicked off with it likely happening with twelve months.

Election Season Has Started

Over the last three weeks, the commentariat and social media has busied itself with the DA’s favourite and arguably best boast: clean governance. Others concede this DA success through gritted teeth. But now, curiously, various pundits and chronic social media posters have adopted the position that clean audits don’t tell you much about good or inclusive governance.

This new angle sounds clever until you actually read the law. Clean audits do in fact point to good governance and pro-poor spending. The Auditor-General doesn’t only ask whether money was spent where the budget said it would be spent. She checks whether organs of state followed the rules on supply chain management, whether they kept within the legal rails on how public money must be allocated, and whether they met the requirements that exist precisely to protect the poor.

South African public finance law compels pro-poor spending. South African public finance law compels pro-poor spending. Section 153 of the Constitution requires every municipality to structure its budget and planning processes to “give priority to the basic needs of the community” and to promote social and economic development. The Municipal Systems Act in section 74 obliges councils to adopt tariff policies that ensure access to at least basic services for poor households through lifeline tariffs or subsidies. And the Division of Revenue Act, which governs how national funds flow to municipalities, explicitly earmarks the local government equitable share to finance free or basic services for indigent residents.

So when audit outcomes are clean, it is a strong signal that the legal obligations to serve the poor are being met. You can dislike the DA but pretending the audit regime is cosmetic is at best uninformed and at worse dishonest.

The fact that clean governance is good for all South Africans is evident in the recognition that bodies like the South African Property Owners Association give with its Municipal Performance Awards. The 2025 awards honoured four DA municipalities in the Western Cape in the Best-Performing Municipalities category, namely Saldanha Bay, Swartland (jointly first place), Swellendam, (second) and Hessequa (third) with the City of Cape Town being recognised as the best metropolitan municipality.

And the Auditor-General has pushed back against this new political slogan of treating clean audits as box-ticking. The AG Tsakani Maluleke has taken issue with president Ramaphosa’s ‘unhelpful posture’ on clean audits and said that they are fundamental to good governance. The knowlegde outside of party politics and the opinion pages is unanimous that financials are fundamental to good governance. To argue otherwise is performative politics at its easiest, namely loud, cost-free, and allergic to facts.

It is quite bizarre how some hold the DA to impossible standards (as if clean audits are not good enough), and the ANC to none. But luckily citizens don’t live in thinkpieces. They live with pipes, cables and buses. If you want to test a government’s sincerity, look there.

Cape Town’s Pro Poor Spending

Here is what pro-poor spending by a DA government looks like in Cape Town.

Over the next three years the City will spend a record R40 billion on infrastructure. Three quarters of that is directed to lower-income households. Unlike all of the ANC’s plans these aren’t grand promises on paper but appropriated money moving through tenders, purchase orders and site instructions right now.

About forty percent of the capital plan is water and sanitation. The City is replacing 100 kilometres of sewer and 50 kilometres of water mains every year, across the metro. There’s a completed R4 billion upgrade at Zandvliet, servicing Khayelitsha and beyond. The Cape Flats bulk sewer upgrade, the largest of its kind in South Africa, is advancing and will benefit more than 300 000 households. None of this fits the narrative the transformationist commentary class prefers, which treats actual work as distractions from “real” change. This type of infrastructure is typically why people move to Cape Town to escape the ANC dysfunction elsewhere.

Turning to transport. the single biggest public transport project by any city in the country is underway in Cape Town. The MyCiTi link from Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain to Wynberg and Claremont. It’s multi-year, multi-billion rand, and aimed at cutting the brutal time tax that apartheid planning still extracts from the poorest workers. It will sit alongside the N2 Express and add to the existing MyCiTi network from Atlantis into the inner city. Alongside this, the City is investing several billion in roads, resurfacing, congestion relief and the basic repairs commuters actually feel, like a pothole that is fixed before it becomes a crater like those seen in Johannesburg.

Then there’s safety, one of the top concerns of Capetonians. Since 2021, the number of operational SAPS officers has declined by approximately 15%, from an estimated 8 668 officers to only 7 355 in 2025. This is a reduction of more than 1 300 SAPS officers. Over the same period, the City’s own enforcement capacity has expanded significantly to compensate. The Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (LEAP) has grown by 121%, and the Metro Police Service by 93%.

Hundreds of new municipal police officers are going onto the streets. Neighbourhood policing teams are being built in every ward. A growing technology stack is helping responders move faster and with better information. And the City keeps pushing for the devolution of key investigative powers so that local officers can build prosecution-ready dockets on gang, gun and drug crimes.

On housing, the hardest test of all, the City has released more well-located land in the last two years than in the decade before. The pipeline for affordable and social housing near the CBD and other economic nodes stands at roughly 12 000 units. The work is real, the pipeline is visible, and it’s accelerating rather than shrinking (as is the case where the ANC governs).

Conclusion

If you want to find fault in Cape Town you can. Any honest government will admit where it fails and the DA does. Governing is messy but that’s not an excuse where the DA governs. But the purity tests that thrive on social media and the writings of the intelligentsia is of little actual value for the lived experience of South Africans.

And most importantly, the consequences of failed audits is certain: a city with dirty books will not serve the poor. Corruption and chaos are regressive taxes. They fall heaviest on those with the least margin for error. That’s why audit outcomes matter.

So the argument that clean audits don’t translate to pro-poor programmes is an unserious way to discuss the problems South Africa faces. It is unhelpful to judge the ANC on its promises but never its performance while judging the DA against made up standards. In practice both should be judged on results that ordinary people can see and touch.

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Political analysis is often simplified and made digestible through grand ideological divides. Neat pairs that bring order to the chaos of ideas and the exercise of power. Left versus right, state versus individual, progressive versus conservative, centralisation versus federalism. These categories have their place. They help us understand political schools of thought, organise policy choices, and even test our own values. But in a country like South Africa that is grappling as much with its post-apartheid history as with two decades of deep state decay, these ideological binaries are not always useful.

These old dividing lines do not necessarily precisely explain the moment the country and its communities now find themselves in.

The Horseshoe Theory and the Politics of Grievance

According to the so-called political horseshoe theory, the far left and far right are closer to each other than they realise. This is particularly evident in the United States. Donald Trump was elected on a free-market mandate but went on to implement a series of anti-market policies like tariffs, and even forms of state involvement in private business that could just as easily have come from the preceding Biden, Obama, or a hypothetical Bernie Sanders administration.

Both extremes believe their group is under siege by a corrupt elite or hostile system, and both want to use the state to impose their version of justice at all costs. It’s grievance politics where each side nurtures its own sense of victimhood. The woke left sees itself as victims of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonial legacies, while the new right sees itself as victims of globalism, progressive media, and cultural decay.

Both draw power from the feeling of injustice rather than from a desire for order, balance, and creation. These extremes cannot build, because their politics of resentment depends on a perpetual sense of crisis. Without an ever-present threat, they lose their reason for being. They cannot restore institutions, because their power is derived precisely from public distrust in those institutions.

And so around the world, a new axis of politics is emerging between those who preserve institutions and those who burn them for applause. This divide has long existed in South Africa between a decaying state and private entities (businesses and communities), but the country’s upcoming election will test whether formal politics will finally catch up and acknowledge this split.

In a country where our literal and figurative structures are crumbling, we need less ideological debate and more builders.

The South African Test: Building vs Breaking

Despite the immense influence of political and cultural debates spilling over from the US and Europe, it remains striking how disproportionately our own commentariat discusses these foreign issues in a South African context. Debates about whether we’re witnessing the end of America’s global dominance, Europe’s migration crisis, or who’s cancelling their Netflix subscriptions fill columns and panel discussions even here on our sunny South African shores.

But for the average South African, the person living daily with loadshedding, potholes, and erratic water pressure, these global ideological battlefields are a luxury concern.

Our context is that of a post-apartheid nation that has lived through two decades of state decay, corruption, and infrastructure collapse. In such a country, ideological labels like left and right mean little. What matters is simpler: who builds, and who breaks.

The tension between building and breaking is not new. Plato wrote about philosopher-kings who build a just order versus the sophists and demagogues who feed on decay and ignorance. Aristotle distinguished between those who create and strengthen the polis and the parasites who drain it. Millennia later, Thomas Sowell wrote of those who create economic value versus those who merely consume it. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was entirely about the conflict between builders and looters.

Politics in South Africa today can likewise be reduced to two types of actors: the builders, those who restore institutions, fight corruption, improve administration, and bring order. And the breakers, those who steal, destroy, make excuses, and plunder what remains of the state.

The Era of Doers

The next decade will belong to the doers. Not the talkers, theorists, or commentariat, but the people and parties who show that they can build, manage, and repair.

South Africans will increasingly reward those who can, at a local level, fix roads, restore water systems, make schools function, and improve safety. Because people do not live on ideology. They do not live on policy documents or conferences. For ordinary citizens, politics is not a philosophical debate but survival, a daily struggle to live safely and prosperously.

And that doesn’t only apply to the poor. It applies equally to the middle class who wake up without water, lose tyres to potholes, and pay taxes, medical aid, and private security.

Some analysts like to point out that if you add up the support for the ANC, EFF, MK, and a few smaller ideological allies, the so-called transformation ideology still commands a majority. But that is a shallow and, in my view, short-sighted reading of the political landscape. Those votes are shifting among parties of the same ideological origin but the underlying disease of those parties remains: lots of talk, little action. In every era of institutional collapse, grievance becomes the cheapest political currency. As Eric Hoffer observed, movements built on resentment can only sustain themselves through perpetual crisis because order and civility would expose their emptiness.

These parties differ in rhetoric but not in results. And as people’s lives continue to deteriorate while the noise grows louder, voters will increasingly turn their backs on this entire generation of political talkers.

This divide between doing and talking is not confined to formal politics. It’s visible across civil society too. The growing premium South Africans place on action over opinion is evident in the success of civic organisations that actually do things. Organisations like AfriForum, with over 300 000 members and hundreds of local branches, or Gift of the Givers, show that people are drawn to visible results. They fill potholes, repair water pumps, deliver emergency aid, and take the state to court when it fails to act.

These organisations thrive not because they publish policy papers, but because they make a tangible local difference, despite how diverse people’s views about their politics may be.

