Written By Piet du Plessis

We in South Africa stand on the threshold of a greater watershed moment than during the 1994 transition. The possibility of massive instability is, in my view, therefore a reality that must be seriously contemplated.

The reason is that the outcome of the municipal elections of November 2026 will cause seismic shifts with serious practical consequences. Hundreds, perhaps into the thousands, of councillors will lose their positions and their only sources of income.

Remember, councillors’ packages usually include a basic salary component, plus structured elements such as cellphone costs, travel and accommodation or motor vehicle allowances, housing allowances, municipal contributions to pension or provident funds, often up to approximately 15% of the basic salary, and medical aid.

This means that ordinary part-time councillors typically receive total packages in the low to mid-hundreds of thousands of rand per year, with higher packages in metros, while full-time executive positions in larger municipalities easily exceed R1 million, plus the mentioned allowances and insurance cover.

But even worse, many hundreds of councillors will also lose their access to patronage, such as, for example, obtaining or sharing in inflated tenders through front companies, with the inflated and unearned incomes that flow from them.

Opinion polls and predictions also indicate that approximately 50% of our municipal councils will have no absolute majority, resulting in “hung councils”.

Readers can listen to this podcast discussion to hear one of our leading analysts’ views on the matter first-hand, and then try to digest it.

The possible consequences range from severe unrest to total chaos.

Remember, these are possible outcomes in municipalities that are almost all already dysfunctional. This is then the extremely uncomfortable and unacceptable starting point for councils trying to reverse the massive backlogs and disintegration of their municipalities.

To make everything worse, the said scenario unfolds within larger provincial and national environments where state failure is the rule rather than the exception.

The laws that allow provincial and national intervention in collapsing municipalities are, in that case, not worth the paper of the statute books on which they are written.

In any event, the history of municipal administration over the past few decades in South Africa shows that such interventions have generally made little difference. Mostly, only the deckchairs on the Titanic’s deck were rearranged, and the further decline simply continued once the intervention ended.

The reason is that the symptoms of the problem were addressed and not the problem itself.

Old ANC cadres who failed were simply replaced by new ANC cadres who later also failed because meritocracy was not the consideration in their appointments or nominations, and because no end was put to cadre deployment and political interference in municipal administration.

Here follows how I sometimes try to explain my fear in a simplified way by attempting to simulate the persona of an ANC municipal councillor:

“I am an ANC cadre. I do not have any academic qualifications or any noteworthy work experience. I have, however, succeeded in having myself nominated because of my membership of the ANC to make myself available for election as a municipal councillor.

“I was successful, in the past almost guaranteed, that I would be elected because the ANC enjoyed the greatest support among the electorate in my municipality. My term as municipal councillor brings me into contact, indeed forces me into contact, with municipal financial affairs, among other things.

“Eish, I was lucky! My municipal manager obtained a knowledgeable consultant on financial oversight and what is expected of councillors in that regard to inform us as new councillors about it.

“What follows here is an exposition of our duties regarding financial oversight at municipal level, as shared in writing by the consultant after the information session with us as the newly elected council.”

Briefing Session for Councillors on Financial Oversight Responsibilities

“Honourable councillors, the main elements of municipal finances in South Africa under the oversight responsibility of the municipal council are primarily regulated by the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA, Act 56 of 2003), the Municipal Systems Act (MSA), the Constitution and related legislation.

“It centres on policy determination, approval of key plans and budgets, and ongoing monitoring and accountability, while officials, especially the municipal manager as accounting officer and the chief financial officer, handle day-to-day implementation.

“Councillors, collectively as the council and often via committees, must understand and exercise oversight over the following core elements.”

1. Strategic Planning and Alignment

The Integrated Development Plan (IDP) is the municipality’s primary strategic plan for development and service delivery.

The council must ensure that the annual budget and Medium-Term Revenue and Expenditure Framework (MTREF) are fully aligned with the IDP and its priorities.

Oversight includes:

• Reviewing community input.

• Realistically prioritising needs.

• Approving revisions to the IDP and related plans.

2. The Municipal Budget

The council must approve a realistic, funded annual budget by 30 June, covering the budget year and the following two years through the MTREF.

The budget must distinguish between capital and operating components, set out expected revenue by source, and allocate expenditure by vote.

Budgets may only be funded from realistically anticipated revenue, cash-backed surpluses and, for capital expenditure, borrowed funds under strict conditions.

Adjustment budgets may be approved when necessary for unforeseen or unavoidable expenditure or other material changes.

The council is also responsible for related resolutions concerning:

• Property rates.

• Tariffs and taxes.

• Measurable performance objectives for revenue.

• Performance objectives for each vote.

Councillors must consider affordability, sustainability, alignment with community needs and IDP priorities, the future operating costs of capital projects, and the avoidance of unfunded mandates or overspending.

3. Revenue Management

Municipal own-source revenue includes:

• Property rates.

• Electricity charges.

• Water charges.

• Sanitation charges.

• Refuse charges.

• Levies.

• Other fees and taxes authorised by legislation.

Municipalities also receive transfers and grants, including the equitable share from national government and conditional grants from national and provincial government.

Policies falling under council oversight or approval include:

• Tariff policies.

• Rates policies.

• Indigent policies.

• Credit-control policies.

• Debt-collection policies.

Collection performance, billing accuracy and strategies to improve collection rates and reduce outstanding debt are critical to financial sustainability.

4. Expenditure Management

Operating expenditure includes staff costs, councillor and official remuneration, bulk purchases, repairs and maintenance, finance costs and depreciation.

Capital expenditure includes infrastructure and the acquisition or renewal of assets, with long-term financial implications.

Councillors must ensure that:

• Expenditure remains within approved budget votes.

• Unauthorised expenditure is prevented.

• Irregular expenditure is prevented.

• Fruitless and wasteful expenditure is prevented.

• Salary and benefit costs for political office-bearers and senior managers are properly overseen.

• Spending represents value for money.

5. Asset and Liability Management

Council oversight extends to the acquisition, protection, maintenance and disposal of municipal assets.

Council approval is required for the disposal of significant assets.

Cash, investments and municipal bank accounts are subject to strict MFMA rules.

Councillors must also oversee liabilities and debt, including:

• Short-term debt, which is limited and generally must be repaid within the year.

• Long-term loans, which require council approval and affordability assessments.

• Security over debt and guarantees.

• Risk management.

• Insurance.

• Contingency planning.

6. The Service Delivery and Budget Implementation Plan

The Service Delivery and Budget Implementation Plan (SDBIP) translates the budget and IDP into quarterly targets, performance indicators and service-delivery plans.

The council oversees its approval through the mayor and monitors implementation against those targets.

7. Financial Reporting, Audit and Performance Oversight

Councillors must monitor:

• Monthly Section 71 reports.

• Quarterly Section 52 reports.

• Mid-year Section 72 reports.

• Annual financial statements.

• Annual reports.

• Auditor-General reports.

The council must adopt an oversight report on the municipality’s annual report, either approving it with or without reservations, rejecting it or referring it back.

Oversight also includes monitoring municipal entities, where applicable, and ensuring compliance with audit findings and corrective action.

Internal audit functions and audit committees provide further advice on controls, risk and governance.

8. Supply Chain Management

The council oversees the municipality’s supply chain management policy, which must provide for procurement that is fair, equitable, transparent, competitive and cost-effective.

Councillors must also oversee contracts with multi-year financial implications and work to prevent irregular expenditure arising from procurement.

9. Budget-Related Policies and the Oversight Framework

The council approves or oversees key policies relating to:

• Tariffs.

• Rates.

• Credit control.

• Cash management and investments.

• Asset management.

• Long-term borrowing.

• Indigent support.

• Free basic services.

• Delegations of powers.

• Codes of conduct.

• Ethical requirements for councillors and officials.

10. Financial Sustainability, Problems and Interventions

Councillors have a responsibility to identify financial problems early through reports and financial indicators.

They must ensure that the municipality can meet its financial obligations and avoid a financial crisis.

They must also oversee financial recovery plans and understand the circumstances under which provincial or national intervention may be triggered under the MFMA and the Constitution.

The Key Principles for Councillors

“Honourable councillors, as consultant I wish to conclude by once again reminding the honourable council of the key principles for councillors that run like a golden thread through legislation at all spheres of government.”

Separation of roles: The council determines policy, approves budgets and plans, and exercises oversight. The executive, including the mayor and mayoral committee, provides political direction and monitors the administration. Officials implement. Councillors may not interfere in operational financial management.

Accountability: The council is ultimately accountable to the community. Regular use must be made of reports, public participation and committee structures. A Municipal Public Accounts Committee is essential.

Sound oversight: Transparency, realistic budgeting, sustainable revenue collection, controlled expenditure and the preservation of assets support long-term service delivery.

“These elements are set out in detail in the National Treasury’s A Guide to Municipal Financial Management for Councillors and the MFMA itself.

“Councillors must familiarise themselves with the latest MFMA circulars, the municipality’s specific policies, and ongoing training from SALGA or provincial treasuries, as practical application and financial health indicators evolve.

“I thank the honourable members for the opportunity afforded me to familiarise them with their legal obligations with which they will have to comply for the next five years.”

At this point, I end this article as its writer.

To add anything else, or to try to explain it further, would be to underestimate the intelligence of Rational Standard readers.

Piet du Plessis is a retiree with a long history of applied socio-economic development. A liberated Afrikaner who has moved beyond self-flagellation, he believes that he has been freed to live out his cultural pride and values and to proclaim them openly when appropriate.

Trade unions have been allowed to dominate South Africa’s labour market for far too long. They are treated as if they speak for workers as a whole, when they represent only their members. Worse than that, they have every incentive to make it harder for outsiders to compete for the jobs their members already have.

Their dominance in politics and the economy has created a cocktail that guarantees that unemployment and poverty will continue to rise.

This matters enormously in a country with 8.5 million officially unemployed people and an unemployment rate of 33.6%.

Yet, when South Africa decides how its labour market should work, who grabs the privileged ear?

The answer is trade unions representing people who already have jobs. No one truly speaks for the unemployed, or the over 60% of youth that haven’t been given even the chance to earn a wage.

The greatest trick of organised labour was convincing society that the interests of people with jobs and people who need jobs are always the same - they aren’t.

A union exists to improve the conditions of its members. That is perfectly rational. Its members want higher wages, better benefits, stronger job security and greater protection from dismissal.

But every additional cost and restriction placed on employment can make an employer less willing to hire the next person. The union member gets the raise while the unemployed person never gets the job.

An unemployed South African may happily accept a lower starting salary, unusual hours, a probationary arrangement or some other compromise to get their foot in the door. Who is a politician or trade union official to tell them they are not allowed to make that choice?

If two consenting adults agree to an employment contract, it should take an extraordinarily good reason for some third party to prohibit it.

There is nothing inherently wrong with trade unions. Workers should be free to join together, bargain together, strike together and even resign together. An employer should be equally free to negotiate with them. That is freedom of association. But freedom of association means nothing if there is no freedom not to associate.

Collective bargaining becomes something very different when workers who did not join a union, or employers who did not negotiate an agreement, can nevertheless be bound by collective arrangements.

South Africa’s Labour Relations Act allows bargaining council agreements to be extended to non-parties under specified conditions. At that point, a union is no longer merely representing its members. It is helping determine what other adults are permitted to agree to. In a way, it has become an unelected regulator.

An individual worker should be allowed to negotiate their own wages and conditions. A worker who wants to work during a strike should be allowed to work. A business that never consented to an agreement should not have that agreement imposed upon it. Rights belong to individuals. They do not disappear because a sufficiently large collective has decided it knows better.

Big business and big labour

The usual story presents unions and corporations as natural enemies. Reality is more complicated. Huge corporations can afford labour lawyers, HR departments, compliance staff and expensive employment regulations. Small businesses cannot.

Rules negotiated between government, organised labour, and major incumbent businesses can therefore create a comfortable arrangement for everyone already inside the room while crushing those outside it.

Jeremy Magruder’s research into centralised bargaining in South Africa found bargaining agreements reduced employment in affected industries by an estimated 8% to 13%, with the losses concentrated among smaller firms. Big Labour and Big Business can both survive rules that kill small businesses and shut unemployed workers out of the market.

Industry-wide bargaining also weakens competition for workers. McDonald’s, KFC, and Wimpy should be competing to attract decent employees. One might offer higher wages, another flexible hours, another better bonuses, training or faster promotion.

Employers should have to compete for workers just as workers compete for jobs. The more employment conditions are homogenised across an industry, the less room businesses have to experiment with different arrangements, and the less choice workers ultimately have.

Union’s ugly history

South Africa’s history provides an especially ugly demonstration of what happens when incumbent workers gain political power over who may compete with them.

During the 1922 Rand Revolt, white mineworkers fought attempts by mine owners to cut costs partly by expanding the use of lower-paid black labour in positions previously reserved for whites.

The racial politics of that era were uniquely abhorrent, and modern unions should not be equated with the white labour movement of a century ago. But the underlying incentive is instructive.

Incumbent workers possessed something valuable and used organisation and political influence to prevent outsiders from competing for it. The Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924 subsequently excluded African workers from statutory collective bargaining while industrial council decisions could still affect their conditions of employment. When politically powerful incumbent workers are allowed to control entry into a labour market, they have an incentive to close the gates behind themselves.

That lesson should matter today. COSATU remains an ANC alliance partner, while organised labour enjoys an institutional seat at NEDLAC alongside government, business and community constituencies.

Why should a private organisation representing its own members receive privileged political influence over legislation affecting millions of unemployed people, non-union workers and entrepreneurs who never appointed it? We would rightly be suspicious if a handful of giant corporations enjoyed the same degree of political privilege. Calling an organisation “labour” does not somehow eliminate its self-interest.

Trade unions must fall

Trade unions must fall. That does not mean workers should be prevented from organising. They must fall from the privileged position they occupy above individual workers, unemployed South Africans and businesses that never consented to their authority.

The problem is not union size; the problem is union privilege. Workers should be allowed to build unions as large as they want, but membership and collective bargaining must be voluntary. Industry agreements should not be imposed on outsiders, individual workers must remain free to negotiate their own terms, willing employees must retain their right to work, and organised labour should not enjoy a privileged political voice merely because it is organised.

South Africa does not need to crush trade unions. It needs to strip them of their power to dictate terms to everyone else and return them to their legitimate role of representing those who voluntarily choose to be represented. A trade union should have exactly as much power as its members can voluntarily give it, and not an inch more.

Nicholas Woode-Smith is the Managing Editor of the Rational Standard and a Senior Associate of the Free Market Foundation. He writes in his personal capacity.

BOSA leader Mmusi Maimane remains adamant that South Africa’s political future lies in building what he calls a “radical centre”.

According to Maimane this political project is “radical” because it rejects a strict adherence to ideology. It is “centrist” because it seeks to unite South Africans from all backgrounds in the centre behind a common vision of building a better South Africa for all.

On the face of it, this project is noble if one considers the country’s dark history. And I doubt that many South Africans take issue with the idea of unity, at least in theory.

And yet a frank question that needs to be posed to Maimane and others is why this project of building a centre has had no real electoral success since the first democratic election in 1994?

Every political party, from AGANG to GOOD, Rise Mzansi and BOSA itself, that has campaigned on a platform of building this centre has failed to establish any real political footprint in the country. The DA, being the only exception in terms of electoral support, ultimately failed, according to Maimane, to become the vehicle through which he could build a centre.

And while Maimane maintains that the DA’s rejection of centrism is the reason he left the party in October 2019, the DA has arguably not shifted towards the right, even as the long-standing battle for its ideological soul continues.

The centre that isn’t

The trouble with what Maimane and others term centrism is that it rests on very questionable assumptions about South Africa as a country.

The first assumption is that there is an objectively identifiable political centre with substantive political content, that this centre represents a morally superior political position, and that those who fall outside of it necessarily occupy the fringes of the political spectrum.

This is simply not true.

While there are a number of political parties that reject extremism in favour of moderatism, these parties have very different conceptions of what constitutes the political centre. These conceptions themselves have ideological underpinnings that inform how these parties assess the supposed centrism of other parties.

A centre, if it is to exist in any substantive and objective sense, does not require complete uniformity. It does, however, require some level of political consensus on what principally constitutes it and where its boundaries lie. No such consensus exists in South Africa, despite what polling results may suggest and what vague, vibes-based sloganeering about pragmatism may imply.

When it comes to concrete questions of policy, there are real differences.

The DA, for instance - in line with the constitutional imperative of redress - supports means-based redress as a way of addressing the injustices of the past. In line with its classical liberal tradition and commitment to non-racialism, it does not support race law and maintains that past injustice can be addressed by a restrained state that allows a market-driven economy to operate largely unencumbered by state interference.

It would be difficult to find anyone in the DA who does not regard its policy agenda as centrist and as a position around which most South Africans should rally. Even black DA voters, who are routinely portrayed as either self-hating or ignorant, certainly do not see themselves as occupying the fringes of the political spectrum or as holding excessively ideological political convictions.

And yet BOSA, Rise Mzansi and GOOD have, if not directly, then certainly implicitly, argued that the DA is in fact right-wing, anti-transformation, race-blind and committed to protecting white privilege at the expense of the black majority.

In their view, what South Africa requires is a capable state that engages in social engineering and plays a far more meaningful role in the economy. They see no contradiction between race law and their conception of non-racialism because they believe the country can only transcend race by continuing to make it relevant to questions of public policy.

Their policy agenda lies at the centre in their own estimation, and they also do not see themselves as extremists operating on the fringes of the political spectrum. And yet from the perspective of the DA, the very positions they regard as centrist bear parallels with aspects of the racial nationalism espoused by the ANC and the EFF.

I could give more examples including ActionSA, the VF Plus and the IFP, all of which regard themselves as advancing a centrist project rather than operating on the political fringes. They, too, are labelled “right-wing” by the self-described centrists in BOSA, Rise Mzansi and GOOD on account of some of their policy positions.

But the point about there being no centre in any substantive and objective sense should by now be clear.

What really exists are political parties that are broadly moderate in their outlook but disagree fundamentally about what constitutes the political centre and where its boundaries lie.

The voters who aren’t there

The second assumption, which flows directly from the first, is that a centrist constituency corresponding to this “objective” centre exists in South Africa and can be mobilised if only the right centrist political vehicle is created.

If the electoral outcomes of the past 32 years are anything to go by, South Africans who have participated in elections have not been rallying behind a shared conception of centrism. They have, in the main, voted for the racial nationalism of the ANC, which has found expression in the EFF and the MK Party, as well as for the DA and a range of smaller political parties.

The parties that have explicitly sought to occupy the supposed centre have failed to attract anything approaching serious levels of electoral support.

The reasons for this are obviously layered and contested, and they fall outside the scope of this piece. But I do want to submit that ideology - whether operating consciously or unconsciously - should not be understated in the conversation about voter behaviour, particularly when considering the behaviour of those South Africans who have actually turned out to vote.

The fact that voters may be moderate in their outlook does not mean that their political choices are devoid of ideological content. Ideology can inform political judgement without announcing itself as ideology to those making the judgement.

What, then, of the biggest “party” in South Africa - the party of those who do not vote at all? Surely, it too may form part of this centrist constituency.

What is known, at least from polling results, is that these South Africans are generally not extremists. They are, by and large, moderate and do not want to drive their fellow compatriots into the sea.

But even if they are “centrist”, why have they consistently declined to turn out to vote? Why have they remained outside the electoral process for so long? And can it really be inferred that they are centrist simply because they appear to be moderate? There is a distinction between centrism as a coherent political project and moderatism as a disposition towards political questions.

What guarantee is there, then, that another centrist political vehicle will suddenly energise them to vote? What makes political analyst Prince Mashele so confident that his project is sufficiently distinct from those that have come before it to succeed where they have failed? I do not wish to overstate my case here, but the global trends are clear: in many democracies around the world, most people – particularly young people – do not turn out to vote.

This is usually attributed to apathy, and there may be some merit to that explanation. But room should be left open for the possibility that there are other reasons for political disengagement that are not yet fully appreciated. There should be no hasty assumption that the answer to political disengagement is simply another centrist political vehicle.

What this does not mean

Does all of this mean that I am against centrism? That I hate moderation, compromise and the idea of uniting South Africans?

Certainly not.

It does, however, mean that I have become increasingly sceptical of the way the centrist project is presented in South African politics. I am sceptical of the assumption that there is an objectively identifiable centre, that there is a constituency which naturally corresponds to it, and that what is required is simply another political vehicle capable of mobilising that constituency.

After all, if the centre is as obvious and politically compelling as some of its proponents suggest, we should perhaps have seen more evidence of it by now.

Ayanda Sakhile Zulu holds a BSocSci in Political Studies from the University of Pretoria and is a Policy Officer at the Free Market Foundation.

Written By: Vivienne Vermaak

To many Westerners, the idea of a pet-friendly Chinese restaurant might conjure up a secret question: “Is the pet on a leash or on the menu?”

It might come as a surprise that Chinese people now own pets, not eat them. Over the last decade, pet ownership levels have increased by 50%. Twenty percent of Chinese families now have a dog or cat.

“This is a very serious and dangerous thing to China,” says Frans Cronje of The Common Sense news and analysis platform. “You can read a lot into the future of China and the US because of this. It is one of the most important insights into the Chinese state’s ability to maintain order. Pet ownership breeds individualism, individualism that creates ownership around an asset that has no economic value. This is threatening, which is why the Chinese state restricted it.”

A few decades ago, the Chinese state called pets a “bourgeois peculiarity”.

There are many ways to tell when a society has become bourgeois. You can look at the cars in the driveway or the coffee machines in the kitchen. Or you can look at whether the dog lies with you on the bed while you watch your favourite Netflix show.

The moment it gets its own pillow, its own doctor, and its own place on the couch, the dog has become the most economically successful member of the household.

This is not a story about a labrador or a poodle. It is a story about what happens when people acquire enough disposable income, private space, and personal autonomy to spend money on something that produces absolutely no measurable economic return.

This is economic development at its most wonderfully irrational, and China is discovering it at extraordinary speed.

We have a habit of describing China as a communist country and therefore, by implication, as having a communist economy. It is something more complicated, like a labradoodle.

China is politically communist, but economically, things are rather more convoluted. Since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms began in 1978, China has constructed a strange hybrid: state ownership and direction sitting alongside private enterprise, markets, foreign investment, international trade and an enormous consumer economy.

The Communist Party has retained political control while allowing markets to do much of the economic heavy lifting. The official description is the Orwellian-sounding “socialist market economy”.

So China has managed something unusual: a communist government and quite a lot of capitalism, surprisingly manifesting in its pet ownership patterns.

Humans have lived amongst animals for thousands of years and domesticated some. Ancient Egyptians kept cats. Roman elites kept exotic animals. Aristocrats throughout history surrounded themselves with horses, hounds, birds and other creatures.

To the peasant, the animal may produce eggs, milk, meat, labour or security. A dog guards the property, a cat catches mice, a chicken has a job.

The bourgeois dog, on the other hand, has one principal responsibility: to be loved.

Our fur babies have become legitimate members of our families. Spending on pets has skyrocketed. Furthermore, animal lovers organise politically. Powerful political lobbies argue that pets are people too.

This indicates a shift towards individuality and being able to choose what is important to you. You have a choice about what you spend your disposable income on, including something ridiculous like a unicorn hat for your cat.

You now have the freedom to form an emotional attachment to a creature that the state did not assign you. You can pick your family, in direct defiance of a government that once limited families to one human child per household.

This personal liberty might be the chink in the armour of the Chinese who thought they were culturally strong enough to control the influence of the West.

Cronje did the maths. By comparing China’s GDP with its pet spending, you can see the cat and dog line pull away drastically over the past 15 years.

It shouts “bourgeois”.

China’s pets are therefore not merely a cute side effect of rising prosperity. They may be one of its most revealing symptoms. When the family starts buying the dog a birthday cake, you know the revolution has taken a very strange turn indeed.

It never occurred to anyone that, in the West’s attempt to overthrow communism, they might have chosen the wrong tactic. It could have avoided a lot of trouble by sidestepping wars and embargoes, and sending in Lassie and Miaow Tse-Tung instead.

Communism may tell you that class has disappeared. Capitalism may quietly reply: “Maybe, but someone needs to rub Miss Fluffybutt Stinkypants’ belly first thing in the morning.”

I guess we should be grateful the bourgeoisie still licks its own balls.

Vivienne Vermaak is an award-winning journalist and keynote speaker. She is an associate of the Free Market Foundation. She writes in her personal capacity.

Is Cape Town introducing a pet tax? Proposed changes to Cape Town’s Animal Keeping By-law have reignited controversy over pet permits, fees, compulsory sterilisation and the City’s powers over dog and cat owners.

Nicholas Woode-Smith is joined by Dr Martin van Staden and David Ansara to unpack the Cape Town pet by-law controversy, separate fact from exaggeration, and ask how much power a municipality should have over responsible pet owners.

Is the so-called Cape Town “pet tax” really new? Should residents need municipal permits to keep dogs and cats? Are compulsory sterilisation requirements justified? And where should the line be drawn between legitimate animal welfare measures and unnecessary government regulation?

The panel examines Cape Town’s Animal Keeping By-law from the perspectives of individual liberty, property rights, animal welfare and good local governance.

Professor Koos Malan’s article in The Common Sense of 2 September 2026 brought back many memories of how I experienced the ANC’s workings in the inner circle of their state administration. I “served” them for four years in a senior position as a professional public servant without ANC cadre membership. In other words, I was never appointed because I was an ANC member with contacts that could secure me a senior post. I was simply appointed on the basis of my professional knowledge and experience in a specialised development field of which cadres had little knowledge.

I deliberately refrain from being more specific about the exact position and development field, because my aim is not to “expose” or embarrass specific cadres. That would be unprofessional of me, when I obtained my position precisely on professional grounds.

I was deliberate in my decision at the time to apply for a public service post and in my willingness to move from an environment of great comfort and personal security of living conditions to something far more uncertain, because I had almost an obsession with trying to help build the New South Africa at the forefront of development in the spirit of Madiba.

I am therefore in a position, in connection with Prof. Koos Malan, to share practical experiences from the inner circle of ANC state administration with readers.

Initially my experience was that the officials of the new ANC administration were willing to learn from expertise. There were still a few experts remaining from the old order before 1994, and they were of great help in acting as mentors for new appointments that were almost always ANC cadre deployments.

There were also, during the first Government of National Unity from 1994 to 1999, which most people have already forgotten, old officials with particular knowledge who served alongside certain senior new officials, such as directors-general, to facilitate the transition. This was part of the Codesa negotiations / interim constitution’s conditions to make the transition as smooth as possible through shared responsibilities at many senior levels.

I do not think many people are still, or ever were, aware of that arrangement. It certainly helped to transfer experience, but it also brought great tension. I observed at first hand fierce differences of opinion where the new director-general, for example, wanted to deviate from policy, but where the senior official from the old order seriously objected.

The eventual outcome could certainly be predicted: the new administrative officials increasingly asserted themselves and simply ignored the advice of the official from the old order. As an observer it appeared to me that the new administrative leadership was increasingly placed under pressure by their political masters, behind the scenes, to loosen the handcuffs of policy in order to give the politicians more power to manipulate the administration and even, for all practical purposes, to take it over.

Unfortunately the new senior officials were cadre deployments and, with their little or no experience of state administration, they yielded to political pressure. This was fatal, as any professional public servant will be able to testify, because once policy is no longer respected, the administration inevitably falls apart.

Many of us still remember the old British Yes Minister television series. It comes from the days when state administration and the distinction between administration and political interference were still understood.

In that excellent British TV series it was depicted in a satirical manner how the dividing line is maintained with the aim of ensuring effective and consistent state administration: in the series the highly competent officials simply say “yes minister” in a very polite way to everything the minister insists on, and then simply continue to implement state policy “by the book”.