Conclusion

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs teaches that humans must master survival and safety before they can pursue self-actualisation. South Africa, with its power cuts, water shortages, crime, and corruption, is simply too far removed from those higher levels of political contemplation to be debating the fine distinctions between liberalism and conservatism. And I say this as someone who deeply values and writes about those debates. But no system of ideas can help you if your sewerage system doesn’t work.

One year before the next local government elections, South Africans should therefore not be asking: Am I left or right? or Which leader fits my ideology? The question is simpler: Who builds, and who breaks?

Which party has a record of repair, of financial discipline, of working infrastructure, and of transparency? And which parties have a record of decay, self-enrichment, and destructive utopian promises from the outset?

Even the harshest critics will have to admit that in this country, there are parties that build. The temptation will be to say: yes, but I’d rather vote for a party that builds and perfectly reflects my ideological shade. But that is wishful thinking. That ideal party won’t be on next year’s ballot. Like Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu on a rugby field we must play what’s in front of us.

In the next twelve months as we build up to the local government elections, much will be written about the election about parties, leaders, their tweets, and their scandals. The media storms will come, full of noise and moral panic. But amid all that, we should keep asking one simple question:

Am I voting for builders or for breakers?

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I must have missed the moment when Anele Mdoda was appointed South Africa’s newest public intellectual. The last I checked, back in the days when I was still living in Pretoria and forced to listen to 947 FM over someone else’s car radio, she was just a morning show host. She had quick wit and the kind of banter that gets listeners through the traffic on the N1. But was no political analyst or serious journalist.

So I was surprised to hear her recent interview with Helen Zille turn into a storm. What could have been an interesting exchange with Zille who has ended her hiatus at the coalface of politics to run for Mayor of Johannesburg, ended up as a showcase of Mdoda’s posturing. It was quickly quite clear that this was a celebrity flexing on a guest she presumed unpopular, because that’s what X tells her.

The problem is there is a social cost to the approach and ideas people like Mdoda have.

The Luxury of Criticising from the Comfort of Sandton

Rob Henderson, the American writer, coined the phrase luxury beliefs. These are ideas and opinions that flatter the speaker, signal moral sophistication, but cost them nothing while imposing very real costs on others. It’s a neat frame for understanding a certain class of South African commentary.

Because let’s be blunt. Where the Democratic Alliance governs, unemployment is lower, services are delivered incomparably better and clean audits are the norm. Where anyone else governs, the opposite is true: broken infrastructure, fiscal looting, and promises that collapse like the roads in Joburg’s CBD. And this is not a partisan slogan, it’s the Auditor-General’s reports year in and year out.

Yet here was Anele Mdoda, driving to work on roads pockmarked with potholes, past darkened traffic lights, and somehow convinced that the proper target for her scorn inherited from social media is not the ANC that presided over this mess, but the DA. She can afford this luxury. Her own power failures are an inconvenience, not a life sentence. Her kids will never be consigned to a failing township school. The millions in Alexandra, however, don’t share her insulation.

Mdoda will happily lob softball questions at Panyaza Lesufi in her multiple interviews with him the last few years but when Zille sits across from her, speculation and allegations suddenly become urgent lines of inquiry. That asymmetry isn’t journalism. It’s clearly performance. Mdoda calls Cape Town “segregated” as if it’s still run under Group Areas. This is not analysis, it’s posturing. It’s a luxury belief to declare this from behind a microphone while ignoring the fact that hundreds of thousands of poor South Africans choose to move to Cape Town every year for better schools, clinics, and jobs.

Tweets versus Tap Water

What makes this even stranger is that Mdoda herself admitted in the interview that Zille is supremely qualified to run a city. She didn’t deny Zille’s track record, her policy, or her ability to wrestle bureaucracy into order. Instead, she raised the question of tone and Zille’s tweeting style.

For the majority of Johannesburg residents, the trade-off is not between witty tweets and kind tweets. It’s between taps that run and taps that don’t. They will pick running water ten times out of ten. They would rather live under a mayor who now and then sends out a tweet some view as barbed than under a mayor who smiles sweetly, is black and tweets Mdoda’s preferred transformationist lingo.

To pretend otherwise is to indulge in the purest kind of luxury belief.

The Basics of Governance

What further struck me, and has struck me quite frequently recently, is the ignorance about the country’s governance framework. It is startling how many clever and accomplished South Africans still don’t grasp that different spheres of government carry different powers. Cape Town, for example, struggles with crime as does the entire rest of the country. But policing is a national competency, run from Pretoria, not from Wale Street or the Civic Centre in Foreshore. The DA has been pushing for devolved policing powers precisely because the national government is failing. Yet when Cape Town’s crime rates rise, critics lazily chalk it up to DA failure, as if the DA could simply conjure 5000 new SAPS officers if only they wanted to.

Polling by the IRR shows safety ranks as a top concern among South Africans. And Maslow’s hierarchy makes sense of that. If you can’t walk the streets without fear, nothing else matters. But again, the point is that the DA is boxed in by constitutional design, and spends much of its political capital trying to pry some powers away from the national government that botched them in the first place.

Meanwhile, look at what the DA has done where it governs. In Cape Town, inequality remains a brutal fact of life, but you also see record infrastructure spending in low-income areas. Clinics function. Public transport runs. Water crises are managed rather than allowed to fester into cholera outbreaks. Cape Town and the Western Cape is not utopia, but it has government that tries and often succeeds.

Even Mdoda admitted that people flock to the Western Cape for opportunities. She scolds Zille for calling them refugees. But then, almost in the same breath, she claimed Cape Town only services the privileged. How does she square that circle? If the city was truly as hostile to the poor as she suggests, why do tens of thousands of South Africans vote with their feet to move there each year? Migrants may exaggerate in their praise, but they do not voluntarily relocate to dystopias.

This is what I mean about luxury beliefs. It’s easy to sit in a comfortable studio, microphone in hand, and pronounce that Cape Town is for elites. It flatters one’s own moral standing. But the single mother in Khayelitsha who stands in a clinic queue that actually operates after fleeing the ANC’s dysfunction elsewhere may not see things the same way.

Mdoda furthermore casually suggested there were “Zille tender scandals,” then couldn’t name one. This isn’t accountability journalism despite Mdoda’s best efforts. And worse it is corrosive, because it creates the impression of moral equivalence, the DA, ANC, they’re all corrupt, which is precisely the narrative the ANC relies on to escape accountability while ignoring the fact that were the DA governs it gets clean audits.

It becomes a kind of circle logic. First, the DA is accused of being corrupt. When you point to the Auditor-General’s reports showing consistent clean audits, the line shifts: no, the DA isn’t corrupt, but it doesn’t govern “for everyone.” When you then show the cross-subsidisation in Cape Town, the fact that the city spends more per household in Khayelitsha than in Camps Bay, the argument moves again: perhaps that’s true, but Zille tweets things some don’t like. And so the carousel turns back to tone and optics.

Meanwhile, the ANC is measured against no such standard. Its governance is not compared to any ideal, nor even to the DA’s record, but merely to itself. If corruption is exposed, the retort is that “all politicians are corrupt.” If service delivery collapses, we are reminded of apartheid’s legacy. If people flee to the Western Cape, we are told not to call them refugees. The bar is lowered to the ground, and somehow the ANC still struggles to clear it.

This is why the indulgence of luxury beliefs is so dangerous. They allow comfortable people to keep the ANC on life support by pretending that the only real problem in South African politics is that the DA isn’t perfect. For millions of ordinary citizens, however, the choice is not between perfect governance and flawed governance. It is between collapse and competence.

Conclusion

In conclusion I’ll admit something here. I had my doubts about Helen Zille throwing her hat in the ring for Johannesburg. Not about her competence. She’s proved herself again and again, whether in Cape Town’s turnaround, the Western Cape’s governance, or the DA’s resilience under immense pressure. My worry was her energy. Johannesburg is a corrupt, sprawling and chaotic beast, and she is no longer in her fifties when she won world mayor of the year.

But watching this interview, I realised my concern was misplaced. Zille sounded as sharp, focused, and very much in fighting form as ever. Few have her stomach for a fight.

Johannesburg is in desperate need of competence. The city’s very survival is in question. The question is therefore not whether Zille is the perfect mayor. No such person exists. The question is whether anyone else has both the ability and the grit to drag Joburg back from the brink.

On that score, the answer seems obvious.

Mdoda can hold her luxury beliefs. She can mock, she can nitpick, she can complain about tone. None of it changes the brute reality: millions of South Africans live under collapsing governance, and the DA, imperfect as any human organisation, is the only party in the country that has consistently demonstrated it can deliver something better.

Helen Zille is not flawless, but she is formidable. And if Johannesburg is to be saved, it may require precisely that. In my view, she is one of the greatest South Africans in history. Saving Johannesburg would be the cherry on the cake.

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On September 8, the Himalayan republic’s young people lit the match. Within days, the parliament building was torched, the homes of former prime ministers razed, and the Supreme Court burnt to the ground. Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli resigned after security forces opened fire on crowds. At least 51 protesters were killed. By September 13, the army had entered negotiations but not with political parties, but with a leaderless, digital generation organising through the gaming app Discord.

The protesters demanded parliament be dissolved and appointed Sushila Karki, a former chief justice and veteran of Nepal’s 1990 pro-democracy movement, as interim prime minister. Incredibly, the army agreed. Elections are now scheduled for March 2026.

It sounds like a modern Jeffrey Archer novel, but it is very real. And for South Africa, it is a cautionary tale about youth unemployment, corruption and the fragility of legitimacy of a dispensation.

A history of instability

Nepal is no stranger to political upheaval. The country of 30 million has lurched between monarchy, parliamentary monarchy, civil war, and finally a fragile republic since the 1950s. In 2008 the monarchy was abolished and Maoist insurgents briefly held a majority. But ten prime ministers in ten years have since come and gone.

Oli’s fatal misstep was trying to ban 26 social media platforms and was the trigger for protests about wider dissatisfaction. The deeper cause was distrust which accumulated over decades of corruption and elite capture. Young Nepalis have long mocked their politicians with hashtags like #NepoKids, highlighting the sons and daughters of leaders flaunting luxury cars and designer clothes in a country where the average income is about $1 400 a year, similar to that of Lesotho and Eswatini. Combine that with youth unemployment of roughly 21%, and the country clearly had tinder waiting for a spark.