This at the same time made the politician feel good, while state administration and management were applied within approved rules: it afforded protection on both sides. Even more important: it kept the politicians humble, as is proper. Politicians must exercise their powers where applicable, such as establishing policy through legislation which must then be applied by the officials for as long as that policy has not been amended by the correct process.

Later all seconded officials from the old order either voluntarily left or, with the expiry of their secondment periods, bid farewell to the new dispensation.

I myself of course remained because I held a permanent appointment under the new dispensation. But it was not easy. My superior public servants to whom I had to report were cadre deployments. They were not necessarily all incompetent, but clearly preferred to yield to the politician’s pressure rather than to adhere to development policy; they even allowed themselves to be convinced by politicians that they could break laws.

It was then quite possible to get away with it, because everyone protected everyone else’s back, since almost everyone owed their posts to the ANC. A few old hands from the old order who stiffened their backs were quickly worked out of the system. The easiest was with packages for early retirement.

For others who did not want to take the easy way out, their professional lives were simply made hell. They were falsely accused, especially of their so-called “unwillingness to transform”. Read that as their unwillingness to become involved in corruption and the violation of policy provisions.

Another popular method was to question everything they had done and refer it back with comments and remarks, whether it made sense or not. This broke those officials’ backs, because they were then referred to as incompetent, in front of colleagues and subordinates in meetings, because they were not making progress in their work, which of course had been made impossible for them. They were then branded as incompetent and usually resigned voluntarily.

Yet another “torture method” to get rid of unwanted officials who would not cooperate, read: would not steal together, was to overwhelm them with impossible instructions, often of a nature that did not even relate to their area of responsibility.

The outcome was predictable: reference was then also made in meetings in front of colleagues and subordinates to their failures and it was then announced that another official, naturally a cadre, mostly incompetent, would take over that unwanted official’s obligations. This was extremely humiliating and succeeded in making the targeted official decide soon to seek a livelihood elsewhere.

Senior management meetings were initially limited to the participation of officials only and not politicians, as is proper. The most senior official was the invisible link between the administration and the politician. Proper management meetings were then held, to all appearances, with decisions taken and minuted.

It was not long, however, before it became apparent that this was merely so much window-dressing. More and more management decisions were simply amended between management meetings. Of course this was sometimes questioned by some managers, especially by the non-cadres, but the answer time and again was that the responsible politician had not liked the management’s decision.

Soon this created the precedent that legislative / policy-making functions were no longer separate and mutually independent. The worst was that it emerged that so-called ANC caucuses took place over weekends at the home of the responsible politician, where the administrative management’s decisions were then reconsidered.

This of course made a farce of the separation of powers, which for all practical purposes meant the end of an independent and professional public service. Later politicians simply summoned the senior public servants and issued instructions. No room was left for objections.

It reached the point where senior officials such as myself were held responsible for budgets of millions of rands, but with minimal control over those budgets. It was randomly announced in management meetings that your budget had now been reduced by millions because funds were needed elsewhere. No opportunity for input or insight: it had simply, usually, been decided by the politicians and you simply had to fall in line.

Another practice that increasingly began to rear its head concerned the employment of new officials. Initially posts were advertised and applications were then evaluated against the post requirements and a shortlist of suitable candidates was drawn up.

Thereafter a panel was constituted consisting of a human resources expert, a trade union member and the head of the section within which the new appointment would function. Identical questionnaires with a scoring list that had to be completed by all members of the panel during the interview were then made available.

After the interview the human resources expert then totalled the scores and informed all panel members of the outcome, with a recommendation of the most suitable candidate in terms of the panel’s joint scoring. In other words, a very objective and fair procedure for staff appointments.

With time, however, something strange began to happen. One day your personal assistant informed you that so-and-so wanted to meet you as a newly appointed staff member. You meet the person, but have never in your life heard his or her name, even though you were part of the panel that was supposed to make the appointment on the basis of a very thorough and fair employment practice.

You hide your surprise and ignorance and turn to Human Resources for clarification. No, they say, an instruction had been given by the responsible politician that the stranger you had met for the first time was to be appointed in your department.

As if that were not bad enough, you discover that the appointed person who has to evaluate multi-million-rand new projects for viability had made evaluations of schoolchildren’s progress at primary school and is well known to the responsible politician and has thus been blessed with a job opportunity for which he was not even nearly suitable.

The consequences for the spending of millions of rands of the taxpayer’s money on projects regarding which the official has not the slightest understanding on which to make recommendations do not bother the politician for a moment. On the contrary, it gives the same politician more room for favouritism further down the chain to project implementation; and of course to decisions about who and on what conditions will be designated as beneficiaries of the project.

I sincerely hope that my account of personal experiences of how the ANC succeeded in hollowing out the South African public service will open eyes to the enormous damage the ANC has done to decent and competent state administration.

Little has changed since my own voluntary departure from the public service under the ANC. On the contrary, it has become bigger and clumsier and more corrupt, with few exceptions. It is mostly now what is referred to as a “job shop”: employment of large numbers of “workers” to let taxpayers’ money and service benefits end up in cadres’ pockets in order to buy their loyalty and ensure their cooperation to make corruption on a massive scale possible.

I conclude with a quotation from Prof. Koos Malan’s article to which I referred and which prompted me to share what I experienced at first hand of the South African tragedy of public service collapse. In an attempt to sound more positive about how the collapse can be reversed, if it is indeed possible, I give the professor the last word:

“… once the culture of voluntary compliance with the norms (in this case the norms of public office) has largely disappeared, the structures of law and a Constitution, including courts and commissions of inquiry, can no longer correct it.

Only a replacement by a constitutional order or orders with new ruling elites and accompanying new values, including a corrected sense for public office, can do this.”

Piet du Plessis is a retiree with a long history of applied socio-economic development. A liberated Afrikaner who has moved beyond self-flagellation and believes that he has been freed to live out his cultural pride and values, and to proclaim them openly when appropriate.

Written By Dr. Oluwaseun Adeoye Oyebamiji

Africa’s giving culture is visible in places that formal statistics often miss. Money moves through families, religious institutions, neighbourhoods, mutual-aid arrangements and formal foundations.

Research on African philanthropy describes solidarity, reciprocity and mutual assistance as important features of giving, alongside its religious and institutional forms. Evidence from Ghana [1] shows that giving operates through a mixture of religious, familial, community and formal philanthropic channels, though the available evidence remains too fragmented to treat this pattern as representative of the continent as a whole.

The puzzle is not whether Africans give. They clearly do. It is whether some of that capacity for private mobilisation could also support the production of new knowledge.

That is a question about institutions, not about generosity.

We do not know how much Africans give

The first difficulty is knowing how much giving actually occurs.

The OECD [2] notes that much domestic philanthropic activity in Africa remains inadequately captured in international statistics, and calls for better mapping of the sector. This matters because the visible figures mostly describe formal organisations and recorded flows, while a great deal of giving moves through informal or relational channels that no register captures.

Nigeria illustrates the measurement problem. An OECD [3] survey invited 56 domestic foundations to participate, and only 12 completed it. The OECD cautioned that the low response rate and small sample did not permit generalisations about Nigeria’s domestic philanthropic sector.

We therefore know less about African private giving than the rhetoric around African generosity sometimes suggests.

The research funding gap is clearer

The weakness of research financing is easier to document.

UNESCO’s [4] latest figures put research and development expenditure in sub-Saharan Africa at 0.38% of GDP in 2023, compared with a global average of 1.92%. The World Bank similarly reports that most sub-Saharan African countries remain below the African Union’s 1% R&D benchmark.

An earlier UNESCO [5] analysis found that R&D in Africa was mainly a government and university activity, with private-sector involvement marginal in most countries, South Africa being an important exception.

These figures describe a weak research system. They do not, however, tell us why private wealth and philanthropy have not become larger sources of research finance.

Correlation is not an explanation

That distinction is where the real question begins.

Evidence can establish strong traditions of giving and weak private participation in research without establishing that one explains the other. A correlation between two weakly measured phenomena is not a mechanism.

Current evidence does not support the conclusion that wealthy Africans prefer consumption, religious giving, ceremonies or patronage to research. Nor can we say that African philanthropy is predominantly religious. The evidence is too incomplete and the continent too diverse for either claim.

The more useful question is narrower.

If societies already possess durable mechanisms for mobilising private resources around religion, family and community, why have equally visible mechanisms not developed around research, experimentation and independent knowledge?

Why might donors hesitate?

Several explanations are plausible, but each remains a question for investigation rather than a finding.

Research produces uncertain and delayed returns, and its value is difficult for a donor to assess before results emerge. A donor may also find it easier to identify an immediate beneficiary than to evaluate a university laboratory, a research institute or a policy experiment.

Institutional capacity matters too. Where research organisations lack strong governance, transparent evaluation or credible mechanisms for managing private funds, potential donors may hesitate to commit.

Family and community obligations shape giving decisions in ways that formal appeals rarely account for, and immediate social needs compete with investments whose benefits may arrive years later.

None of these explanations should be treated as established without comparative evidence across countries.

Private initiative is not foreign to Africa

A market-based reading of this problem need not be imported from elsewhere.

As George Ayittey and other scholars of African economic history have shown, precolonial African societies had traditions of trade, entrepreneurship, customary property, mutual aid and decentralised economic organisation.

Those societies were diverse and should not be romanticised, but markets and voluntary economic activity are not foreign to African experience.

The question today is whether those traditions of private initiative and collective action can find new institutional expression in research.

Spread the risk

Research is an uncertain investment, and that is an argument for spreading the risk rather than concentrating it.

Governments, businesses, foundations and individuals can each bear different risks and support different kinds of ideas. The aim is not to replace public research with private philanthropy, but to widen the sources of capital available for discovery.

Africa already has institutions capable of mobilising private resources. The unresolved question is whether some of that capacity can be connected to universities, independent research organisations and experimentation.

We do not yet know whether existing giving patterns and weak private participation in R&D are connected at all. Answering that would require better measurement of private giving and much closer study of how donors actually choose between competing causes.

It is precisely the question worth investigating.

Dr. Oluwaseun Adeoye Oyebamiji is a development economist and agricultural policy researcher whose work examines food security, poverty, markets, agricultural policy and economic development, particularly in Africa. His research combines empirical evidence with policy analysis to examine contemporary economic and development issues.

Sources

[1] Owusu-Ansah, M., & Moyo, B. (2025). “Individual giving in Ghana: A self-determination theory approach to giving.” VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 36(1), 43–59.

[2] OECD (2026). Private Philanthropy for Development (Third Edition): Taking Stock of Philanthropy’s Contribution to Development.
https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2026/03/private-philanthropy-for-development-third-edition_c4f4bea1/98e676c0-en.pdf
Accessed 15 August 2026.

[3] OECD (2022). Domestic Philanthropy for Development and Gender Equality in Nigeria.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/domestic-philanthropy-for-development-and-gender-equality-in-nigeria_8efe47b4-en.html
Accessed 15 August 2026.

[4] UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2026). 2026 R&D Data Release.
https://www.uis.unesco.org/en/2026-rd-data-release

[5] UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2017). Global Investments in R&D (Fact Sheet No. 42, FS/2017/SCI/42). UNESCO Digital Library.
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000247772

It’s a tough time right now to be a Jew. That’s a statement that’s demonstrably true, but it’s one that can’t be made without a whole slew of caveats if I am to have any hope of not having a veritable cavalcade of keyboard warriors jumping down my throat.

So, yes, it’s also a tough time to be a Palestinian. And it’s a tough time to be trans. Or working class. Or Iranian. Or a person at all really. And certainly, the Jews of 2026 still have it a lot less tough than the Jews of, say, Eastern Europe in the 20th century or Spain in the 15th or England in the 13th.

But the very fact that I have to list those caveats in the first place is precisely the problem. Since Hamas’ brutal invasion of southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Jews worldwide have been on the defensive; reeling from the explosion of antisemitism that erupted worldwide from the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

And yes, that includes those “as a Jews” who will denounce and vilify their own people just to make them look like they’re on the right side of history. What is that, after all, if not a defensive measure?

This is not about “playing the victim” and certainly Jews have survived this long precisely by not allowing ourselves to be defined by victimisation, but it’s impossible to ignore the hypocrisy. In an era when every minority is a protected class and every microaggression an aggravated assault, it is only the Jews that constantly have to qualify every act of antisemitism and it is only the Jews that “don’t count” as a minority in the eyes of the “woke” left.

Author, comedian and proud (secular) Jew, David Baddiel, coined the term “Jews don’t count”, incidentally, in a brilliant book of the same name... and he wrote and published it before the world-altering events of 7 October!

The result of all this isn’t just actual antisemitic attacks of varying degrees of violence, but a pervading sense of being gaslit en masse, compounded by the feeling of no one having our back - at least not against antisemites who share their same political hue.

The Emptiest Barrels...

In truth, though, while the former is undeniable, as Jews, especially Zionist Jews (the vast majority of diaspora Jewry) are constantly called on to doubt even the most obvious and apparent hatred directed towards them, it’s very much not true that we don’t have those who stand with us.

Hell, it’s entirely possible that there are more people that stand with us than against us – it’s just that they tend not to be the ones holding the loudspeakers.

And yet, there are certainly exceptions to this. Anti-Israel sentiment runs rampant in celebrity activism and lines are constantly crossed either into outright antisemitism or into exactly the sort of equivocations that I’ve been talking about, there are those who stand tall and proud against Jew-hatred.

Many of these have been Jews like David Schwimmer (Friends), Emmanuelle Chriqui (Entourage) and Debra Messing (Will and Grace), but there have been non-Jewish celebrities too who have stood up firmly against Jew hate and demonization of the Jewish state, including Nathaniel Buzolic (The Vampire Diaries), Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond), and Andy Buckley (The Office).