But what makes Nepal’s uprising remarkable is less the destruction that followed. Destruction and revolt obviously have always gone hand in hand. But what was surprising and unique is that this uprising was organised in typically Gen Z fashion. It wasn’t a Maoist insurgency in the mountains or an old-style military coup, but a decentralised, digital, and overwhelmingly youth-driven one.

Gen Z (those born in the late 1990s and 2000s) clearly don’t play by the old rules of politics. As with much else in their lives, their politics live on their screens. And as part of their apparent need for instant gratification they did not wait politely for election cycles. So they gathered online, coordinated through networks, and acted with speed that outpaced the Nepalese bureaucracy and security forces.

Nepal’s army, to its credit or perhaps desperation, recognised the overwhelming reality rather quickly. Rather than crush the movement, it conceded to its demands.

Patterns across Asia and Africa

Nepal is not alone. Bangladesh’s prime minister fell last year after a student uprising. Indonesia has been convulsed by protests against President Prabowo Subianto, led by student unions. Kenya’s youth have mounted sustained protests against corruption and economic failure, despite police killings.

Each country shares three features: a history of authoritarianism, pervasive corruption, and youth unemployment that locks millions out of economic life. Each uprising has been driven not by party structures but by digitally connected young people, willing to endure state violence.

That insight deserves the attention of Pretoria and Cape Town.

South Africa’s youth unemployment crisis is not just severe by local standards, it is among the very worst in the world. According to the World Bank, more than 61% of South Africans under 25 are unemployed, a rate second only to Djibouti. For perspective, the global average sits around 13.6%, while Nepal, where the streets recently erupted, has youth unemployment of about 21%. Even Bangladesh, where protests toppled Sheikh Hasina’s government last year, is well below us.

What’s more, unemployment doesn’t spare the educated. Stats SA estimates that roughly 12% of university graduates can’t find work, which means even those who’ve “done everything right” face long odds. The picture darkens further when looking at NEETs, young people who are Not in Employment, Education or Training. Nearly 44% of South Africans aged 15–34 fall into this category, according to Stats SA’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey. That’s almost half a generation effectively written out of the economy before their adult lives have even begun.

What does this mean in practice? It means millions of young people in townships and informal settlements, who will likely never find formal employment, no matter how many skills programmes or youth development funds are announced. By 25, if you’ve never had a job, your chances of entering the labour market shrink to almost nothing.

At the same time, wealth is flaunted shamelessly by some of our political elite and their enriched connections. Expensive German cars driving through townships and Instagram feeds show ministers’ children sipping champagne. The optics are indistinguishable from Kathmandu’s NepoKids.

Despite our country’s very violent daily living, South Africans have been relatively docile when compared to other countries, when it comes to political violence. It might not feel that way, but globally political violence is considerably more routine. Governments toppled in Asia and Africa, armies deployed on their own citizens, leaders ousted by mobs who had finally run out of patience.

But South Africa’s youth are not uniquely apathetic. They have filled the streets and campuses during student fee crises and protested service delivery failures. What they lack is not anger but cohesion. If that changes, if they ever coordinate at scale, digitally and outside the old party system, South Africa might witness something similar.

Closing thought

Nepal’s uprising is extraordinary and even unsettling, because it shows how fast legitimacy can collapse and how strange the future of politics may look. A former judge elected on a gaming app now leads a country once ruled by kings. The absurd has become reality.

South African leaders should not take comfort in the idea that “it can’t happen here.” History rarely announces itself before arriving. The deeper lesson is that politics no longer belongs only to parliaments, party lists, or liberation movements, it belongs to whoever can claim legitimacy in the eyes of the public. If institutions fail to carry that trust, the streets, and now the screens, will.

We already see fragments of this in the privatisation of the public sphere: private security companies patrolling where police are absent, business coalitions fixing electricity substations, community groups maintaining roads when municipalities fail. Functions once reserved for the state are steadily shifting into the hands of private actors. When legitimacy weakens, authority doesn’t vanish, it migrates. In Nepal, it migrated to Discord. In South Africa, it may migrate to whoever can provide what the state cannot: safety, services, and above all, a sense of representation. And if that transfer gathers enough force, the burning of parliament will not be a metaphor.

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History lingers in South African institutions. Nowhere is this more obvious than in South Africa’s police. The structure of the South African Police Service (SAPS) is not an accidental administrative design, nor the product of careful deliberation about how best to keep people safe. It is the heir of colonial centralisation, apartheid control and 1990s ANC angst.

When the new Constitution was signed in 1996, it carried many compromises. Some were noble and necessary, breaking from our past in an attempt to bind a fragile democracy together. Others were less inspired. Among the latter was the decision to retain a highly centralised police force. It was a decision rooted in fear of provinces breaking away (the ANC was particularly concerned about KwaZulu-Natal having its own police force under IFP control), fear of communities governing themselves in isolation, but above all it reflected the ANC’s deep-seated ideological commitment to centralisation and control.

And this ended up enfeebling the state’s ability to deliver one of the most basic democratic promises - safety.

Today the consequences of this centralisation are everywhere. SAPS detectives routinely carry caseloads in the hundreds. Conviction rates for firearm-related crimes hover in the single digits. Residents of Cape Flats townships learn, from childhood, the instinct to duck when gunshots ring out. Farmers in rural provinces know how long they might wait for a patrol car that never arrives. And yet, all of this dysfunction stems not only from scarce resources or corruption, but also from the belief that one police service directed from Pretoria can manage a country as diverse and extensive as South Africa.

In this regard South Africa is an outlier. Almost every other democracy, large or small, rich or poor, has embraced decentralised policing.

How Others Do It

Take the Anglo-American model. In the United States, law enforcement is layered. You have local police, county sheriffs, state troopers, and federal agencies. The American system is undoubtedly messy, so much so that its jurisdictional squabbles have become a Hollywood trope, the moment when the Feds walk in and local police have to stand down. But the advantage is local responsiveness. New York City, which has 36 000 police members serving just about 9 million people, doesn’t wait for Washington DC to send detectives when a murder occurs in Brooklyn. Police departments reflect the politics, resources, and culture of their communities.

In Britain, the tradition of the local constabulary remains intact. Each area has its own police force, funded and managed locally, though coordinated under national oversight for matters of terrorism or organised crime. The result is a culture of community policing that is far closer to the people it serves than any Pretoria-style bureaucracy could ever be.

Looking to Europe. Germany entrusts policing almost entirely to its Länder, the federal states. Each has its own police force, its own command structure, and its own strategy. National police exist, but their mandate is specifically focussed on border security, terrorism, crimes that cross Länder boundaries. The philosophy is that because crime is local, so policing must be too.

Even in Africa, federal or semi-federal systems like Nigeria and Kenya have acknowledged that the national government alone cannot police the complexity of sprawling societies. The devolution of policing powers has been messy, but it has allowed for greater responsiveness in urban centres and rural regions alike.

Japan provides yet another lesson. There, the National Police Agency sets broad policy, but the work is carried out by prefectural police forces. The balance is deliberate and ensures coordination where necessary but broadly has autonomy which is effective.

Why South Africa Stands Apart

Contrast all of these examples with South Africa. Here, the Constitution imagines three spheres of government (national, provincial, and local) yet in policing, power has been pulled tight into the hands of the national commissioner and the minister of police. Provinces may monitor. Municipalities may prevent crime, patrol streets, and enforce by-laws. But investigate? Build dockets? Run proper detective units? No.

The result is a one-size-fits-all approach to a country that is anything but uniform. Gauteng’s urban sprawl, the Western Cape’s gang wars, the Northern Cape’s vast rural emptiness are treated as if they require the same strategy, the same capacity, and the same structures. It is central planning of the crudest variet.

It is no wonder the system is completely collapsing. A city like Cape Town, which removes around 400 illegal firearms from the streets each year, cannot prosecute effectively because its law enforcement officers are legally barred from following through with investigations. They must wait for SAPS detectives, who may never arrive. So then evidence is lost, witnesses disappear and consequently cases collapse and the criminals walk free. And that is not even talking about the challenges faced by our correctional services, in the handful of cases where prosecution does actually occur.

The Case for Devolution

This is why decentralisation is a necessity. The arguments are straightforward.

First, responsiveness. Local governments know the crime patterns of their communities. They understand whether the priority is gangs, stock theft, extortion, or drug trafficking. A decentralised police can act on those priorities immediately, without waiting for Pretoria’s blessing.

Second, accountability. A national commissioner in Pretoria is penumbrally insulated from ordinary citizens. A local police chief, overseen by a city council and civilian boards, is not. Abuses of power become harder to hide when your neighbours do your job performance review.

Third, relief for SAPS. If municipalities handle local investigations, SAPS can focus where it matters most, such as syndicates, the ever growing organised crime, cross-border trafficking, and terrorism with its increasing threat. This is exactly how most other democracies structure their policing.

The centralisation experiment in South Africa has been tried, tested and has failed. And this failure is most evident in policing. The civil rights group Action Society has for example pointed out that more South Africans were murdered 2023 than people were killed in global terrorism and that more South Africans were murdered in 2024 than lives were tragically lost in Gaza in 2024.

Conclusion

South Africa today faces the serious danger of the continued slow erosion of public trust in SAPS. We can debate endlessly about how big or small the state should be, but across the spectrum, from anarcho-capitalists to communists, there is agreement that keeping people safe is the state’s most basic duty.

The law as it stands insists that municipal police may “prevent” crime but not “investigate” it. This absurdity is the crux of our failure. It can be undone with the adding of two words: “and investigate.” But beyond those words lies a broader shift in political will to admit that centralisation has failed, and that devolution is not dangerous but common sense.

South Africa can continue down the path of bureaucratic inertia, clinging to a system designed for control rather than service, and watch as communities retreat further into despair and mistrust. Or we can learn from the rest of the world, from our own history, and from the daily evidence of failure, and choose a different path.

Decentralisation is not a panacea. But it will bring policing closer to the people, where accountability is sharper and responsiveness quicker. It will relieve a national police force that is buckling under impossible demands and devastating factionalism. And it will align us, finally, with the democratic norm that safety is best secured not by a distant hand, but by those who walk the same streets as the people they serve.

History handed us a centralised police force. Our Constitution allows us to change it. And democracy allows us to demand it.