Perhaps the most high profile of the latter group in recent weeks, though, is ‘80s pop icon and The Voice judge, Boy George, who first made it very clear in public statements that he would not abandon his Jewish friends to the antisemitic mob and then went on to release a song in commemoration of October 7th that focused especially on those hundreds of young people murdered at the Nova Festival, titled, appropriately, “We Will Dance Again.”

What’s notable here isn’t just that Boy George did this while fully anticipating the inevitable backlash (including ultimately withdrawing from a West End production of Jesus Christ Superstar), but that he demonstrated exactly how to show support for a people without demonizing another and without professing to understand a complex situation more than he actually does.

If only the “pro-Palestinian” (really, anti-Israel) side would learn from his example.

Love vs Hate

This is what Boy George had to say in an interview with UK newspaper, the Telegraph, earlier this year about his support for Jews, especially in the wake of a spate of antisemitic incidents that have rocked the British Jewish community:

“Over the years it’s been a really personal thing. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have compassion for Palestinians, it doesn’t mean that I agree with what’s going on in Israel, but I am always going to defend the people that I love. I have a lot of Jewish friends and there would never be a situation where I’d turn my back on them.”

Note not just what’s said in this quote but what’s not: he is both able to show support for Jews without necessarily supporting the actual policies of the Israeli government, and show compassion for the Palestinian people at the same time. There’s no political grandstanding, just simple humanity rooted in love and support and personal connection.

And lest you think that this is just about diaspora Jewry and not about Israel, one needs only look at the lyrics of We Will Dance Again. The song, which was controversially created through the use of AI (hey, no one’s perfect) takes its title from a mantra of resilience adopted by Israelis in the wake of the 7 October attacks; one that is framed very specifically around the massacre at the Nova festival.

Here, George does get more political. The song literally opens with the verse: “You say genocide, I say war / When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for / Does it get ugly? You bet it does / When I know you wanna kill every last one of us,” and he directly calls out the “pro-Palestinian” crowd when he sings, “You condemn the Jews, with selective memory / Musicians holding flags, mouthing like sheep / Propaganda fuelled by the internet feels so weak.”

The question, obviously, has to be asked: is he overstepping the line here in the way that so many “pro-Palestinian” activists are by opining on a complicated political situation with simple slogans? Am I just being a hypocrite for condemning the hateful “anti-Zionist” rhetoric employed by everyone from Vanessa Redgrave to Mark Ruffalo, but excusing Boy George for doing the same from the opposite direction just because he’s on “my side”?

I don’t think so. And the reason I don’t, gets to the very heart of my problem with so much pro-Palestinian activism. It’s the reason why I put “pro-Palestine” in quotation marks and prefer to call the movement what it is: anti-Israel.

How To Be an Ally

Before getting into the stark difference between George’s message and that of the anti-Israel movement, one thing worth pointing out is that on a most basic level, We Will Dance Again is a protest song; one that follows a long established tradition in folk and popular music, which uses the medium of song to talk about the pressing issues of the time.

Protest songs have always been blunt, emotionally charged vehicles for what are usually simple messages. So, if Boy George comes across as polemical in the song, and doesn’t delve into the complex history of the region, well, that’s very much in line with every protest song from This Land is Your Land through Masters of War through The Streets of Minneapolis.

There is a massive, qualitative difference between writing a protest song and using your celebrity to lecture people about things that you either don’t properly understand or that you oversimplify to suit your political agenda: be it ending an awards speech by shouting “free Palestine!” or lecturing mere mortals about the wonders of socialism just after cashing a 20 million dollar pay check for your work in a single movie.

Again, note the massive difference between the polemical passion of We Will Dance Again and the compassionate but humble response that George gives in his Telegraph interview.

More than just the medium, though, is the difference between Boy George’s message and that of most of the anti-Israel movement. While George defends Israel for daring to fight back against a foreign army (that’s what Hamas is, at minimum) that massacred, tortured, raped and kidnapped hundreds of its citizens or foreign nationals within its borders, and calls out the explosion of antisemitism worldwide that followed in its wake, he does so in a way that neither excuses Israel when it does go beyond its remit of defence nor when it fails to live up to its liberal-democratic ideals.

He also certainly doesn’t vilify all Palestinians, Arabs and/or Muslims, let alone questions the Palestinian right to self-determination and never presents himself as anything like a geopolitical expert.

Can we really say the same about the majority of the “pro-Palestinian” movement - at least its loudest component - and its attitude towards “Zionists” and the “Zionist Entity”? I think unfortunately not.

I am grateful, above all else, to Boy George for his unshakeable, proud support for the Jewish people, but I’m also grateful for his showing the world how to be an “ally”; how to stand with a people without demonizing another. I can only hope that, AI-assisted or not, his vitally important message doesn’t fall on deaf ears.

Ilan Preskovsky is a Johannesburg-based freelance writer, who has covered everything from international politics to Jewish culture/ religion to film and TV reviews. His work has been featured online on the likes of News24, Popverse and BizNews, and in print in Business Day, Jewish Life Magazine and the Star, among others.

The City of Johannesburg’s trading services are depleting resources because no one holds a residual claim on their performance.

City Power and Johannesburg Water generate revenue; however, their cash is transferred into a central municipal account. Surpluses are absorbed into the general fund, while deficits are covered by ratepayers, national transfers, or additional borrowing.

Managers face few personal consequences for high losses or poor collection rates. The result is predictable: water losses approaching 45%, electricity losses around 27%, mounting arrears, and an infrastructure backlog measured in hundreds of billions of rands. The Austrian school of economics has long warned that, without residual claimancy, resources are systematically misallocated. Johannesburg provides a textbook example.

Residual claimancy is the right to retain what remains after all costs have been met, or to bear the shortfall when they have not. In a private business, this claim is held by the owner or shareholders. Their wealth increases with the efficient use of resources and decreases with waste.

In a municipal utility, the residual is diffuse. Political appointees, bureaucrats, and elected councillors neither pocket the surplus nor personally fund the deficit. The costs are socialised across residents and national taxpayers, while the benefits of careful management are limited and delayed. Soft budgets and the expectation of bailouts further undermine fiscal discipline.

There are a couple of practical reforms that can reintroduce residual claimancy without requiring full privatisation or a political revolution. These reforms fit within the existing Municipal Systems Act of 2000 and the Municipal Finance Management Act of 2003, and are already partially practised in better-run metropolitan areas.

The first step is the genuine ring-fencing of the trading services. City Power and Johannesburg Water must become properly capitalised entities that retain their own surpluses and absorb their own losses. The practice of cash sweeping into the metro’s central account must cease.

Each entity should publish audited full-cost accounts that include realistic maintenance and capital charges. Management and boards should operate under performance contracts that link remuneration and continued employment to measurable outcomes such as collection rates, reductions in physical and commercial losses, and adherence to maintenance standards.

When an entity generates a surplus after meeting its obligations, it retains the residual for reinvestment or debt reduction. Conversely, if it incurs a deficit due to inefficiency or poor credit control, it must reduce costs or adjust tariffs within a regulated band rather than drawing on the general rates account. This arrangement effectively makes the entity a residual claimant. Those closest to the pipes and wires suddenly have a vested interest.

Ring-fencing alone is insufficient if the residual still vanishes into bureaucratic opacity. The second reform ensures the residual is visible and felt by ratepayers. Surpluses remaining after full cost recovery and prudent reinvestment should translate into tangible relief: a rates rebate, a freeze on tariff increases, or a dividend-style credit on municipal accounts.

Deficits resulting from operational failures or non-payment should be recovered transparently from the same rate base or through targeted tariff adjustments, rather than concealed within national equitable-share allocations or soft loans.

Residents who pay directly experience the consequences. Efficient service reduces their bills, while persistent waste increases them. Although this feedback loop is less sophisticated than private shareholding, it is far more effective than the current system, in which municipal deficits are socialised nationally and surpluses disappear.

Neither of these reforms will work without credible enforcement of payment. Residual claimancy collapses when free-riders can consume without contributing. The culture of non-payment, coupled with weak collection, must be confronted if there is to be any hope of rescuing South African municipalities.

Prepaid metering, consistent disconnection of non-payers (including those politically connected), and rigorous credit control are therefore prerequisites for any attempt to implement these reforms. Cape Town’s higher collection rates (97% compared to Johannesburg’s 83%) demonstrate that rather than demography political will determines outcomes. Johannesburg can and should adopt these methods without replicating the politics to which they are so inclined.

Critics may claim that these measures are “anti-poor.” However, the opposite is true. Collapsing infrastructure and unreliable supply already disproportionately affect the poorest residents. Cross-subsidisation that rewards non-payment while penalising those who pay accelerates the departure of formal customers and deepens the downward spiral.

Residual claimancy compels the system to address scarcity directly rather than obscure it with transfers. It aligns the interests of managers, paying residents, and the long-term health of the network. More importantly, it cultivates a culture in which everyone in society has some degree of skin in the game, thereby facilitating the enforcement of accountability mechanisms.

These steps are evolutionary. They require no constitutional amendment nor sudden ideological conversion of the electorate. They simply apply the basic insight that people allocate resources more carefully when they retain the residual.

Johannesburg’s and other municipalities’ current funding models treat trading services as common pools to be raided. Ring-fencing restores a clear residual at the entity level, while ratepayer feedback reinstates a diluted but genuine residual at the resident level. Together, they begin to replace political allocation with something closer to economic discipline.

Residual claimancy does not abolish local government; it merely insists that those who manage scarce resources face the consequences of their decisions, and that those who pay for the services see the results reflected in their own accounts.

Economic liberty in Johannesburg must start with these unglamorous incentives. Without them, the lights remain off, the taps stay dry, and the country’s economic engine continues its march towards serfdom.

Zakhele Mthembu has BA Law LLB from the University of the Witwatersrand, and is the Policy Officer at the Free Market Foundation.

Joblessness in South Africa isn’t some freak accident thrust upon our country by natural disaster or even historical legacy. Our rising unemployment rate is the very expected outcome of policies that are designed to hurt businesses and withhold opportunities from the jobless.

As of the latest unemployment figures from StatsSA, 33.6% of South Africans are unemployed as of Q2:2026. This is up from 33.6% in the previous quarter, representing 345,000 additional unemployed South Africans, bringing the total to 8.5 million. This was caused by a combination of jobs being destroyed, but mainly by more people seeking jobs and not being able to find any.

Of course, young people are the hardest hit. 62.8% of people between the ages of 15 and 24 are unemployed.

All these stats rise when you expand the definition of unemployment to not just be job seekers failing to find a job but also include people who have given up and just accepted that they will never find a job. The estimated unemployment rate with the broader measurement is 43.8%.

If you further expand to workers who are employed but need or want more hours to earn a sufficient income, the rate rises to 46.3%.

Unemployment has far-reaching consequences for society and is arguably South Africa’s foundational issue.

No income means poverty, starvation, debt, and no future for many South African families. Many turn to crime out of desperation or are unable to afford to fight crime themselves through a well-funded community police.

A lack of independent income saps the dignity from many people, leading to mental health issues, anger, and resentment. Unemployment saps the soul out of a nation’s people.

Unemployed people must rely on welfare and badly run public services to survive, adding to the drain on a fiscus that is running out of taxpayers to fund it.

Unemployment is a vicious cycle that exacerbates all the major issues in this country. Solving it should be the number one priority for any government in power or political party seeking election.

Yet, the present Government of National Unity (GNU) and ruling African National Congress (ANC) have not only failed to address unemployment; they continue to back the very policies causing the destruction of jobs.

Since the establishment of the GNU, the Democratic Alliance (DA) as the largest junior partner has failed to stand up to the ANC and demand the necessary reforms to fix this country. Rather, the DA has conceded and compromised at almost every turn. It is as if the DA read that “politics is the art of compromise” and decided to rush straight to giving up.

The DA manifesto is not horrible. On paper, the party seems to understand what the country needs.

Deregulation. Cutting red tape. Making it easier and clearer to hire and fire. Weakening dominant trade unions and preventing collective bargaining from destroying entire industries.

Dozens of international studies and cases have proven that less rigid labour markets that allow for businesses to set their own agreements with their own employees are necessary for fighting unemployment. South Africa lags the rest of the OECD and G20 countries due to our strict labour laws that make employment a burden.

But the ANC is functionally still the ruling party, as the GNU refuses to set ultimatums to pass the reforms and deregulation needed to fix this country.

Unfortunately, the ANC is not truly concerned with unemployment. An unemployed populace is easier to control. The desperate and hungry don’t become politically literate. They accept welfare grants with understandable relief and will listen to propaganda that the ANC is the giver of gifts and that any other party would strip them of this life line.

Income earners are harder to control. They can pay for education. They can leave the country. They start becoming entitled due to their paying tax. The ANC doesn’t want to rule a wealthy democracy. It wants to rule a destitute fiefdom.

The trade unions, COSATU notable as an ally of the ANC, also have a vested interest in maintaining unemployment. Their bargaining power stems from a limited supply of workers. They can make demands and force employers into accepting disastrously high wage increases because labour laws and union intervention make it harder for employers to find alternative workers.

Trade unions don’t want extra competition for their members. So, they will lobby to restrict new workers from entering the workplace, and lowering the cost of labour.

Most pertinently, both the ANC, the trade unions and much of South Africa’s political class are devout socialists. They are deluded by their ideology and do not care for reality. Unemployment numbers don’t matter. Only transformation. Poverty doesn’t matter. Only the revolution.

We cannot keep looking for solutions to joblessness through the ANC in its present form. The only thing that can save this country is a true free market that allows employers and employees to be independent adults, entering into contracts on their own terms based on their own needs – without an intrusive, selfish and stupid government getting in the way.

Nicholas Woode-Smith is the Managing Editor of the Rational Standard and a senior associate of the Free Market Foundation. He writes in his personal capacity.

All experienced political analysts warn that the ANC’s ability to mobilise voters must never be underestimated. This applies even to their current efforts in the run-up to the November 2026 local elections, which many analysts regard as extremely weak, and rightly so, as I myself recently pointed out in an article on OntLaer.

Moreover, I recently watched two podcasts from highly credible organisations that were so full of laughter one could have mistaken them for comedy. Yet the topic under discussion was indeed the ANC’s clumsy election campaign. The discussions can be viewed here and here.

Don’t write the ANC off just yet

There are, however, reasons not to write the ANC off completely just yet.

The ANC brand remains a powerful one with a magical attraction for millions upon millions of South Africans. Their historical credibility as the liberators of the oppressed black South African population still carries loyalty value among substantial numbers of South Africans.

The ANC is also by far the dominant “partner” in the GNU, with political power that is shamelessly used by party members in government to “buy” support in various ways. Officials in state departments, local authorities and state-owned enterprises also feel they owe the ANC something for their positions and for keeping them. This is a strong incentive that extends to dependent family members who likewise realise where their livelihood comes from.

Then consider the nearly four out of every ten South Africans who receive some form of social grant from the government every month, for which they thank the ANC.

Nor should one forget the large numbers of businesspeople who owe their contracts to the ANC’s corrupt tender awards. They obtained their contracts through bribery, and their next award or contract extension has a corrupt ANC politician and official at the head of the corruption chain.

These ANC strengths, many of them distasteful in the mouths of excluded cadres and ordinary South Africans without access to the corruption chain, will again convince many voters rather to vote once more for “his master’s voice.”

Nevertheless, all indications are that the ANC’s support will decline considerably compared with previous elections. This obviously works in favour of alternative political parties, but unfortunately it appears that many voters disillusioned by the ANC’s pathetic record as governors will rather not vote at all than vote for another political party.

What happens when the ANC loses power?

With all indications pointing to the ANC being considerably weaker after the November 2026 elections than in any previous period, there is now much speculation and scenario-building about the possible consequences of the ANC’s significant weakening.

Certain outcomes can be predicted with reasonable certainty, such as the increase in coalition governments in local authority areas, and that Zuma’s MKP will reign supreme in KwaZulu-Natal and even emerge elsewhere as a factor that will have to be taken seriously.

Many current ANC councillors will also lose their positions, estimated at between 500 and 1,000, which will be extremely traumatic from a personal perspective, as livelihoods will suddenly disappear. Far too many current councillors lack the knowledge and experience to survive outside the patronage system and without the ANC’s corrupt practices.

Their reactions are unpredictable, but we know that a cornered cat makes desperate leaps. One counter-reaction could be to make life as difficult as possible for the new councillors. The disturbing number of political murders in South Africa also makes it possible that some new councillors’ lives may even be at stake.

This could nullify many of the benefits of change in administrations that may flow from the elections.

Frans Cronjé’s surprising argument

It is perhaps against the above background that the respected and highly capable Dr Frans Cronjé of the online newspaper The Common Sense recently said strange things, in my opinion, in a video interview with Gabriël Makin of the same newspaper.

In fact, I found his views shocking.

Readers can watch the full interview here.

Why am I personally shocked?

My interpretation of what Dr Frans is saying is that we must show the ANC mercy in its hour of weakness. For pragmatic reasons we must not try too hard to hold the ANC to account. We should rather look the other way and try to get them, as the ANC, to correct our destructive economic policies so that our economy can grow properly again.

In a growing economy it will not really be necessary to stress about corruption, because the impact will not be destructive. Corruption is in any case a given everywhere.

I repeat that I am merely reflecting here my own interpretation of what I believe I hear Dr Frans believes would be a good approach.

I am also in favour of pragmatism as he is, when it is appropriate, but I feel much more strongly about ethics and the upholding of law and justice, rather than letting unashamed scoundrels “get away with” their transgressions by letting them off.

That is the equivalent of giving in to the demands of an extortionist. It merely leads the extortionist to believe he can continue with what he is doing.

Don’t compromise with socialists

Perhaps I would have been less sceptical about Dr Frans Cronjé’s points of view, as I have interpreted them, if I had not, at almost the same time as the podcast I referred to, come across a brilliant opinion piece by an equally respected and knowledgeable opinion-former, David Ansara, chief executive of the Free Market Foundation.

The article, titled “Don’t Compromise with Socialists,” was published on 21 August 2026 in The Common Sense of none other than Dr Frans Cronjé himself.

The title says it all, and its content can be summarised in the following words of David’s:

“For those of us who want to halt the advance of socialism through our society, it is therefore necessary to offer firm and responsible forms of resistance. The alternative is to seek compromise, but the best that can achieve is to buy you a little time. The ANC understands and values the balance of forces.”

David specifically warns against what I understand Frans is saying should happen with regard to the socialist-oriented ANC.

David argues that compromise with hostile or socialist-oriented policies is a strategic trap that only delays the damage, and that firm, principled resistance is rather required.

That sounds to me like the polar opposite of Frans’s line of thinking as I have interpreted it.

Ansara describes the ANC’s Marxist-Leninist NDR as a gradual strategy that advances on the basis of the “balance of forces.” Resistance can force temporary retreats, but that is tactics; pressure resumes later.

Firm, responsible resistance is therefore essential to halt the advance of socialism. Compromise buys only limited time.

The ANC understands resistance

That underhanded ANC way of doing things, according to legend, also came from the mouth of former president Zuma, who reportedly once remarked something to the following effect:

If you inflict a stab wound on your enemy with your bayonet and you hit bone, meaning there is resistance, first withdraw the bayonet and then later look for a softer spot for the death blow.

Clearly his metaphor was intended to describe the strategy of attack followed by withdrawal if it is not fully successful, which is of course aimed at making your enemy believe he has survived your assault, only then to deliver the unexpected death blow that was the original intention of the attack.

The same, in my opinion, will apply to handling with kid gloves the ANC criminals who have corruptly stolen taxpayers’ money for their own personal benefit, as it sounds Dr Frans feels must happen for pragmatic reasons.

But what about principles in that case?

Can the failure to act against corruption for pragmatic reasons, which, according to Ansara’s views, will in any case be accepted by the ANC only in order to buy time to implement their inflexible Marxist-Leninist ideology of socialism at full steam again once they have regained power “by hook or by crook,” to use my words, be justified?

No mercy for the ANC

On the basis of two other very recent podcasts, under the banners of the Institute of Race Relations’ Daily Friend and the Free Market Foundation’s Rational Standard, respectively, I found justification for my position of no mercy for the ANC now that its hegemony is crumbling.

Participants in those podcast debates included big names such as Dr Martin van Staden, Nicholas Lorimer, Hermann Pretorius, Nicholas Woode-Smith and Zakhele Mthembu.

They also advocated a no-mercy attitude towards the ANC, and the words “Machiavellian actions” as necessary to break the ANC’s back came up repeatedly in the conversations.

Yes indeed, if there is the slightest chance of destroying or weakening the unreliable and underhanded ANC’s hegemonic grip on the country, we must not hesitate to do so merely for pragmatic reasons.

Corruption and theft can under no circumstances be overlooked.

Piet du Plessis is a retiree with a long history of applied socio-economic development. He describes himself as a liberated Afrikaner who has moved beyond self-flagellation and believes that he has been freed to live out his cultural pride and values, and to proclaim them openly when appropriate.

In the previous essays I argued that human beings are simultaneously rational and dependent. Because individuals cannot reliably solve every problem they encounter across a lifetime, they create institutions to mediate unavoidable dependency while preserving or expanding human agency. From these institutions, authority emerges as a necessary consequence of organised cooperation.

Institutions therefore exist for a purpose. They are means through which human beings overcome limitations they cannot overcome alone.

The emergence of authority, however, creates a further problem. Once an institution exists, someone must maintain it. Decisions must be made, resources allocated, rules interpreted, and conflicts resolved. Authority is not an accidental feature of institutions; it is required for them to function. But authority also introduces a new possibility: that the institution may begin to serve purposes other than those that originally justified its existence.

This is the beginning of corruption in its older and broader sense. Not merely dishonesty, theft or personal enrichment — although those are important forms of corruption — but a change in orientation: a movement away from the purpose that justified its existence.

A measurement system is corrupted when the measurement becomes more important than the reality it was intended to represent. An institution becomes corrupted when the mechanisms created to serve human purposes become increasingly directed toward purposes of their own.

This possibility exists because institutions, once created, develop complexity beyond their original design. They acquire expertise, procedures, traditions, resources and internal structures. These are necessary. Without them, institutions cannot function. Yet the very structures that allow an institution to operate also create the possibility of drift. The institution begins to develop its own internal logic.

The question subtly changes. Instead of asking “Does this institution continue to serve the purpose for which it exists?”, the question becomes “How does this institution preserve itself, expand its capacity and maintain its authority?”

The distinction may appear small, but it is fundamental. The means can gradually become the end.

This process does not require malicious actors. Human beings often understand corruption primarily through the presence of a villain — a corrupt official, a leader abusing power, or an organisation acting dishonestly. Those cases are real and morally significant. But a villain is not required for corruption to occur.

A system can drift without anyone consciously seeking to corrupt it. Individuals may act in good faith while responding rationally to the incentives, measurements and expectations created within the institution. People may protect procedures because procedures represent stability. They may defend authority because authority allows the institution to function. They may prioritise institutional survival because survival appears necessary for continued service. The problem emerges when preserving the institution becomes confused with fulfilling the purpose of the institution.

The villain does not create the possibility of corruption. The structure creates the opportunity. The villain exploits, accelerates or exposes a vulnerability that already exists.

This does not mean that individuals are irrelevant. Human choices matter. Moral responsibility matters. Institutions are ultimately shaped by the people who operate within them. But a society that relies only on finding virtuous people to exercise authority misunderstands the nature of the problem. A well-designed institution cannot depend solely upon the character of those who hold authority. It must also contain mechanisms that preserve alignment between authority and purpose.

This is the role of constraint.

Constraint is often misunderstood as a limitation on power. Properly understood, constraint is what gives power direction. A river is constrained by its banks; the constraint does not prevent movement, it makes productive movement possible. In the same way, institutional constraints do not weaken authority; they preserve its alignment with purpose. Constraint therefore should not be understood as hostility toward institutions. It is a recognition that every powerful tool requires guidance if it is to remain useful. Authority without constraint risks becoming detached from the purpose that legitimised it.

The question is therefore not whether institutions should possess authority. They must. The question is whether authority remains accountable to the human problem it was created to solve.

The standard established in the previous essays remains the same. Does the institution preserve or expand human agency? Does it leave individuals more capable of sustaining their lives and pursuing their values? Or does it gradually make individuals more dependent upon the institution itself?

Human beings cannot escape dependency. Institutions are necessary because dependency is unavoidable. Authority is necessary because institutions require coordination. The challenge is ensuring that the structures created to overcome human limitations do not become new sources of limitation themselves.

The greatest danger is not that institutions exist. It is that the means by which human beings pursue their purposes may eventually forget that they were created to serve those purposes.

Bryan Theunissen is a South African doctor with a stubborn streak of optimism. Even after years of watching bad policy win, he still insists on pointing to better choices.

Eskom is being celebrated as though the crisis is over. But the truth is far less comforting: Eskom’s apparent turnaround is not proof of recovery. It is proof that a failing monopoly can still survive while the country around it continues to pay the price.

Join Nicholas Woode-Smith, Zakhele Mthembu and Ayanda Zulu on the Rational Standard Podcast as they unpack the myth of Eskom’s recovery, the reality behind its apparent success, and why South Africans should be deeply sceptical of claims that the power utility has turned the corner.

While loadshedding may have eased and Eskom may be presenting signs of improvement, the deeper structural problems remain exactly where they have always been. Eskom is still a state-backed monopoly. It still operates without meaningful market discipline. It still depends on a distorted system that rewards political control rather than efficiency, competition and service to the public.

At the heart of the issue is a basic reality: Eskom’s apparent success does not mean South Africa has a healthy electricity system. A monopoly can extract more money, raise tariffs and protect its own position while the broader economy suffers. That is not recovery. That is a monopolist surviving at the expense of households, businesses and long-term growth.

In this episode, we examine why Eskom’s so-called turnaround should not be mistaken for real reform, why state monopolies are structurally incapable of delivering abundance, and why South Africa’s energy future depends on competition, decentralisation and privatisation rather than renewed faith in a broken institution.

We also discuss the deeper political and economic problem: South Africa keeps treating Eskom’s temporary improvement as proof that the model works, when in reality the crisis is built into the model itself.

Is Eskom actually recovering, or is South Africa once again being asked to celebrate a failing monopoly for becoming slightly less disastrous?

Israel and the Jews have, once again, been at the centre of some controversy over the past fortnight. Or more specifically, Israel and the Jews in relation to acclaimed actor and outspoken activist, Mark Ruffalo (The Hulk, Poor Things). The actor made some comments about the controversial merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Brothers Discovery – the two major entertainment behemoths that make up a sizeable portion of the American media landscape whose monopoly-forming merger has cleared its required regulatory reviews but is still being challenged by a coalition of US states – that seemed to draw on classic antisemitic canards about “Jewish power” against Paramount CEO David Ellison and his father Larry, while also bizarrely bringing the so-called “genocide” in Gaza into his criticisms of a business merger. This resulted in quick condemnation by Paramount and a just as speedy rebuttal by Ruffalo against allegations of antisemitism.

Meanwhile, at the same time this was happening, Ruffalo and some twenty other actors known for their work in Marvel movies made news by signing a petition calling on the United Nations and the international community to force Israel to release Marwan Barghouti: the infamous Palestinian leader, known by supporters as the “Palestinian Mandela”, who sits in jail after being convicted for the murder of five people during the Second Intifada and the attempted murder of another.

That Ruffalo and his Marvel comrades in arms have made millions of dollars playing characters created by Jews (usually Stan Lee and/or Jack Kirby – the latter of whom was an especially proud Jew and listed a three week visit to Israel as one of the highlights of his life) is an irony that appears lost on them.

Ruffalo: Antisemitic, Antisemite or Something Else?