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My high school debate coach always fondly quoted Mark Twain’s famous quote:

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Twain referred to his own difficulty in understanding figures, and to the idea that statistics can have persuasive power, even when used inappropriately. I too am in Twain’s boat, hence why I went to study law, to avoid wrestling with numbers for a living. Yet here I am delving through the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey.

Following the latest job stats release most headlines read “Unemployment worsens to 33.2%”. In the short term, that’s not wrong. Compared with the first quarter of this year, another 140 000 people have joined the ranks of the unemployed. But compared to this time last year to now, and the official unemployment rate is down slightly, from 33.5% to 33.2%. Year-on-year unemployment has dropped but measured quarter-on-quarter it has increased.

Agriculture

South Africa’s job market is not a straight line. It’s a tide, rising and falling with the seasons. Agriculture alone still has the heft to move national statistics. In the second quarter, maize is in the ground but not yet in the silo, and seasonal workers are mostly at home. This is why Stats SA likes year-on-year comparisons for certain sectors because they strip out the planting-and-harvest whiplash.

But seasonal patterns can’t explain everything nor does it cover the fact that South Africa continues to experience a massive joblessness crisis. The formal sector grew by 34 000 jobs, trade by 88 000, and construction by 20 000. On the other side, community services shed 42 000 jobs, finance lost 24 000, and agriculture itself shed 24 000. More troubling is that the number of unemployed people continues to increase faster than the number of employed. The labour force grew by 159 000, but only 19 000 of those found jobs. The rest joined the job queue or gave up looking for a job entirely.

There are two further numbers that should keep us all awake. First, the absorption rate, which is the share of working-age South Africans who have jobs, which is stuck at about 40%. That is a long-term scar. Even in “good” quarters, six out of ten working-age people are not employed. Second, youth disengagement is staggering. The NEET (not in employment, education or training) rate for those aged 15–34 is 43.9%. Almost half of young adults are not studying, training, or working.

Since the mid-2000s, the official unemployment rate has been stuck between the high twenties and low thirties, and the absorption rate has barely shifted. In other words, we have normalised a level of joblessness that would be considered a national emergency anywhere else.

The tragedy is that these are compounding losses. Every quarter of inaction on education reform, energy stability, crime prevention, or infrastructure repair doesn’t just miss an opportunity to fix it, it raises the cost of fixing the problem in the future. The longer these issues fester, the more entrenched joblessness becomes, and the more expensive it will be to undo.

Western Cape

Amid the gloom, there is one provincial shift worth noting. The Western Cape has overtaken KwaZulu-Natal as the province with the second most employed people but still only halfway to the total employed in Gauteng. The Western Cape is also still the province with the lowest unemployment rate, by some distance (at 27% vs 39.2% the closest being Gauteng). Unless the wheels come off completely, and nothing in the numbers suggests they will, that provincial growth by the Western Cape is likely to grow.

What is striking about the Quarterly Labour Force Surveys each three months is how it plays directly into “right direction/wrong direction” opinion polling, one of the most reliable predictors of voter behaviour. This is even more important in the build up to the next local government elections expected to be held late 2026 or very early 2027. If you believe your city or province is heading in the right direction, you’re far more likely to stick with its current leadership. That is why, despite the noise many in the media and on social media make about the Democratic Alliance, painting it as either a milquetoast “ANC-lite” outfit or a heartless neoliberal clique, the party’s support tends to hold or creep upwards in places it governs and elsewhere where people see the difference.

When residents compare their lot to the national average - especially on jobs, crime, and infrastructure - the contrast is stark. In most DA-run metros and provinces, the basic machinery of government still works. That alone makes the DA outliers in a country where “working” is not the default setting.

In response to the DA it’s easy to cite ideological purity tests that no real-world government can pass. That’s especially tempting if you’ve never run anything more complex than a Twitter account. Governing, unlike posting, is a contact sport. You inherit or work with broken systems, you wrestle with limited budgets, and you try to keep things moving in the right direction without burning the engine and while the other engines around you stall. Perfection is never on the menu when you actually govern and therefore mere competence and accountability is already a massive victory. Ideological debates are a distant third in importance when set against the primary challenge of simply keeping the machinery of government running. You can argue endlessly about the ideal blueprint, but if the lights are off, the taps are dry, and the streets are unsafe, theory is irrelevant. In a country where the basics are so often botched, delivering the fundamentals is in itself revolutionary.

In fragile or failing states, ideology is a luxury and debates over the perfect economic blueprint are academic. You can’t build social democracy without electricity, and you can’t run a free market if the roads to the markets are impassable. This is why South African voters, whether in Cape Town or Gqeberha, will increasingly reward whoever can simply keep the basics functioning. For critics obsessed with doctrinal purity, that’s unsatisfying. But for those living in the dysfunction, competence beats ideology every time.

Conclusion

The broader problem is that national South Africa is not moving in the right direction. The fundamentals - energy security, crime prevention, infrastructure maintenance on a municipal level - are not improving fast enough to change the trajectory. Until they do, the labour market will keep doing what it’s done for a decade, rising in some quarters, falling in others, but never moving far enough to matter and generally sliding downwards.

If the “right direction” question were asked at the national level today, most South Africans would say “wrong”. But in parts of the country, notably in the Western Cape and DA-run municipalities, the answer is often “right” particularly when compared to its neighbours. That perception, grounded in lived experience rather than ideology, is why the DA’s provincial and municipal footprint is likely to grow, however much its critics fume. In politics, as in job creation, reality tends to outlast rhetoric.

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Argentina’s economic turnaround has left Keynesians frustrated and free-marketeers vindicated. But the real lesson for South Africa is that a slow sinking ship can be turned around.

Rather than asking whether Javier Milei’s shock therapy could “work” in South Africa—which invites all the usual ideological scuffles—this piece argues something else, namely that Argentina’s sudden recovery challenges the fatalism many South Africans have internalised about state reform, governance failure, and economic stagnation. I don’t argue that South Africa needs its own Milei (although I would not be sad to see one), but rather that we need to stop thinking that this ship will undoubtedly sink.

Milei’s libertarian project, for all its eccentricity, proves that a democratic government can reverse decades of decline, and do so quickly, dramatically, and without abandoning constitutional norms. That stands in stark contrast to South Africa’s political national mood, where real reform is endlessly chased but seldom achieved. Argentina had entrenched labour unions, populist legacy parties, and a bloated welfare state too. The difference wasn’t the institutions. It was the will and it was the electoral mandate given.

It turns out that governments can, in fact, change course. That a country deep in crisis doesn’t need a technocrat or a tyrant to impose order. It just needs someone willing to act like the crisis is real.

South African politics, by contrast, treats crisis as an everpresent background condition unchangeably with us due to our country’s history. Policy papers are endlessly written and a litany of task teams are assembled. Yet on a national level we do not reform. South African policy-making is stuck in a Groundhog Day where our politicians wake up, reannounce the same reforms, and act surprised when nothing changes.

This was the case for a long time in Argentia too.

Two years ago, Argentina looked like a country doomed. Inflation above 200%. Half the population in poverty. A currency spiralling into worthlessness. And then, out of this wreckage, voters elected Javier Milei, a wild-eyed libertarian economist who campaigned with a literal chainsaw and a promise to slash the state down to its roots. The establishment laughed at his libertarian proposals and some braced for the “inevitable” collapse he would supposedly cause.

But the collapse didn’t come.

What came instead, remarkably, was recovery. Inflation fell. Growth returned. Investors, once skittish, piled back in. Rent prices dropped in real terms. The public deficit, for decades an immovable fixture of Argentine life (South Africans are quite used to these types of structural failures being treated as permanent facts of life like rolling blackouts or failing service delivery) was erased in a matter of months. And all of this was done through policies the average South African policy wonk would dismiss as reckless, politically naïve, or “unrealistic.”

Now this isn’t an argument for importing Milei’s programme wholesale. South Africa isn’t Argentina, and our problems, though similar in type, have different historical roots and social dynamics. But the Argentine experience should make it clear that our slow-motion crisis isn’t inevitable. It’s a political choice.

The Myth of the Unreformable State

A peculiar fatalism has taken hold in South Africa, especially among the professional class. Many assume that real reform is simply beyond reach, too politically costly or socially disruptive to attempt. So they emigrate to Europe, the US or their security estate. And this is not to blame them. South Africa’s challenges often seems insurmountable.

But Argentina was also written off as unreformable. Decades of Peronist patronage had created a bloated public sector, subsidised everything from electricity to football tickets, and convinced much of the population that markets were exploitative by default. Their unions were powerful and their political culture was allergic to austerity. Sound familiar?

And yet, in the face of that, Milei’s government cut spending by over 30%, fired tens of thousands of public employees, and shut down entire ministries. Rent control laws were scrapped. The money printer was unplugged. And after some initial pain like rising food prices, higher unemployment in state-linked sectors the results began to show. By mid-2025, inflation had drastically dropped, growth had rebounded, and even poverty began to fall.

How did this happen? The answer is both mundane yet revolutionary: they did the thing. They stopped pretending there was another way. Argentina’s crisis was real, and their response matched its scale.

What has been striking about Milei’s approach is not just its economic impact. It’s that it’s been achieved (so far) without violating democratic norms. He hasn’t suspended elections or silenced opposition parties. His reforms, though aggressive, have mostly been pursued through the legislature or via lawful presidential decree. In fact, his coalition is a fragile one, and much of his agenda has required negotiation and compromise. This is not the profile of a strongman and we’ve seen with the current populist revolution we’re seeing over the globe. It does seem that Milei takes democracy as seriously as he does his free market convictions.

Compare that to South Africa, where major reforms—from labour deregulation to education overhaul—have been promised but postponed indefinitely due to their clinging to fail ideology.

Conclusion

You don’t have to romanticise Milei and we don’t need the same kind of theatrical libertarianism. But we do need politicians who are doers of deeds (to borrow from Rooseveldt’s famous speech) and not the critic who refuses to accept that South Africa’s project with centralisation, redistribution and state-led development has failed.

For years, Argentina was the go-to cautionary tale for what happens when states lose their fiscal discipline. It’s where commentators and analysts pointed when someone warned about Eskom or the public wage bill. Now, suddenly, it’s a case study in how fast things can turn around if a government is willing to act like and admit that there is actually an emergency.