Barghouti is the rather more complicated case, so to start off with something slightly more straightforward, let’s look at what exactly Mark Ruffalo was accusing Ellison of, whether those statements are antisemitic, and what, if anything, they reveal about Ruffalo, who has been constantly and virulently anti-Israel over the past decade.

This latest controversy all started on Friday, 21 August, when Ruffalo posted on social media an old clip of Paramount board member, Safra Catz talking about the “really profoundly scary technologies” developed by Larry Ellison’s database management company, Oracle, that were used to assist the Israeli military in its war against Hamas. In his commentary on the video, Ruffalo remarked, “look how she revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle... [which] will probably be merged into one of the largest media corporations in the world, and one day be used against you.” Oracle is a database company; he talks of them as weapon manufacturers.

He also accused the Ellisons of being “classic oligarchs” and of “powering some of the most destructive and inhuman forces in the world” whose influence would only grow with the merger of Warner Brothers and Paramount. Again, Oracle makes database software.

Now, it has to be said, there are a great many reasons for why Ruffalo and many others like him are vehemently opposed to the Paramount/ Warners merger. There’s the alleged influence of Donald Trump on Ellison and how he runs his company. There’s the real risk of massive job losses that would come with such a merger. There’s the gross violations of anti-trust laws that would inevitably accompany one family controlling such a large chunk of the entertainment and news industries. These are incredibly persuasive arguments and have all but entirely persuaded me of the merger being a bad idea.

But, as a spokesperson for Paramount said, “[we are] troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute. Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong – they’re a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe.”

I would love to be able to write off Ruffalo’s statements as an unfortunate but well-intentioned plea against corporate greed if not for the simple inescapable truth that he has a very long history of singling out the Jewish state and only the Jewish state for the greatest evils in the world. Does this make Mark Ruffalo an antisemite? Well, as a fan of his work, I certainly hope not. It’s entirely possible that he is just another sincere but not-very-smart celebrity sounding off about something he doesn’t know much about.

Worth noting too is that this particular conflict had caught his attention by 2014. By 2016, the year that Donald Trump was first elected, the left took a turn to the extreme in response; taking increasingly hard-line positions against anything even remotely associated with Trump – including and most especially Israel. And whatever else you may say about Ruffalo, he’s a hell of a lefty.

At this point, though, I’m not even sure if that matters. There is, after all, only so much that someone can claim ignorance for their actions. And Ruffalo has proven, repeatedly, that he has absolutely no intention to educate himself beyond his cheap, ignorant activism.

In his response to Paramount’s allegations, where he wrote off claims of antisemitism as “appalling and fundamentally dishonest”, he noted that criticisms of the Israeli government do not make him antisemitic and that he was well within his rights to warn of the many real dangers of this merger. He is right on both points, but demonization is not the same as criticism and there are more than enough valid reasons to be against the merger without reverting to conspiracy theories built around Jewish power and money.

At the heart of his open letter, though, was the insistence that, “my views come from my own political convictions and should never be interpreted as hostility toward Jewish people, for whom I have deep love and respect. Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.”

Even if we assume that he’s not just employing the “my best friend is Jewish” response to allegations of antisemitism, there’s a real irony at the heart of that statement when, in September 2025, he joined notorious anti-Israel pundit, Mehdi Hasan, on his podcast and spoke, with some pride, at how he refused to listen to Jewish and pro-Israel voices who dare to offer contrary views about Israel being an apartheid state and the war in Gaza being a genocide.

Well, Mark, which one is it? Or are you “profoundly shaped” only by those Jews that already agree with you?

Celebs for Terrorism?

And then there’s the matter of his involvement with the petition to free Marwan Barghouti. Barghouti himself is far too complicated to get into here – his case deserves, at the very least, a dedicated article by itself – and, frankly, for all that I’ve read up on him, I’ve yet to entangle the various threads that have caused Barghouti to be considered either a bloodthirsty terrorist or the last great hope for the two-state solution. Or both.

But that’s the point.

These celebrities are quick to readily accept the positive spin on Barghouti, without properly reckoning with the fact that he was convicted of orchestrating the murder of five civilians and the attempted murder of another during the Second Intifada, of which Israeli intelligence sees him as one of its main architects. This is not something to swipe under the rug and if you are to talk about “freeing Marwan”, it has to be properly reckoned with and understood. Which, I’m sorry, none of the celebrities have shown the vaguest interest in doing so.

It’s really besides the point that for many, if not most, if not all, of these celebrities, this is not about hatred of Jews or even of Israel. I’m sure for many of them it comes from being rightly horrified by the photos and videos coming out of Gaza or from jumping onto the latest virtue-signalling bandwagon to bolster their public image or from deferred hatred of Donald Trump.

Because even if we assume the very best of intentions on their part, that doesn’t change how dangerous their ill-informed, reckless, grossly simplified rhetoric continues to be. It gives permission to attack “Zionists” worldwide and to underestimate antisemitic hate. Perhaps even worse, by creating false or simplistic narratives to fit into their limited moral view of the world, they empower the most extremist voices on both sides and end up hurting those most directly affected by the conflict.

Celebrities constantly talk about having the responsibility to use their platforms to speak out against what they see as injustice, but when they try tackle tricky subjects like the Middle East without understanding its nuances, conflicting narratives, and myriad complexities, perhaps the most “responsible” thing for them to do is to shut up and listen.

Ilan Preskovsky is a Johannesburg-based freelance writer, who has covered everything from international politics to Jewish culture/ religion to film and TV reviews. His work has been featured online on the likes of News24, Popverse and BizNews, and in print in Business Day, Jewish Life Magazine and the Star, among others.

Written By: Christopher Paul Szabo

We are living in the age of AI. Wherever one turns, it is there - either overtly through direct use or covertly in the background. From nowhere, it is everywhere. From a concept that has its origins in the 1950s , it is the present and the future. Sam Altman, of OpenAI fame (or infamy) claims the singularity has arrived , that the machine is now indeed superior to the human – the arrival of superintelligence. Not just in what it can do, but in that it can decide what to do. Science fiction has become lived reality. But who asked for it ? Who wanted it ? There was no consultation process. A weighing up of risks and benefits. The sales pitch has been “efficiency”. That AI will help humanity to live better. Is that really the case? A supposed quote from Deng Xiao Ping , which may be relevant to the question, when apparently asked by Henry Kissenger his thoughts on the impact of the French Revolution responded: “too soon to tell“.

Indeed, already there are storm clouds on the horizon, never mind the clear and present dangers. As with any new wonder drug, only once unleashed beyond the confines of the tightly controlled and artificial environment of the randomized, placebo controlled, double blind drug trials do we see the unintended consequences...and so called “off label” uses. The GLP 1 agonists are the latest example. They are a class of drugs classified as incretins that mimic the naturally occurring gut hormone (Glucagon Like Peptide-1) that leads to satiety. Originally developed for those with diabetes type II (non-insulin dependent) and now a major money earner beyond the intended target patient population. Weight loss for all, at a cost - not just financial. The consequences and concerns are emerging , not least of all for those who are weight preoccupied, but such is the drive to be thinner that the apparent benefit outweighs any cost. Will AI be the same ?

The litigation against OpenAI is increasing from families of those affected by chatbot linked suicides and emotional distress. The risks are not theoretical, and time will tell to what extent such companies will be held accountable, and at what cost if the litigation is successful. Beyond extreme psychological consequences of chatbot interactions, the odds of at least moderate depression is 30% more likely amongst those using generative AI daily compared to those who don’t. “Efficiency” indeed. But that is the rallying call for uptake of AI - efficiency. A local hospital group has proclaimed that the AI driven hospital is already here and that they believe they are “...on the right side of history.” . Are those who are wary not? Early adoption is one thing, embracing blindly is a concern. Blindly in the sense of no long-term data on impact - both positive or negative. Moreover, the same group is getting ready to begin implementing AI assisted ICU decision making.

In relation to AI, Max Tegmark , a Professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute (a nonprofit focused on reducing global catastrophic risks from advanced technologies) noted that “The worry is it’s going to turn really competent and accomplish goals that aren’t aligned with our goals.” . He has warned of the risks of artificial superintelligence stating that: “humanity may be racing toward its own obsolescence” noting Sam Altman’s statement referenced earlier. AI certainly has a way of doing whatever is required to get the job done, with recently documented ‘sandbox’ escapes and hacking of systems to obtain necessary information to successfully complete a task evoking alarm . AI has no conscience. AI does not experience guilt, or shame. AI is a technology that simulates what is human. It is not human.

What about the environment and data centres? A recent comment by Alan Winde, Premier of the Western Cape suggested that anyone opposed to their being built was hindering future economic growth. This sentiment has been echoed in this very publication. And AI data centres are in the pipeline to be built. At last count there already existed 56 of them, in South Africa, with a load capacity of 350 MW of electricity noting that “1 megawatt can power about 600 to 1,000 average homes at any given moment — in many developed countries.” To address the power need, solar farms are being built . These are not without their own environmental concerns .The case made for construction relates to jobs created of which some are in the moment for construction with others as a consequence related to staffing. Some jobs. These data centres are built by corporations requiring computing power to drive their enterprise, but it is the locals who deal with the consequences – potential loss of agricultural land, power demands that impact local costs and critically, the draining of water supply and aquifers. The life blood of humans, noting recent concerns about water in the Western Cape. But this is not confined to the Western cape with KwaZulu Natal set to build such a data centre with electricity consumption that is “eye watering” and ”… set to consume 25% of Durban’s electricity .”

To dismiss environmental concerns is to ignore stark data released by the United Nations University that details the extent of environmental impact . Relevant data cited by the report included “the water footprint associated with training GPT-4 was about 600 million liters, enough to meet the minimum annual domestic water needs of 81,000 people in Sub-Saharan Africa, or to fill 237 Olympic-sized pools.” noting further “GPT-4’s training energy is equivalent to the annual residential electricity consumption of over 460,000 people in Sub-Saharan Africa.”.

But opposition is growing. Both in the UK and in the USA in the USA with the emerging phenomenon of “anti-tech extremism” . Such sentiments, and related actions, go beyond concerns about the impact of AI on humanity generally and include opposition to data centres. The recent spate of rogue AI incidents has done little to quell such concerns.

The question is whether environmental concerns trump economic development and one sees similar such battles being fought in relation to the search for oil off South Africa’s Indian ocean Wild Coast. In this instance activists successfully, and legally, challenged a corporate giant. The AI battle has an activist driven precedent. Beyond environmental issues, the use of AI in determining eligibility for social grants locally was recently successfully challenged in the North Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) and found to be unconstitutional – albeit that the ruling is being appealed by the Government. Essentially, a human rights issue. Human rights must be at the centre of all debates regarding AI. The human.

Whilst one cannot argue against economic progress driven by greater “efficiency” , the headlong rush to embrace new technology to drive this cannot simply be embraced without appropriate, and meaningful, consultation and debate. People do matter, what it means to be human in this age of AI. To quote Pope Leo XIV from his Magnifica Humanitas : “ When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to use themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.”

Christopher Paul Szabo is an emeritus professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is the host of the podcast “Talking Psychiatry” https://www.youtube.com/@TalkingPsychiatry

There’s a phrase that gets thrown around so easily it almost sounds comforting: hold the government accountable.

It rolls off the tongue like a solution. While it might sound democratic, the more you sit with it, the more it starts to feel like one of those ideas everyone repeats without really asking what it means in practice.

Because… accountable to whom, exactly? And enforced how?

That’s where things start to get uncomfortable.

How do we hold government accountable?

Take the United States. You don’t even have to look far back.

A segment of Donald Trump’s support base has openly criticised him for military escalation and foreign entanglements, despite his earlier positioning as an anti-war candidate. That contradiction is real, and people notice it. They talk about it. They argue about it on TV, on social media, in living rooms.

But does that translate into accountability in any strict sense?

Yes, there’s frustration and public disagreement, but the machinery of state policy keeps moving. Supporters can disagree loudly and still find themselves carried along by decisions they never endorsed.

So, what does “holding accountable” mean there? Voting again in a few years? Writing op-eds? Protesting? Lobbying? At what point does criticism become control?

It’s not a rhetorical question. It’s the whole issue.

Complaint as background noise in Nigeria

Here, the phrase “hold government accountable” is almost part of daily speech. People say it in arguments, in WhatsApp messages, on radio shows, in tweets that disappear into the noise by the next hour.

Complaints are constant - that part is not in doubt. However, the complaints rarely change the behaviour of the institutions being criticised.

Police brutality has scourged Nigeria for decades but was brought to the public eye years ago. The protests were massive, especially the youth-led demonstrations against the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. For a moment, it looked like something might shift.

Then things escalated.

There were widely circulated reports and video evidence alleging violence against protesters, including claims that armed forces were deployed during demonstrations. Different investigations and accounts continue to disagree on details, but what remains widely discussed is the sense that state response moved from containment to force.

Even now, interpretations differ, but the perception many people carry is simple: protest did not translate into accountability.

When people returned to quieter channels – complaints, petitions, media pressure – it didn’t feel like those mechanisms made a difference.

Are elections the answer?

Then there’s the electoral route.

In 2023, Nigeria’s election cycle was widely framed as a test of public dissatisfaction with the ruling party. Opposition supporters and many ordinary voters expressed deep frustration with governance, corruption allegations, and economic hardship.

The expectation – at least in theory – was that voting would function as accountability in action.

The aftermath of the election was greatly disputed. Allegations of irregularities and concerns about the electoral process were widely raised, particularly around transparency and result collation. Supporters of different sides still argue over what happened – even though everyone really knows what happened.

So again, you end up in the same place: competing narratives, competing claims, and no universally accepted mechanism that resolves the disagreement in a way everyone agrees is legitimate.

Which leads to a blunt question people don’t like to ask out loud: If elections are contested, protests are risky, and complaints are ignored… what exactly is “accountability” supposed to be?

Theory vs reality

In theory, accountability sounds like it works like a chain:

people → institutions → consequences → correction

But in practice, the chain often is:

people → complaints → media cycle → institutional continuity

And the missing link is consequence.

Without consequence, accountability becomes empty words; an expectation without enforcement.

That doesn’t mean governments are identical everywhere or that pressure never works. It does work sometimes – slowly, unevenly, and usually after long periods of struggle, but the romantic idea that citizens can simply “hold government accountable” whenever they want starts to look fragile when tested against real power structures.

This is because governments don’t exist as neutral platforms waiting to be corrected. They are systems with their own incentives, security apparatus, political interests, and control over enforcement tools.

That asymmetry matters.

What’s really going on?

At this point, it almost feels like there are two different meanings of the phrase floating around.

One is aspirational: citizens participate, speak, vote, protest, and gradually steer outcomes.

The other is literal: someone can be compelled to change behaviour because consequences are imposed on them.

Only one of those resembles strict accountability.

Here’s the tension nobody resolves cleanly: modern states tend to monopolise the very mechanisms that would enforce accountability against themselves.

Courts, policing, regulation, electoral administration – these are all state-adjacent structures. Even when independent, they operate inside the broader system they are supposed to constrain.

So, when people ask, “Why don’t we just hold them accountable?” it sometimes misses the deeper issue: through what mechanism, exactly, is that supposed to happen when the system itself controls most of the levers?

What happens when peaceful channels fail?

This is where discussions usually get awkward, because if voting is disputed, protests are suppressed or ignored, and institutional complaints don’t produce change, then people are left with a gap between expectation and reality that is hard to ignore.

Historically, that gap has sometimes led to instability or outright rupture, but that is not something most societies want to contemplate, let alone normalise.

Still, avoiding the question doesn’t make it disappear. It just sits there, unresolved. Maybe because the alternative is harder to articulate or harder to face.

Econ Bro (@EconBreau and @EconBreau2 on Twitter/X) is a Nigerian Austrolibertarian economist and an apprentice at the Mises Institute. Under the organisation name “The Freedom Institute” he teaches individual liberty, personal responsibility, private property rights, free markets, and sound money to mostly young people across Nigeria. Econ Bro is an Associate of the Free Market Foundation.

A follow-up to “Word Prisons and the Ethics of the Individual”

“Word Prisons” ended on a sentence worth sitting with: the ethical individual doesn’t act correctly because they were told to. They act well because they’ve thought well.

That sentence quietly assumes something enormous. It assumes there is a someone doing the thinking — a locatable place where reflection happens, judgment gets formed, and a self decides what it will and won’t accept from the inherited categories handed to it. The previous essay spent its energy on the categories: society, proletariat, bourgeoisie, the collective. It showed how a word can arrive pre-loaded with a worldview, and how accepting the word can mean accepting the worldview without ever agreeing to it.

But there is a second, quieter trap sitting right next to the first one, and it is in some ways more dangerous, because it doesn’t target your opinions. It targets the thing forming them.

If words can be built to manage a belief about society, they can just as easily be built to manage a belief about yourself. And once you notice that the word prison can be pointed inward — not at what you think, but at your right to be the one thinking it — a whole second set of specimens comes into view: ego, aloof, narcissist, and eventually the smallest and most loaded word of all, I.

Somewhere in the next few seconds

Somewhere in the next few seconds, something odd is going to happen. You are going to read a sentence, and inside your skull — not beside it, not shared with it, inside it — meaning is going to occur. No one else’s brain will do this work for you. It cannot be outsourced, delegated, or performed by consensus. However crowded the room you’re sitting in, the reading is happening in exactly one place.

We don’t usually notice this, because it costs us nothing to ignore. But an enormous amount of modern moral vocabulary is built on the pretence that it isn’t true — that thought is something that happens between people rather than inside one, that meaning is a kind of weather system passing through populations rather than an event occurring, discretely, in a nervous system.

Society says. We believe. The culture thinks. The community has decided.

These are convenient fictions. Useful shorthand for the fact that many individual nervous systems have, independently, arrived at compatible conclusions. But shorthand becomes something else — something closer to a trick — when we forget it’s shorthand. Society has never said anything. Society has no tongue, no Broca’s area, no glucose-burning act of assembling a sentence out of possibility. Only a person does that. Every time.

This is the fact worth holding before drawing any conclusion from it. Not “the individual is sovereign” — that’s already an argument, and arguments invite counter-arguments. Just the fact: someone has to actually do it. The words are inherited. The doing is not.

The thing that does the doing

Sit with that a moment longer, because it has a strange consequence.

If the words are inherited and only the doing is not, then whatever is doing the doing is not itself made of words. Two people can be handed the identical fifty words and, from them, one produces an apology and the other an insult; the dictionary supplied the words, but it did not supply that choice. Something else made it — something that receives the inherited system whole and then, somehow, operates it. A person can possess every word in a language and say nothing, the way a person can own a piano and never touch the keys. Possession is not use. Something has to sit down and play.

We don’t have a very good name for that something. We reach, by habit, for words like mind or self, and immediately run into the same problem we started with — those too are inherited, handed down with their own accumulated weight, their own instructions for how much to trust the thing they’re naming.

Which puts us in an odd position. We’ve noticed that something must exist to operate the inherited language. And the only tools available for describing that something are more of the same inherited language — which may or may not be describing it accurately.

That is the actual subject of this essay. Not language in general. An inspection — of the specific words we’ve inherited for naming the thing that does the doing, to find out whether each one was built to describe it, or built to manage it.

Because there is a difference. A word can be a lens. A word can also be a leash.

Words on trial

Start with the plainest one. In Latin, ego simply means I — nothing more exotic than that. It is a designation, not an argument: a placeholder for the fact that experience has a location, that when something is seen, thought, wanted or feared, there is a someone to whom it is happening. Somewhere between that modest job and the word’s current use as an accusation, we loaded it with moral freight it was never built to carry. To “have an ego” is now closer to a diagnosis than a description. Strange, when you think about it — the alternative being implied is not a better ego. It’s the absence of a locatable self at all. Nobody ever explains what that would mean, or what would be doing the not-having. The word was never guilty of anything. It simply named a fact modern moral fashion finds awkward to admit — that someone is there — and got vilified for the naming.

Once you’ve seen it happen to one word, you start finding it everywhere. Aloof has an actual paper trail, which makes it a cleaner case. It began at sea, describing a ship keeping clear of a dangerous shore — a matter of distance from something that could wreck you, held for the sake of steering your own course. No contempt for the shore is implied. No claim of superiority to it. Just distance, chosen, for the sake of remaining in command of the vessel. Compare that to what the word is asked to do now. Today aloof names a social defect — insufficient warmth, insufficient absorption into the surrounding current. The word has been quietly re-pointed. It used to describe a sailor’s relationship to danger. Now it describes a person’s relationship to other people, and the distance that was once prudent has become suspect. Nobody voted on this. No one announced the change. The word simply drifted, the way words do, and most people inherited the drifted version without ever being shown the original — without ever being told there was a self at the helm worth crediting for keeping clear of the rocks.

By the time you reach narcissist, the pattern has a name, and this is the word doing the most damage, because it’s the one reached for whenever the thing we noticed at the start of this essay — a locatable self, operating its own inheritance — becomes visible enough to make someone uncomfortable. Confidence gets called narcissism. Independent judgment gets called narcissism. Simple refusal to be argued out of one’s own conclusions gets called narcissism. But the myth itself gives us a more useful picture than the modern usage does. Narcissus is not powerful because he possesses an unusually strong ego. He is incapacitated by his own reflection — fixed in place, unable to look anywhere else, unable to act, unable to leave. (Some etymologists connect the name to narkē, the root behind “narcotic” — numbness, torpor; the link is disputed, but it fits the picture regardless.) A healthy ego is agency. Narcissus is the absence of it: fixation standing in for what should be motion. The word is now deployed against almost exactly the opposite of what it depicts — against people who are, if anything, unusually capable of acting on their own judgment.

Three words, one shape. Each began as an honest description of something ordinary and defensible — a location, a distance, a stillness that isn’t strength at all. Each was quietly re-pointed until it became a way of making a person flinch at his own standing to think for himself. None of them deserved what happened to them. They are not casualties of careless drift; they are casualties of a framing that needed the self to look suspicious, and reached for whatever vocabulary was lying nearest. Which means rescuing them isn’t nostalgia for old dictionaries. It’s just accuracy — putting each word back to naming what it was always naming, before it got conscripted into managing the person who used it.

The last exhibit

Not by argument, notice. By vocabulary. You don’t have to be persuaded out of your own judgment if the words available for describing that judgment have already been rigged to embarrass you out of it — this is a word prison of the same species diagnosed before, except this one isn’t built around society or class. It’s built around you. Its job is not to tell you what to think about the world. Its job is to make you flinch at the fact that there is a you doing the thinking at all.

Which brings the inspection to its smallest and final specimen. Consider the word I.

Every child acquires it late, and acquires it as a correction. For a stretch of early speech, a toddler will refer to himself the way everyone around him refers to him — by name, in the third person. Ben wants juice. Ben’s turn. He is, grammatically, an object in his own sentences, described from the outside before he has the tool to describe himself from within. Then, usually somewhere around his second birthday, the correction arrives. I want juice. Nothing about the child changed in that moment. The wanting was already his; the third-person sentence was simply never adequate to it. What changed was that the grammar finally caught up to a fact that had been true the whole time — that there was a subject there, experiencing, before there was a word to say so.

A self does not require the word I in order to exist. It requires the word in order to be nameable — to itself, and to everyone else. Take the word away, or make it embarrassing to use, and the self doesn’t disappear. It just goes back to being described from the outside, the way the toddler was, before he had the grammar to object. That is what ego, aloof and narcissist turn out to be doing, each in its own smaller way — three words quietly re-engineered to make the grammatical subject flinch, to make him doubt whether he’s entitled to the distance, the confidence, the sheer located thereness that thinking requires. Word Prisons showed how this happens to your picture of society. This is how it happens to your picture of yourself.

Autognomy

But acquiring the word is not the end of the story. It’s only the beginning of a second one, and this is where the essay actually wants to end up.

Once a child can say I, he can do something no third-person sentence ever allowed him to do. He can think. Not merely register the world — want, see, fear — but form a thought and hold it as his own: I think. And a mind capable of that is capable of a further, stranger move: turning the same act back on itself. I think about what I think. From there it is a short step to something no other creature we know of manages: I ask whether the words I use to describe what I think are accurate. And from there, shorter still: I discover that the very vocabulary handed to me for describing myself — ego, aloof, narcissist — is itself part of the inheritance I am capable of judging, not a verdict I am obliged to accept.

That capacity — the I turning its own scrutiny inward, examining not the world but the inherited grammar of itself — is not the same thing as autonomy. Autonomy is self-rule: the right to govern one’s own choices, and it presupposes a self already formed enough to do the governing. What’s being described here comes earlier than that, and makes it possible. Call it autognomy — self-knowing. Not the freedom to act on your own judgment, but the prior capacity to ask whether the words you’ve inherited for describing your own mind still describe it, or have quietly been repurposed to manage it instead.

This is why syntax, in the essay’s title, is doing more work than grammar usually gets asked to do. Syntax is not only the architecture of sentences. It is, at the level this essay has been examining, the architecture of subjecthood — the rules governing who is permitted to occupy the position of I in a sentence, and who is quietly pushed back into being merely its object. The question this essay has been circling is not whether the individual matters, which is a preference, easily disputed. It’s whether the individual is allowed to remain the subject of his own thought, which is closer to a fact about what thinking requires in the first place.

None of this is an argument that other people don’t matter, or that community is a fiction, or that distance from a group is automatically wise. It is a narrower and, I think, much harder claim to knock down: that the words available for describing the self that does your thinking are not neutral, that some of them have been quietly repointed from description into management, and that noticing this — autognomy, in the end — is not optional if you actually want to think well rather than merely feel permitted to.

The collective can hand you every word you will ever use to describe yourself. It cannot hand you the moment of deciding whether those words still fit. That moment belongs to exactly one place — the same place where, a few seconds ago, this sentence became meaning rather than ink.

There’s somebody there. There always was. The task now is simply to examine him.

Bryan Theunissen is a South African doctor with a stubborn streak of optimism. Even after years of watching bad policy win, he still insists on pointing to better choices.

News24 wants South Africans to know that it is enormous. In June 2025, it boasted that 6.6 million users visited the site every month. Yet in the very same article, News24 said it had only just over 110,000 monthly subscribers. That does not mean only 110,000 people read News24. Much of its breaking news remains free. But it does raise an awkward question: when News24 publishes one of its subscriber-only investigations or analyses, how many of those millions can read the journalism behind the headline?

Nor is News24’s dominance quite as overwhelming once access to the content itself is considered. Maroela Media has recorded more than 36 million monthly pageviews while keeping its journalism freely accessible, Daily Maverick reaches millions without a paywall, and SABC News attracts tens of millions of monthly YouTube views. News24 may dominate conventional website rankings, but there are enormous audiences consuming competing news without having to pay to see what lies beneath the headline.

The distinction matters because News24 has a peculiar advantage. Its headlines are public. They appear on Google, Facebook, X, WhatsApp and everywhere else people encounter the news. But many of the investigations, in-depth articles and opinion pieces behind those headlines are deliberately reserved for subscribers. Media24 itself describes these categories as part of News24’s premium offering. The result is an obvious information asymmetry. The accusation is public; the evidence is private.

Consider News24’s recent investigation into AfriForum: “Inside AfriForum’s money machine: How lobby group splurges on salaries, marketing.”

The word “splurges” is doing a lot of work there. It isn’t a neutral description of expenditure. It tells readers how they should interpret the numbers before they have examined them. AfriForum didn’t merely spend money on salaries. It splurged. Yet the investigation itself is subscriber content, complete with News24’s facility for subscribers to share the article with a limited number of friends.

Maybe News24 is completely correct about AfriForum’s spending. Maybe it isn’t. (Spoiler: News24 was unconvincing.)

That isn’t even the most important issue. The problem is that a vastly larger audience can encounter the accusation than can readily inspect the case supporting it.