South Africa, by contrast, remains stuck. We have rituals of accountability rather than accountability itself. South Africa has the performance of reform rather than actual reform. We debate inequality in abstract terms while 60% of young people sit unemployed. We bemoan poor service delivery, but never honestly touch the underlying centralised and state-led structure that produces it. Even now, the most radical proposals on the table are from the same ideological tent as what caused the problems.

The irony is that South Africa still has more institutional capacity than Argentina did when Milei took office. Our courts are stronger (despite challenges and jurisprudential dogma). Our civil society is more robust. We have functional banks, a relatively independent Reserve Bank, and a constitution that still commands legitimacy. If anything, we are better positioned for serious reform than Argentina ever was.

Reform can still come. But first South Africans need to admit that the current model has failed, vote out the statists who built it, stop replacing them with parties offering more of the same and get on with it.

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Due to a potential lack of enough talking at the National Dialogue, President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced the creation of yet another commission of inquiry.

It has become a familiar thing to South Africa as a political scandal drops, public pressure builds, and rather than act through existing institutions, the government announces a fresh panel to investigate what everyone already knows. This time, it’s in response to explosive claims made by Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla “Lucky” Mkhwanazi. Claims that, by any reasonable standard, should have triggered immediate suspensions (not special leave), criminal investigations, or even resignations.

Standing before the press, flanked only by his insignia and a few pages of notes, Mkhwanazi accused Police Minister Senzo Mchunu of obstructing investigations into political assassinations. He said a task team probing those killings had been disbanded on direct instruction. He hinted at high-level collusion with criminal networks and suggested, plainly, that parts of the police service are captured. He did not mince words.

These are not just allegations of incompetence, the likes of which South Africans are generally accustomed to. They are charges of institutional sabotage made by a senior police official in uniform. They strike at the heart of state legitimacy. In any functioning democracy, this would be a moment of reckoning. But in South Africa, true to ANC form, it’s a cue for another commission.

But at least in South Africa our government doesn't bury scandals. They commission it.

Commissions as Political Sedatives

From Marikana (which cost R153 million) to State Capture (R850 million, or nearly four Nkandlas), from Life Esidimeni to the Seriti Arms Deal inquiry (R130 million), the post-apartheid state has routinely turned to commissions when political heat rises. These forums are framed by the ANC as evidence of transparency and institutional introspection. In practice, they serve a different function entirely: to delay, deflect, and defuse. They are political sedatives.

The Zondo Commission, the most sprawling and expensive of them all, produced a forensic account of how the state was hollowed out under Jacob Zuma’s leadership with South Africa still suffering its consequences. But years later, most of its key recommendations remain untouched. Prosecutions, where they’ve even begun, have been sluggish at best.

The Marikana Commission, set up to investigate the police killings of striking miners, ended with little in the way of justice. The Seriti Commission, after four years and over R100 million in taxpayer money, was ultimately dismissed by a court for having “failed manifestly to enquire into key issues.”

The pattern is well established. And it resembles much of political life in South Africa, a fondness to talk about problems as if talking equals doing.

When Talk Becomes a Substitute for Action

Very much like the National Dialogue promises much talk but will likely lead to very little doing to actually “forge a new social compact that drives progress” as it promises on paper.

This tendency isn’t limited to commissions. It reflects a deeper pathology in ANC governance, a belief that talk, in itself, is a form of action. Lekgotlas, strategy sessions, task teams, consultative forums, these are the rituals of the ruling party. Each new crisis brings more dialogue, more performance and more process but little progress.

To be clear, deliberation has its place. But when it becomes endless and when it substitutes for decision-making and shields the powerful from consequence it’s simply performance. It creates the illusion of movement while preserving stasis. The appearance of responsiveness without the burden of responsibility. It reminds me of the British political satire sitcom Yes, Minister, where commissions and inquiries are often suggested as ways to avoid action or kick issues into long grass. South African commissions increasingly feel designed not to act, but to appear to be acting

Who Will Bell the Cat?

Mkhwanazi did what few in his position have dared, he named the cat. He broke ranks and said out loud what many South Africans know discuss around braais and in our taverns, that parts of the state have been compromised by criminal interests. That political killings continue not just because they’re difficult to solve, but because solving them would expose those in power. That the police are not feared by organised crime because, in some cases, they are part of it.

The question now is: who will bell the cat?

If history is any guide, the answer is no one. The President has announced a commission and a report will be written likely years from now with recommendations being made. And then the machine will hum along, unchanged.

But there is a wrinkle this time. In 2024, the ANC dropped below 50% for the first time and it remains in government through an awkward, stitched-together coalition. That changes the political calculus compared to previous times where these commissions have been announced.

The Zondo Commission ran for nearly four years, from 2018 to 2022. The Marikana Commission lasted close to three years, from 2012 to 2015. The Seriti Commission took four years, from 2011 to 2015. The Life Esidimeni arbitration process, though technically shorter, still stretched over nearly two years between hearings and final report.

A coalition government or even a future post-ANC administration might find it politically expedient to do something with the findings of this latest commission. Not to shelve the report, but to act on it. Because unlike previous inquiries, this one may not land on a desk occupied by someone trying to protect the status quo.

If the timeline follows the usual historical pattern, this commission will wrap up between the next local government elections and the 2029 national election. And if polling trends hold, the ANC may not be in charge when that happens. It may not even be the largest party.

Consequences, or Collapse

The ANC’s inability to hold its own accountable will continue to mean that the electorate holds them accountable.

It won’t happen overnight. The ANC’s legacy networks, rural base, and control of state machinery will keep it viable for some time yet. But the change is clear and coming. The ANC’s go-to tactic to avoid accountability is no longer working as reliably as it once did.

This time, the real question isn’t what the report will say. It’s who will be in power when it finally lands.

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More than a quarter-century ago, Parliament passed the Prevention of Illegal Eviction from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act. Few laws carry a holier aura. PIE is the statute that promised an end to midnight bulldozers and forced removals. It translated section 26(3) of the Constitution (no eviction without a court order) into a legislative tool ordinary people could invoke. In the 2005 Port Elizabeth judgment, the Constitutional Court wrote that PIE infuses “grace and compassion into the formal structures of the law.” Hard to argue with grace and compassion.

Yet here we are, in 2025, knee-deep in unintended consequences. Ask the pensioner in who has spent three winters in a wendy house behind her own home because she cannot afford the legal fees to evict strangers squatting in her lounge. Ask the farmer in the KZN Midlands who watches syndicates peg out plots on his crop fields every election season, secure in the knowledge that evictions will dribble through court for years. Ask cash-strapped municipalities (those that actually try) why they burn millions on constant security for vacant land instead of laying sewer pipes. PIE’s halo blinds many to these daily distortions of justice.

I hold, as most people do, that a rule-of-law society must protect the vulnerable. But that same society must also protect property rights, because without clear and enforceable ownership the poor never truly climb out of poverty. They simply trade one uncertainty for another. And a decent legal order can do both. Hence why the PIE Act requires urgent amendment and the talk about these amendments, which have been ongoing for years, must now progress to actual doing.

Separating Desperation from Bad Faith

The first proposed change to PIE which I would suggest, is introducing “land invader” as a term for those who orchestrate or profit from unlawful occupation. It is not aimed at the desperate family that throws up a shack on the fringe of Khayelitsha but rather targets organisers, the men who arrive with a clipboard, a stack of plastic pegs and an empty cash bag ready to receive payment. Currently these middlemen rarely face sanction as the law fixes its gaze on the occupier, not the recruiter. By naming the mischief, we can prosecute the mischief.

The Act requires a narrow, conduct-specific offence of inciting or profiting from invasion which respects individual autonomy while reaffirming that freedom is bounded by others’ rights. It also addresses the truth of the matter that in most invasions, the poorest actors are pawns in an enterprise closer to racketeering than protest. We need not treat them as equal wrongdoers, but we must break the business model that feeds on their insecurity.

Critics hear “amend PIE” and picture the return of bulldozers. But a draft amendment should propose nothing of the sort. Section 4 should be amended and tightened to let courts consider the intent behind an occupation and the impact on the owner when the occupiers have been there less than six months. Judges still weigh health, income, the presence of children—everything they weigh today. But they will also weigh malice, a factor strangely absent from the courts current calculus.

Re-balancing Duties

Section 26 of the Constitution guarantees that “everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing” and that “the state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right.” But like many socio-economic rights, the mere proclamation of the right does not conjure bricks, budgets, or the actual building of houses.

PIE’s framers assumed that municipalities would steadily extend formal housing and that temporary accommodation would indeed be temporary. Reality disagreed. The Blue Moonlight saga of the mid-00s showed cities could not shift housing obligations onto private owners, but it also revealed the perverse incentive that once a court orders emergency shelter, the temporary often becomes permanent.

PIE’s section 4 therefore requires revision to recognise finite resources (as section 26(2) of the Constitution does in text). PIE should allow a judge, in clear cases of land invasion or bad faith, to grant eviction without obliging the municipality to find alternative accommodation. The safety net remains for bona fide poor households. But where occupiers arrived with malice or under the tutelage of a pay-to-squat syndicate the state is not forced to reward the tactic.

And before the predictable housing-rights chorus starts protesting, no this is not cruelty, it is necessary triage. Social spending must prioritise families who wait in line, not those who push to the front. Nothing breeds social anger faster than watching law-abiding residents sidestepped by queue-jumpers who then enjoy government-funded services. Any constitutional order relies on popular consent and perceived unfairness corrodes that consent.

Protecting the Owners

PIE’s procedural hurdles (notices, multiple hearings, social reports) are only manageable (and barely so) to large landlords and state entities who have deep pockets. The hardest stories regarding the unintended consequences of PIE involve ordinary people. A widow renting out a back room, a black middle-class family fighting to move into their own newly bought flat. For them, a single lawyers’ letters costs a week or two’s grocery money. Amendments are required to give criminal sentences for organisers who charge “fees” to place occupants and expedited evictions should be legislated where occupation is short and plainly opportunistic.

Critics will retort that the Constitution already guards owners. True, but rights on paper do not pay attorneys. By pruning the mandatory procedural steps in straightforward cases, an amendment to PIE can give effect to property rights that exist in theory but often fail in practice. When property rights collapse, the first casualties are rarely the rich. The rich are able to insure, litigate, lobby and worst case scenario simply find another house. It is the modest owner who loses a life’s savings. The very self-reliant class that South Africa preaches of creating but in practice doesn’t.

When reforming PIE we must keep one eye fixed on history. We dare not revive the 1951 Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act in new clothes. Proposed changes should not criminalise homelessness but they must criminalise coercion and profiteering. They should not authorise midnight evictions but they must clarify when a judge may prioritise an owner’s rights. They should not strip poor families of recourse but they should supplement our courts’ toolbox so it can tailor justice, rather than issue one-size-fits-all orders as limited by the current legislation.

Shielding every unlawful occupier in the name of compassion is a kindness that boomerangs. As Frederic Bastiat warned:

“When plunder becomes a way of life… men create for themselves a legal system that authorises it.”

If we elevate occupation-without-consent into a protected status, we don’t lift the downtrodden. We normalise plunder. The winners are often the syndicate boss and the loudest queue-jumper and the losers are the patient families stuck on a waiting list, the first time title-deed owner, and the city forced to divert money from water mains to litigation.

Real compassion means drawing a clear line to help the genuinely homeless, yes, but pull the plug on organised lawlessness before it hollows out the very system that should lift people out of poverty.

Conclusion

Thomas Sowell reminds us that “there are no solutions, only trade-offs.” That’s the quiet wisdom hiding behind this whole argument. We can either keep a law that dignifies the dispossessed yet steadily corrodes the property rights of everyone else, or we can tune it so that compassion and discipline travel together.

Will the changes end land invasions, cure the housing backlog, and restore municipal balance sheets overnight? Of course not. But a law that no longer rewards bad faith is a start. Amend PIE, and we trade a brittle idealism for a sturdier fairness that fulfills the Constitution’s promise of dignity and the protection of property rights for all.

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South African politicians often market their ideological pipe dreams as silver bullets, recycling failed policy ideas from the past instead of doing the hard work of real reform. This time, it’s the South African Reserve Bank Amendment Bill, a proposal that, like its ideological cousins NHI, EWC and BEE, promises transformation but will almost certainly deliver dysfunction.

The SARB Bill, introduced in 2018 by the Economic Freedom Fighters and revived again in 2024, wants to make the state the sole shareholder of the Reserve Bank. It also gives the Finance Minister full control over appointing directors and auditors. EFF supporters call it progress and revolutionary. But revolutions, as history shows us, often eat their children. Like many top-down overhauls dressed in the language of justice and “giving power to the people”, this one risks destroying the very thing it claims to improve.

At this stage the Bill has be reintroduce to Parliament and the Finance Standing Committee, chair by the ANC’s Mkhacani Maswanganyi of the National Assembly has once again opened the EFF’s Bill for public comment. A process which all South Africans should participate in to vigorously oppose this proposed amendment.

Centralisation won’t save us

South Africa has real problems. Our institutions are weak, our governance generally is poor and accountability is thin. And when things don’t work, our default move is to centralise power with the assumption that giving the state more control will solve the problem. The SARB Bill follows this same script. It removes the few remaining private checks in the Reserve Bank’s governance and puts a single minister in charge of the board, the auditors, the rules, basically everything.

But a healthy democracy doesn’t function well with centralisation. Functioning democracies do not concentrate power in one office. It disperses it. It designs tension between institutions, between Parliament, the courts, the executive, and independent bodies like the Reserve Bank. And these tensions aren’t bugs in the system but they are features specifically designed to ensure the long term functioning of the institutions and system. The fact that a government can’t single-handedly move every lever of the economy is a good thing.

And what’s peculiar with this move is that the SARB is one of the few public institutions in South Africa that still functions decently well. Not perfectly, but competently. It enjoys trust particularly internationally and it has credibility in financial markets. So why would we hand it over to direct political control? Because some people like the Marxist EFF think that if it’s not owned outright by the state, it can’t be trusted.

Symbolism over substance

The Bill’s EFF backers say this is about reclaiming sovereignty and about removing “foreign influence” in the Reserve Bank. They argued that it puts control in the hands of “the people.” But like many Marxist ideas, that sounds noble on the surface but it’s hollow and doomed to fail. Moreover, like many policy proposals by Marxist it proposes solutions to problems which do not exist.

It’s the same tactic used in Marxist or socialist regimes the world over: create a phantom enemy, then propose a bold reform, and consolidate control. In this case the phantom enemy are the private shareholders of the Reserve Bank, the problem is that the shareholders are in the way of economic growth and the reform is removing these shareholders and centralising the shareholding in the state.

In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the pigs justify everything in the name of equality and the good of the group, even as they hoard power. But as Albert Camus has famously said, the welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants.

The point is the private shareholders of the SARB are not the obstacles to economic success which the EFF attempt to paint them to be. Because the SARB’s private shareholders don’t control monetary policy, they can’t set interest rates and they don’t influence the Monetary Policy Committee. They earn a capped dividend and have no power beyond electing a handful of non-executive directors who are, by law, vetted by an independent panel that includes the Governor and a retired judge.

So why remove them? Because the EFF thinks it looks good to their supporters and it sells a story which has been told throughout history that private interests are per se bad. But the story isn’t true. Those powers that the EFF supposedly want to give to the people don’t go to the people. They go to the Minister and the state.

Supporters of the Bill argue that Section 224(2) of the Constitution guarantees the SARB’s independence so we don not have to worry. That even if we change who appoints the directors, the text of the law will protect the Bank’s integrity. But as we all know promises on paper does not guarantee independence in practice.

Independence is not just about what the Constitution says. It’s about how systems are built and managed. If the Minister of Finance controls all appointments, picks the auditors, and shapes the rules, then the SARB is no longer independent even if the words in the Constitution remain. Because law is not just written words but what is the reality of the situation and what is practiced.

This Bill replaces a semi-independent governance model (which is currently the case with the Reserve Bank) with direct political control. That change might not be spelled out in Section 224(2), but the change in legislation hollows out the meaning in the Constitution.

It’s like claiming to respect free speech while silencing every critic through backdoor regulations. The words of a constitution is only worth the paper it’s written on if its promises aren’t applied in practice. But this double speak is evident the world over, from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea which is neither democratic nor is it a republic, to Nigeria which constitutionally promises universal healthcare but ranks at or near the bottom across all major healthcare outcomes.

In South Africa we’ve seen the consequence of centralisation before as well. Eskom was centralised. It collapsed. SAA was nationalised. It drained billions. SANRAL, PRASA, Post Office are each one a story of state control gone wrong.

And the lesson is always the same, centralising power in a failing system doesn’t fix the system. It just moves the failure to a higher level and creates the illusion that things are being done and progress is being made.

Conclusion

There’s a reason wise democracies protect their central banks. History shows us the consequences of infringing on a central bank’s independence (which independence is actually already limited in South Africa’s case).

In Zimbabwe, the Reserve Bank became a de facto arm of the ZANU-PF. It printed money to fund government spending, ignored inflationary risks, and ultimately triggered one of the worst cases of hyperinflation in modern history. Prices doubled almost daily.

In Venezuela, a similar pattern unfolded. The central bank, stripped of its autonomy, propped up state spending with artificial currency supply, which eventually collapsed the value of the bolívar and destroyed public trust in the economy.

In Turkey, President Erdogan toppled six central bank governors between 2016 and 2022 to force lower interest rates and inflation surged to around 85%, leaving the lira in tatters and wiping out middle-class savings.

In Brazil, President Lula has publicly criticised the central bank chief and even tried to gag him from speaking, undermining the institution’s credibility as its inflation-targeting credibility comes under pressure.

Even in advanced economies like the U.S., political attacks on central bankers like Nixon’s assault on Arthur Burns to more recent Trump tirades against the Fed have rocked the institution’s credibility and stability. In each case, we see currency value suffers, inflation expectations de-anchor and at the end of the day ordinary citizens foot the bill.

Closer to home, South Africa has avoided that fate precisely because its Reserve Bank retained a degree of operational independence. And globally, successful economies like Germany, Canada, and New Zealand have deliberately designed central banks to be shielded from direct political interference. These countries’ records on inflation control, investor confidence, and currency stability reflect that decision. It’s not that independence guarantees success, but removing it almost guarantees failure.

As Friedrich Hayek warned, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” The SARB Amendment Bill is a design born of ideology which has historically proven to be disastrous and if passed, it will leave South Africa poorer and weaker.

The SARB Amendment Bill doesn’t strengthen the Reserve Bank. It just undermines it. And therefore if passed the consequences will follow the well trodden historical path of failure.

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Recently, South Africa's Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA) remarked that, in light of the widespread dysfunction plaguing municipalities, the country should consider reforms that include merging some municipalities. The rationale seems solid. Fewer municipalities will allegedly be easier to manage, and cost savings will follow from scale. But this logic, however intuitively appealing, is deeply flawed. South Africa's local government crisis stems not from too many municipalities, but from too few and a lack of accountability. If anything, we should be arguing for more municipalities that are smaller, closer to the people, and have greater fiscal autonomy.

We need a radical shift in the way we think about governance. The solution to weak local government is not centralisation through amalgamation, but decentralisation through proliferation. And this is not clinging to a libertarian pipedream, the evidence around the world is there.

The Case for Smaller more Numerous Municipalities

Let us start with a simple comparative analysis. South Africa has 257 municipalities for a population of around 60 million people and a land area of 1.22 million square kilometres. That is approximately 1 municipality per 233 000 people and 1 per 4,750 km².

Compare that to:

• Italy: 7 918 municipalities for 59 million people (~1 per 7,500 people and 1 per 38 km²)

• Argentina: 2 218 municipalities for 46 million people (~1 per 20,400 people and 1 per 1,234 km²)

• Ukraine: 1 469 municipalities for around 38 million people (~1 per 25,800 people and 1 per 460 km²)

The countries closest to South Africa in geography (land area) and demography (population) have significantly more local governments per capita and per square kilometre.

Moreover, Japan has 1718 municipalities (792 cities, 743 towns, and 183 villages) and 23 special wards of Tokyo, all of which are the lowest level of government. Japan has twice the population size of South Africa but has five times as many municipalities. Public governance in Germany comprises three levels, the federation, the 16 federal states (Länder) and some 11 000 municipalities, which include cities, towns and other entities. So a country with one and a half times the population of South Africa has more than 40 times the number of municipalities. Italy has a municipality for nearly every village and town.

In these countries services are administered closer to the ground, and accountability has a shorter feedback loop. Citizens there have a far more direct connection to their local representatives.