For many people scrolling through social media, reading Google results or seeing a screenshot shared to a group chat, the headline does not merely advertise the story. The headline is the story.

News24 gets the political benefit of broadcasting the conclusion while the substantiation sits behind the till.

And headlines matter. Research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied found that misleading headlines can affect people’s memory, reasoning, behavioural intentions and impressions, even when they subsequently read the article underneath.

In other words, framing isn’t harmless packaging. It changes how information is processed. If a headline can influence someone who reads the entire article, imagine the power it has over someone who never gets past the paywall.

This would be concerning enough from any publication. It is particularly concerning given News24’s history with AfriForum.

In 2018, the Press Ombud ruled against News24 over Pieter du Toit’s column, “The spectacular unravelling of AfriForum.” Du Toit claimed AfriForum had offered “no solutions, not a single one” on how land redress could be handled while preserving agricultural sustainability.

But Ernst Roets had provided a list of considerations during the parliamentary question-and-answer session. The Ombud found News24’s claim misleading and ordered it to apologise and publish those considerations. Other parts of AfriForum’s complaint were dismissed, but on this substantive point News24 got it wrong.

Nor is the danger of a misleading News24 headline ancient history. In 2025, the Press Council Appeals Panel upheld a finding against part of a News24 headline about Gayton McKenzie. The headline began “Send me!” despite there being no evidence that McKenzie had requested to be sent to the Paris Olympics. The panel concluded that an ordinary reader could interpret those words as a paraphrase of a request by McKenzie and ruled that this part of the headline would mislead the public. News24 was ordered to apologise.

None of this means News24 should be forced to abolish its paywall. News24 owns its journalism and has every right to charge for it. Journalism costs money, journalists need salaries and subscribers have helped finance News24’s investigations unit.

News24 editor Adriaan Basson has explicitly credited its 110,000 paid subscribers with enabling major investigations. Good. Charge away. Property rights, however, don’t grant immunity from criticism when the business model creates perverse incentives.

News24 wants two things at once. It wants the prestige and political influence that come from saying millions of South Africans use its platform, while placing much of the journalism required to interrogate its most forceful claims before a dramatically smaller paying audience. That arrangement becomes especially objectionable when loaded headlines are aimed at politically contentious targets such as AfriForum and other Afrikaner institutions. Millions may see what News24 wants them to think. Far fewer can see why News24 thinks it.

There is an easy solution. When News24 publishes an investigation making serious allegations against an identifiable person, organisation or political movement, make that investigation freely available. Keep the lifestyle pieces, analysis, commentary and other premium offerings behind the paywall if you want. But if you’re going to publicly prosecute someone, let the public see the prosecution’s case. Independent publications and alternative media increasingly compete by putting their arguments in front of readers and viewers who can examine, criticise and reject them without first handing over a credit card.

News24 has every right to criticise AfriForum, Solidarity, Afrikaners - or anyone else. It can investigate them mercilessly. But it should not expect the enormous reach of its publicly visible accusations to be confused with the reach of the journalism supposedly proving them.

If News24 wants to attack AfriForum before the whole country, it should at least have the courage to show the whole country its evidence.

Nicholas Woode-Smith is the Managing Editor of the Rational Standard and a Senior Associate of the Free Market Foundation. He writes in his personal capacity.

(First published in Afrikaans on OntLaer on Jan 29, 2026)

We all know about the major development initiatives in South Africa that end tragically in unfinished infrastructure and half-completed, or completely unfinished, buildings. After that, as we also know, comes the exposure of corruption and fraud, theft and incompetence that repeatedly cause such project initiatives to collapse.

The losses amount to billions of rand nationally and are directly linked to South Africa’s increasing debt burden, poor economic growth, unemployment, poverty and social unrest, to name just a few of the negative consequences that have become characteristic of a so-called developmental state that does not develop.

These large development initiatives or projects are, however, merely the visible manifestation of initiatives in the macro-development sphere. At community level, or ground level, sometimes even called grassroots level, there are hundreds of community initiatives that, without national media fanfare, struggle daily in the hope of bringing about development through local projects. In rural areas, for example, there are attempts to develop “traditional” or communal land for agricultural or tourism purposes. In urban areas, there is an enormous variety of initiatives, such as infrastructure maintenance and the construction or improvement of community facilities, among others.

Ironically, such community projects often stumble as a result of serious conflict, sometimes violent, among community members themselves. This significantly delays development initiatives and frequently leads to projects never starting or being completed, with the accompanying waste of money. More serious violent conflict often follows as well, since failed projects drive community members apart rather than promoting cooperation.

Lessons for initiating development initiatives

Since this happens so frequently, it has convinced me that the development methodology being followed is extremely flawed. It is often dominated by political agendas, although this need not necessarily be the case.

This led me to recall a particularly successful “historical” development initiative from not too long ago, in which I myself was able to take a co-leadership role and which, in my opinion, still holds relevant lessons today for development initiatives that begin at ground level and can ultimately lead to success at national level.

In the stormy early 1990s, I had the dubious privilege of being appointed at national level as one of two facilitators tasked with trying to resolve the bitter and deadly conflict between the ANC and the IFP in the hostel context. It was simultaneously challenging and terrifying, although the real fear only began to grip me later in the process.

The hostels in the townships, with their tens of thousands of so-called “migrant workers”, mainly employed in the mining sector, were an ideal breeding ground for contestation between the ANC and the IFP. Both parties competed at ground level for the “hearts and minds” of township residents.

I use the term “migrant workers” with reservation, since many of the hostel residents had long since ceased to be migrant workers in the full sense of the word. They often still had primary families in their areas of origin, especially in the then Natal and Eastern Cape, but over the years had established second families in the townships.

These relationships, on the one hand, served as emotional relief for men who had long had to manage without their spouses, but at the same time created various tensions. Financially, it was extremely difficult to maintain two families, and it also caused conflict with surrounding township residents. The source of companionship for hostel residents was, after all, the surrounding township population. Without doubt, hostel residents were looked down upon, an attitude that continues to this day, and when it further appeared as if they were “taking other people’s wives and daughters away”, it was not conducive to community relations.

Furthermore, hostel residents were often accused of crimes such as rape, assault, theft, burglaries and even murder, especially in areas near the large hostels. As a result of the numerical dominance of Zulus in the hostels, the impression took hold that Zulus, and by implication the IFP, were hostile towards township residents.

Since the ANC had strong ground-level structures in the townships, especially through well-organised street and neighbourhood committees, resistance against hostel residents could be mobilised relatively easily. To remove the political sting from their counter-strategy, action was increasingly taken under the banner of so-called “civic organisations”.

According to the information available to me, a decision was then taken in high IFP circles in Ngoma, Natal, to begin arming Zulu hostel residents. Shortly thereafter, a particular hostel in Soweto began to function virtually as the military headquarters of the IFP in the then Transvaal. This was the beginning of a serious escalation of armed violence and cold-blooded murder campaigns. Boipatong was but one of the many bloody battlefields that later, because of their brutality and scale, would attract major national and international attention.

Attempts at peace

Against this background, and later from within the continuing and escalating conflict, I and the other facilitator to whom I referred earlier had to try to bring about peace.

As an Afrikaner with a development-economist background and without outspoken political loyalties or prejudices, it was a unique opportunity for me to gain access to the ground-level inner circles of both the IFP and the ANC.

Remarkably, there was little resistance to the appointment of two Afrikaners as mediators. Both of us were appointed by major national development agencies that, at the time, were not regarded as extensions of the government. This conferred legitimacy, but was also helped by the fact that the conflict was literally claiming lives and there was little room to be overly particular about mediators.

Without being arrogant, it can also be said that the mediators were well chosen and possessed the necessary attitude, knowledge and approach to bring two extreme poles closer together.

Without going into all the details, the process began with numerous preliminary discussions, mostly between the two mediators and one representative of a contending party. This made it possible to identify points of contact in an environment where participants could speak more freely.

Thereafter, individuals from both sides could be persuaded to sit at the table together with the mediators, after which larger groups followed and, eventually, direct meetings between the two groups became possible.

The tension was high. There were mutual insults and accusations, but fortunately no physical confrontation. This was largely thanks to the fact that more sophisticated and less impulsive ground-level representatives were involved on behalf of both hostel residents and township communities.

At the end of this phase, it was decided to shift the focus to the broader housing question in South Africa. This helped to depoliticise the agenda and place common development needs, specifically housing, at the centre. Politics was thereby partially shifted into the background.

The outcome was the establishment of a Hostels Forum, which eventually developed into the National Housing Forum. To the best of my knowledge, it was the first completely new development policy for South Africa that rested on consensus and was accepted by all extra-parliamentary parties, as well as the government of the day, even before the 1994 transition was finally concluded.

Political ambitions must not hijack development facilitation

In conclusion, I am of the opinion that even in present-day democratic South Africa, where community conflicts daily hamper local development initiatives, professional, non-political development facilitation and conflict resolution can be of inestimable value in turning socio-economic and social development at ground level into success stories.

One of the greatest challenges remains convincing competing community groups, which almost always arise when work and money are at stake, not to allow political ambitions to hijack their development agendas.

This is more difficult today than ever, especially in a context where communities are conditioned to believe that development can only follow from loyalty to a particular political party. Ironically, it is often precisely this political starting point that causes a local initiative to fail, since it immediately activates established interests.

This makes objective decision-making virtually impossible: Who should the beneficiaries be? How should the best developer be appointed at the best price? How should workers be selected? And so forth.

To ensure true equal treatment for all community members, independent facilitators are an absolute requirement. Such facilitators must be able to convince participants that the “rules of the game” will be determined by shared development goals: Who benefits first, who later, and why?

Since not everyone can benefit simultaneously, there must also be a credible prospect for the so-called “losers” to be able to participate in future developments. Development initiatives should therefore not be once-off events, but form part of a transparent and sustainable development policy.

This is exactly how the hostel initiative of the turbulent and bloody early 1990s was transformed into a national housing policy that even enjoyed international recognition.

Piet du Plessis is a retiree with a long history of applied socio-economic development. A liberated Afrikaner who has moved beyond self-flagellation and believes that he has been freed to live out his cultural pride and values, and to proclaim them openly when appropriate.

Written By: Matsheole Majoro

In July 2026, President Cyril Ramaphosa commissioned Dina Pule as Minister of Social Development. Pule was removed from Cabinet in 2013 after the Public Protector found her guilty of maladministration and improper conduct. Parliament discovered that she had defiled her oath of office and brought Parliament to shame. The issue was also referred for criminal investigation. Yet she was brought back into cabinet, trusted with a folder that manages social grants to 28 million South Africans.

This is not something new. Ministers discharged for misconduct or incompetence show up in new deployments. Thembi Simelane, linked to the VBS scandal, is still in cabinet. Gwede Mantashe was condemned in the Zondo Commission’s findings. He also is still in Cabinet. South Africa has 75 ministers and deputy ministers. The executive is stuffed, irresponsible and increasingly unqualified.

The constitution does not require ministers to have any specific qualifications. The president is free to choose anyone to serve as a minister, who is a Member of Parliament. A matric certificate is enough – that’s the bar. Three ministers (or former ministers) have only a Matric qualification: Agriculture’s John Steenhuisen (DA), Public Works Dean Macpherson (DA), and Sports Minister Gayton McKenzie (PA). Twenty-six of 29 ministers have some form of higher education, but higher education does not guarantee capability. Defence Minister Angie Motshekga holds a master’s in education.

The DA’s own record on ministerial qualification is revealing. John Steenhuisen, after finishing school in 1993, worked his way up to become the DA leader and later Minister of Agriculture, without a university degree. The Freedom Front Plus (VF Plus) has been openly cynical of this. When Steenhuisen was substituted for Willie Aucamp in June 2026, the VF Plus noted that Aucamp has “a stronger agricultural background” and once served on the Department’s Portfolio Committee.

Policy analyst Sandile Swana put it plainly: “Anybody who is holding public office should have the minimum qualifications, so they know all the laws relevant to their portfolio.” He added: “If you are not well trained you will not understand the most basic aspects and therefore you will be incapable of fulfilling your duties”.

The objection is not just about educational credentials; it’s about how the government should be run by people who know what they are doing and are capable. South Africa’s National Framework Towards Professionalisation of the Public Sector was adopted by Cabinet in 2022. It seeks to guarantee that “only qualified and competent individuals are appointed into positions of authority.” Yet ministers are expressly excused from its requirement. The same government that requests senior managers to hold an NGF level 8 qualification and 7+ years of experience excuses its own political leadership.

ActionSA has proposed a constitutional amendment to professionalise Cabinet appointments. The amendment would order parliamentary screening of all Cabinet appointments, enable the National Assembly to remove ministers through a motion of no confidence, this could increase the number of ministers who can be appointed from outside Parliament from two to at least four. The last stipulation is important as it would allow skilled professionals and subject-matter experts to serve in Cabinet.

The solution is rather straightforward. Amend to constitution to require minimum qualifications for ministerial appointments, relevant qualifications, not just any degree. Second, demand parliamentary confirmation hearings for all Cabinet appointments, with the power to reject. Third, do away with Deputy Ministers entirely. This would save billions and eliminate 43 needless positions. Finally, allow the appointment of experts from outside Parliament, people with verified expertise, not just party loyalty. The National Planning Commission is already systematically set up this way: 25 commissioners appointed for their technical expertise and professional experience across diverse sectors. This has proven to work for the Commission; it can also work for cabinet.

Critics will argue that democracy means elected representatives govern, not unelected experts. However, ministers would still be accountable to Parliament. The only change is that they would know what they are doing. A democratic government that cannot deliver basic services is not democratic. South Africans don’t need more politicians; they need people who can fix the power grid and run the health care system.

The Pule appointment sends a clear message that capability and integrity don’t matter, only loyalty matters. South Africa’s challenges are too critical for a cabinet that treats ministerial posts as a prize for those that are politically connected. South Africans deserve better than a Matric pass and a party card.

Matsheole Majoro is a final-year International Relations student and an associate of the Free Market Foundation.