In South Africa, vast rural municipalities try to serve areas the size of small European countries. Residents in far-flung villages are effectively disenfranchised by geography.

Bigger Isn't Better

The theory behind amalgamation is that larger municipalities benefit from economies of scale. But empirical evidence shows otherwise. Studies from around the world indicate that large municipalities become bureaucratic, unresponsive, and prone to administrative inefficiencies. The further government moves from the governed, the worse it performs.

A consolidated municipality may look neater on a spreadsheet, but in practice it becomes less representative, less accountable, and less adaptable to local needs. Mergers do not eliminate dysfunction, they simply obscure it.

Moreover, many of the current amalgamated municipalities in South Africa were born out of apartheid-era consolidations or the rushed restructuring of the early 2000s. They were never sized with functionality in mind, but with political or ideological motivations. And now that design is now failing.

Fiscal Autonomy: The Real Missing Ingredient

Moreover, the lack of accountability isn’t the only issue in local government governance in South Africa. The conversation we should be having should not only be about how many municipalities we have, but how they are empowered and funded. South Africa's local governments still rely on intergovernmental transfers from national government, Even though municipalites have their own-revenue generation it is largely limited to property rates and service charges which are often unaffordable in poor areas and become increasingly more difficult as the economy grinds to a halt. It is a doom loop that throttles municipal initiative and traps communities in perpetual dependency. Breakdowns in basic services erode residents’ willingness to pay, shrinking the rates base even further; shrinking revenues then force councils to cut maintenance and defer upgrades, which in turn accelerates infrastructure decay and drives out businesses that might otherwise have widened the tax net.

By contrast, countries like Italy and even Ukraine grant significant fiscal powers to local governments. In Italy, municipalities receive a portion of personal income tax, local business taxes, and property taxes. In Ukraine, decentralisation reforms saw municipalities retain around 60% of PIT collected locally, giving them a stake in economic activity.

In Germany municipalities enjoy the constitutional right to self-government and can raise revenue through local business taxes (Gewerbesteuer), shares of income tax, and property taxes. The fiscal federalism in Germany ensures a significant portion of tax revenue remains at the local level, enhancing autonomy and incentivising economic development.

In Switzerland, one of the most decentralised democracies in the world, municipalities raise a substantial portion of their own budgets through local income taxes, wealth taxes, and service fees. Swiss municipalities also compete (often fiercely) for residents by setting their own tax rates, creating strong incentives for efficiency and responsiveness.

In contrast, most South African municipalities are essentially delivery agents for national government, not autonomous centres of governance. They are neither close enough to the people to respond effectively, nor fiscally equipped to act independently. And while some municipalities are functional they become victims of their own success, as they perform well amidst failing local governments around them, people flock to them and in balancing their books, and upgrading infrastructure, the equitable-share formula rewards that competence by clawing back grants, saddling them with unfunded national mandates, and forcing them to cross-subsidise and plug the holes left by national government without the funding from national government.

Smaller municipalities would mean greater democratic intimacy. They also create more opportunities for leadership, greater competition, and a better chance for innovation. They allow for community-level experimentation with policy, service delivery, and revenue models, like which is seen in for example the canton system of Switzerland, where even alpine villages set their own tax rates and tailor public services to the needs of a few thousand citizens. The comparative evidence is unambiguous. Successful democracies and functioning states invest in numerous, empowered, and localised governments, trusting that a dense lattice of accountable local authorities will out-perform any lumbering, over-centralised behemoth.

Multiply, Don't Merge

The recent calls for reform in local government should be seized as an opportunity to reimagine local governance. That starts with an inversion of the current trend: rather than merge dysfunctional municipalities, we should break them up. Rather than centralise power we should devolve it to towns, villages, and suburbs. South Africa requires a principled reconfiguration guided by a commitment to subsidiarity, the principle that decisions should be made at the lowest effective level.

Yes, this reform would require careful legal, fiscal, and administrative design. But so did our democratic Constitution. And like the Constitution, it would be an investment in accountability, resilience, and long-term democratic health.

So the COGTA Minister is right about one thing: local government is in crisis, which is already a refreshing concession from the new minister of arguably one of the most important cabinet positions. But the remedy is not fewer municipalities. It is better ones. And better municipalities will not come from size, but from proximity, power, and purpose.

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President Ramaphosa’s National Dialogue, announced this week with great fanfare and a polished list of thirty-odd “eminent persons,” is being sold as a moment of renewal. A chance, we are told, to reflect as a nation, to reimagine the future, and to forge a new social compact. But what it really is, is more of the same, namely a soft, well-lit room for consensus thinking dressed up as national introspection that promises change but will achieve none.

Let me be blunt. This group of prominent South Africans (nothing against them personally) does not represent the country. Not in substance and not in the way that matters. They are, by and large, respectable figures who’ve already bought into the ruling consensus. Their appointment is not a demonstration of inclusiveness. It’s a demonstration of how narrow our intellectual bandwidth has become.

Yes, the list ticks boxes. There’s a spread of races, professions, genders, even a sprinkling of provinces and faiths. But the diversity here is mostly cosmetic. It is skin deep (excuse the pun) and that’s the problem. What we’re missing is the only kind of diversity that really matters in a democracy, namely ideological diversity or diversity of thought.

There is no room in this "dialogue" for voices that reject the dominant narrative of post-1994 South Africa. No space for someone who might seriously question the transformationist orthodoxy that has gripped our institutions since the dawn of democracy. You won’t find a Mbeki-era black economic nationalist in that room, and you also won’t find a classical liberal, a market reformer, or a serious social conservative. No one to ask whether affirmative action has helped or hindered. No one to argue that state power might be part of the problem, not the solution. No one to admit that cadre deployment, racial bean-counting, and dependency politics have hollowed out the state and left millions trapped in poverty.

Instead, we get a rehash of the same tired establishment: business leaders who know which ideological tunes to play, activists turned parliamentarians turned activists again, the always-available clergy, and a few artists and athletes for moral ballast. These are not independent thinkers. They are emissaries of the same consensus that has presided over this slow-motion failure.

This is therefore not a dialogue but another group recital.

What’s Left Unsaid

South Africa’s problem isn’t that we haven’t talked enough. It’s that we keep talking around the real issues. The Zondo Commission, the National Development Plan, the many “Summits” on jobs, crime, education, gender, none of these led to meaningful change. Not because South Africa lacks good people or good intentions. But because our politics is allergic to fundamental self-examination that actually changes the way of thinking.

No one in ANC and its ideological partners (which include other political parties who share the ANC’s ideology to varying degrees) is willing to say the obvious, that transformation, as it has been practiced but in principle as well, has not delivered. It has produced a bloated, patronage-ridden state, elite enrichment, and symbolic change dressed up as attempts at social justice. Meanwhile, unemployment has grown, public schooling has deteriorated, violent crime has surged, and municipalities have collapsed under the weight of incompetence and graft.

Transformation was supposed to be the engine of equality and dignity. What it became was a system for recycling privilege under a new name.

Of course, none of this is allowed to be said in polite company. To question transformation is to invite accusations of being “anti-progress” or worse. But that’s precisely why this National Dialogue will fail. It cannot ask the hard questions because it has already decided the answers. It reminds of Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.

What South Africa desperately needs is not another forum for talking, but a reset of its intellectual and moral assumptions. We need to break free from the stale binaries that pit race against merit, redistribution against growth, state power against private initiative. We need a politics of ideas, not identities.

This country has no shortage of thinkers willing to challenge the status quo. Some are academics. Some are community organisers. Some are religious leaders. Some are ordinary citizens who’ve simply seen too much and are no longer afraid to speak plainly. But almost none of these people are in the room.

And that tells you everything you need to know and expect of this conversation initiated by President Ramaphosa.

Because if this were a real dialogue, an honest confrontation with our national condition, you’d invite the heretics. You’d welcome people who say uncomfortable things, who break with orthodoxy, who don’t wear the right ideological uniforms. You’d include people who think the Constitution needs amending, and those who think it needs defending more fiercely. People who think social grants are a moral imperative, and those who think it’s a dead-end distraction. People who do not adhere to the transformationist orthodoxy because the 30 people already invited already have that side covered.

But ideological diversity is too dangerous to the ANC that’s still clinging to its political plurality. Ideological diversity risks disruption. It makes too many sacred cows and entrenched interests nervous. Better for the ANC, it seems, is to assemble a group of safe hands who will talk about “values,” “cohesion,” and “shared futures,” while avoiding the minefields of actual disagreement and what is necessary for actual change. It’s the old classically South Africa tale of being more focused on talking about progress than making actual progress.

We Can’t Reform Our Way Out of This

The central conceit of this National Dialogue is that we just need a better conversation. But we’ve been having conversations for three decades. The failure of South Africa is not a failure to speak and talk about problems. Politicians have been doing this quite fine. The failure of South Africa is the failure to change course.

Transformation (or transformationism more specifically) which has been the cornerstone idea of post-apartheid governance is a project that cannot be “reformed.” It must be abandoned and our focus must shift to actual progress. You can’t fix broken incentives with nicer slogans and you can’t legislate dignity and economic growth.

What we need are new ideas. Ideas about education that don’t revolve around centralised departments and failing unions. Ideas about growth that don’t start with handouts but with private enterprise. Ideas about justice that aren’t obsessed with race but with outcomes. Ideas about citizenship, responsibility, family, law and order, and the kind of society we want our children to inherit.

But these ideas are out of bounds to the transformationists. Not because the ideas have been tested and failed, but because they don’t fit the dominant narrative and would in effect be an acknowledgement that what the ANC has promised since the Freedom Charter has failed.

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The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) is facing a critical financial crisis (again), with a reported funding gap of R7.03 billion over the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) period. Despite slight improvements in audit outcomes, the broadcaster's financial sustainability remains in jeopardy, as recently highlighted by the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA).

This shortfall threatens the SABC's ability to fulfill its public broadcasting mandate, which includes (at least in theory) providing diverse and informative content to all South Africans and in its variety of languages. The current funding model, heavily reliant on declining TV license fees and commercial revenue, is no longer viable. TV licences as a system is so archaic and regressive it’s almost funny. Except it punishes poor households the most and costs more to enforce than it recovers. In a world of fibre and 5G, it’s about as sensible as a tax on cassette players.

So it’s time to be blunt about the SABC. No amount of restructuring, tinkering, or overhauls will fix what is fundamentally broken. The broadcaster is a relic of a bygone era, staggering from bailout to bailout. The only honest solution is full privatisation, not a partial sell-off, not a public-private partnership, but a complete clean break through full privatisation. Anything less is wishful thinking and clinging to the dead ideological idea of a state broadcaster.

South Africa should not pretend the SABC can be reformed within its current shape. It’s had three decades to prove otherwise. The idea that we can somehow keep it alive through another round of government funding or board reshuffles is simply political theatre. Much like the TV viewing on offer at the SABC we’ve seen this before and it ends the same way every time.

Struggles at the SABC

Back when I was in private legal practice, I represented a number of actors with claims against the SABC, mostly unpaid fees for reruns of old shows and films they’d appeared in. These weren’t complex cases. The broadcaster had simply lost the contracts, or the invoices, or both. It wasn’t malice but just pure administrative dysfunction part of a broader pattern where the basics of doing business, like paying artists or honouring agreements, seemed beyond the organisation.

What’s wrose is the so-called “public broadcaster” can’t even meet it’s own internal payroll some months. If this were a private company, it would have folded years ago. But because it's state-owned, it lingers on propped up by public money and defended by sentimentalism about its imagined role in nation-building.

Post-1994, the SABC was meant to transform into an independent public broadcaster. That dream barely lasted a decade. Board appointments became political handouts for cadres, news coverage started toeing ideological lines, and journalists found themselves shown the door.

And the financial failure has consequences outside of the SABC. It regularly fails to pay local content producers, it bungles sports broadcasting rights, or it fudges around with its news programmes. Good people have tried to fix it. Some even made small dents. But the structure itself is too broken to salvage.

The Digital Age Doesn’t Need a State Broadcaster

The old justification for the SABC was that it ensured access to information in places where private media didn’t reach. That was true once. But South Africa isn’t in the 1980s anymore. Over 95% of the population has mobile phones. Streaming, online news, podcasts, these are where people go for content now, especially the young. This means that the SABC isn’t just behind the curve but it’s not even on the same graph.

Meanwhile, independent outlets are producing far more credible public interest journalism than the SABC has managed in years and doing so without government subsidies, although some of these independent outlets are themselves struggling financially. But these platforms show that robust journalism doesn’t require state control. It needs a level playing field, editorial independence, and a public that sees value in the work.

Increasingly, some of the most immediate, ground-level reporting comes not from state studios or even the independent platforms but from laymen reporters in communities posting on social media. And this gives government a clue as to where public investment should shift. Not toward propping up a failing institution, but toward cheaper data, better broadband, and a media environment where quality can compete and thrive.

Global Lessons

When state broadcasters overseas have been privatised properly (fully, not halfway) the results have often been impressive. France’s TF1 tripled its revenue and became a market leader. Argentina’s Telefe held the top spot for two decades after its privatisation. These weren’t miracles or outliers. They were the result of unleashing competition and removing the dead hand of the state.

By contrast, the halfway houses (partial sales or partnerships) tend to fail. Russia’s Channel One kept the state in control and remained subsidy-hungry. Zambia’s TopStar deal turned into a debt trap. The Philippines tried to sell part of its broadcaster and ended up with layoffs, cancelled shows, and eventual collapse. These cases all have a common thread, namely that trying to have it both ways ends up with the worst of both.

South Africa should learn from these missteps. If we sell off only a portion of the SABC, we’ll keep the political meddling and the inefficiencies while chasing the illusion of reform. Investors will stay away. The public will lose what little trust it has left. The only real solution is complete privatisation.

What Would a Real Reform Look Like?

But privatising the SABC doesn’t mean gutting public interest media. It means freeing up the space for it to grow on its own terms. Government’s role should shift from content producer to infrastructure enabler. Expand affordable data access. Support independent content creators through transparent grants. Create a regulatory environment that protects media freedom and diversity, not state dominance.

And let the market decide what kind of broadcaster South Africans actually want. Maybe a privatised SABC survives, maybe it doesn’t. But at least it will have to earn its audience, not demand it through state coercion.

A truly democratic media landscape doesn’t need gatekeepers in Auckland Park. It needs competition, accountability, and freedom.

The SABC isn’t too big to fail. It already has. We must let it go, and see what else might grow in its place.

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In the cult classic computer strategy game Civilization, a global bestseller since the 1990s, players guide a nation of their choice from the Stone Age to the space age. Each decision shapes the course of history: where to settle, whom to trade with, when to wage war, and how to invest in science, culture, or the military. Among the game’s many mechanics, one quietly determines everything else: production. This refers to a city’s ability to turn resources into tangible outputs like buildings, roads, weapons, wonders. In the hands of a skilled player, high production turns the Aztecs under Montezuma into a global nuclear superpower while Theodore Roosevelt still figures out how to build wooden ships.

In Civilization, production helps you dominate.

What is “production” in the Civilzation computer games is manufacturing in real life. The capacity to make things, en masse, with speed and at scale. And though we're often told that we're now in a knowledge or services economy, production remains a decisive advantage in both peace and war. As historian Adam Tooze observed, it wasn't ingenuity or ideology that won World War II, it was logistics, steel, and Detroit.

When Nations Made Things

The 20th century offers an industrialised masterclass in this principle. The United States, once dubbed the “arsenal of democracy,” overwhelmed Axis powers with sheer output. Tanks rolled off assembly lines in minutes. In the Cold War, the Soviet Union matched the US's might for decades by marshaling centralised production, even if at great inefficiency.

Fast-forward to 2010: China overtakes the U.S. as the world’s largest manufacturer. In 2023, China produced $4.8 trillion worth of goods. 27% of its GDP. That includes everything from fertilisers to synthetic textiles to machine tools. In short, China today makes things, and makes them fast. And while there are question about their environmental and human costs, the manufacturing engine powers its geopolitical ambitions just as surely as aircraft carriers do.

In contrast, the U.S. now relies on manufacturing for just over 10% of its GDP. The Biden and Trump administrations, in their own ways, have tried to reverse this trajectory through tariffs, subsidies, “Made in America” slogans but the hollowing out of American manufacturing remains a source of political anxiety, particularly as the temperatures for global conflicts rise.

Germany, ever the continental craftsman, has held its ground with precision engineering and a robust Mittelstand of small-to-medium manufacturers. India is rising fast, albeit from a lower base, buoyed by its youthful population and government incentives. Russia, constrained by sanctions and kleptocracy, survives on resource extraction rather than complex manufacturing but this has changed since the start of its war with Ukraine.

The ongoing war in Ukraine has reminded the West, rather rudely, that wars are not won by ideology or diplomatic speeches. They are won by endurance, logistics, and the ability to produce matériel at scale.

Russia, despite sanctions and corruption, has managed to ramp up domestic arms production, churning out drones, shells, and artillery faster than many Western analysts predicted.

Ukraine, in contrast, depends heavily on Western military aid. NATO countries are rediscovering the hard truth that defence readiness isn’t just about high-tech jets or cyber units. It’s about whether you can produce 155mm artillery shells by the million. Suddenly, European leaders are talking about repurposing old arms factories and boosting military budgets.

This war has exposed a post-industrial vulnerability. The West had outsourced so much of its production capacity that it now finds itself scrambling to reindustrialise under the shadow of war near its NATO borders and elsewhere. In peacetime, this deference to globalised supply chains was framed as economic rationality. Why make what you can cheaply import?

And this did make perfect sense, thought believers in Fukuyama's End of History—a world where liberal democracy reigned supreme and great-power conflict was a relic of the past.

But in wartime, the calculus changes. Dependence on others' manufacturing ability becomes a liability.

For decades, defence production in Western Europe and the United States was allowed to downscale. In an age of counterinsurgency and peacekeeping, stockpiles of munitions, spare parts, and basic industrial capacity were allowed to dwindle. Factories were shuttered, skilled trades hollowed out, and manufacturing outsourced. The result? When the guns of Europe roared again, NATO countries were caught flat-footed. By early 2023, Ukrainian forces were reportedly firing more shells in a month than some European arms manufacturers could produce in a year.

This reawakened reality has triggered a frantic effort to rebuild what was dismantled. Not just in defence sectors, but in steelworks, chip fabrication plants, and critical mineral refining. The fantasy of a frictionless global economy, where manufacturing could be someone else’s problem, has given way to the logic of redundancy, resilience, and reshoring. Manufacturing has made its comeback and price competitiveness is no longer the only consideration, sovereignty seems to have made its reappearance too.

And what of South Africa?

There are lessons here for any country, South Africa very much included, that treats manufacturing as passé. In times of crisis, the capacity to make things at home, at scale and under pressure becomes a form of national insurance. You cannot airlift a foundry. You cannot 3D-print a workforce. And you cannot import manufacturing independence.

Once the industrial jewel of sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa finds itself in a twilight zone. Neither post-industrial nor industrialising. Manufacturing contributes about 13% to our GDP, a modest figure that has been in gentle but persistent stagnation. Our economy is overly reliant on services and raw commodities.

Worse still, our productive capacity is constrained not only by a similar outsourcing of manufacturing as seen in Europe and the US but further by dysfunction. Load-shedding, logistics bottlenecks at ports and rail, policy zigzags, and skills shortages have left our factories underutilised and uncompetitive. We all see the broken windows and derelict former factories in old heartlands like the Vaal Triangle, East London and Pietermaritzburg.

Where China opens a new industrial park, we wrangle over the diesel budget for backup generators or additional security to stop copper theft.

The consequences are severe. Without manufacturing, a nation struggles to create stable, semi-skilled employment. The downstream effects on inequality, social cohesion, and political stability are immense.

In short: if you can't build, you can't rebuild.

A Different Kind of Reindustrialisation

To be clear, a romantic return to the smokestacks of yesteryear is neither possible nor desirable. South Africa should not try to out-China China. But we can foster smart, regionally integrated production networks, linked to food processing, pharmaceuticals, green tech, and automotive assembly.

But the state must get out of the way where it hinders and step in where it enables. Energy, infrastructure, and regulatory clarity are prerequisites for this to happen.

In Civilization, players who neglect production fall behind. In the real world, the same rule applies, only with far graver consequences.

If South Africa is to remain sovereign, secure, and socially stable, it must rediscover how to make things again.

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