Written By: Matsheole Majoro

In May 2020 the rollout of the Special COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress grant began. Initially, it was supposed to be temporary for six months emergency measure to aid unemployed citizens financially that were affected by the pandemic. Since then, the grant has been extended and updated.

In 2023, the ANC Youth league president demanded that the R350 Social Relief of Distress grant should be increased to R1,500. He added the unemployed graduates should be given R4500 monthly. Two years later and the grant is R370.

Today 28million South Africans receive some kind of social grant; the temporary measure has become permanent.

Every election cycle, the ruling party teases grant increase in front of voters. The R350 became R370 in 2024. A R20 increase that does not even cover a liter of milk. Yet the persuasion of R1500 continues.

The SRD grant has proven to be a failure - an expensive one at that. The grant was supposed to be a safety net, instead it has trapped people into poverty. Households that depend on the grant are merely surviving, while grants offer financial support, sustained dependency may discourage some people from looking for employment. Social grants have a way of keeping the individuals that benefit from them from taking steps that would help them out of poverty. The hand-out becomes a handcuff.

The suggestion of the R1500 teaches that the government is the source of all good things. It is control, a way to keep people waiting for the government than building their own futures. Creating the R350 grant was the ANC way of keeping people dependent, ensuring that they continue voting for them.

South Africa needs an economy that creates jobs; it needs entrepreneurs. South Africa does not need another grant. The SRD grant alone has been earmarked an additional R36.4 billion to continue payments until March 2027 at R370 per month. The National Treasury made it clear that increasing the grant or increasing eligibility would be fiscally untenable. Increasing it to R1500 would be disastrous.

Social grants don’t just redistribute funds. They make individuals dependent on the governments permission to survive. When the government controls how you get to eat, you don’t get to question the government. You wait and hope and vote for whoever promises the next increase.

A free society would have an economy that turns unemployment into work. A free society would not need SRD grants at all. What South Africa needs is a smaller state. This isn’t cruelty; it’s the belief that individuals can build better lives for themselves, better than any government planner could design for them. Every grant that is redistributed instead of invested in economic growth is every year real solutions are delayed.

The R1500 promise will be made again at the next ANC political rally, the next election cycle, the next moment votes are needed. It won’t be delivered - it was never meant to. Will South Africans keep waiting for an EFT that never comes or will they start building a future does not need one.

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

Join Martin van Staden, Nicholas Woode-Smith and guest Leigh-Ann Hallak as they unpack some of the most pressing issues of the week.

In this episode, we discuss News24’s latest “exposé” into AfriForum and ask whether it uncovered a genuine scandal, or simply reinforced a familiar media narrative. We discuss the reporting, the reaction, and the broader treatment of AfriForum and the South African right in the media.

Read Leigh-Ann Hallak’s article ‘The AfriForum Scandal That Wasn’t’.

In his speech at the Free Market Foundation’s relaunch of the Free Speech Union South Africa (FSU-SA) as an institutional initiative, the CEO of the FMF and a Director of the FSU-SA, David Ansara, correctly noted that, aside from the incitement of violence, certain forms of expression, however offensive, should enjoy legal protection and should not be unjustifiably restricted.

Free expression requires tolerance for a diversity of perspectives. And when intolerance is on the rise – as has been the case in South Africa for some time – the space for free expression begins to narrow, with certain individuals being targeted, criminalised, and professionally destroyed for exercising their right to speak.

One arena in which intolerance has become particularly prevalent in South African society is the university. This intolerance can be attributed, in large part, to the ideology of Fallism, which has gripped universities since the emergence of the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall student-led protest movements and facilitated their capture by actors more interested in advancing ideological rather than educational imperatives.

Arthur Vamva’s case

Over the years, cases of students being subjected to disciplinary action for expressing their views have become increasingly common. One such case is that of Arthur Vamva, a former student at Rhodes University who was expelled for four years in December 2022 after an internal disciplinary board found that comments he had made on social media about homosexuality contravened the university’s student disciplinary code.

At the time, Vamva was a candidate for the SRC presidency and became the target of his political opponents, who brought up a past Facebook post in which he, among other things, stated that “Homosexuality is evil.”

An online petition that garnered more than a thousand signatures was soon launched, calling for Vamva to be disqualified from the election. Before the final election results were announced, the university nullified the vote and initiated disciplinary action against him. That action would eventually culminate not only in his four-year expulsion but also in the endorsement of his academic transcript, preventing him from continuing his studies elsewhere.

What followed was a protracted legal battle over free expression that continues to this day.

At the time of writing, Vamva is awaiting the outcome of an application he brought before the Eastern Cape High Court on the 20^th of November 2025, challenging the university’s decision to expel him. He argues that the four-year expulsion was grossly disproportionate, that the disciplinary process was procedurally unfair, that some of the statements relied upon as evidence were taken from private conversations, and that his rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion were violated.

Whatever the outcome, Vamva has indicated that the case will likely proceed through South Africa’s higher courts, including the Supreme Court of Appeal and, potentially, the Constitutional Court.

Why this case matters

This article’s interest in Vamva’s case is not in the content of his remarks or whether they were right or wrong. Rather, it is in the principle of free expression – however offensive it may be in some instances – and whether it should be protected in universities, which should ideally serve as open platforms for the free exchange of ideas rather than institutions that professionally destroy individuals for exercising their right to speak.

Offensive speech is, by its nature, offensive, but offensiveness alone does not place it outside the protection of the law. The proper test is whether speech falls outside that protection by amounting to the incitement of violence. In Vamva’s case, while his remarks were regarded by some as offensive, they did not amount to the incitement of violence against any individual or group.

For this reason, Rhodes University’s decision to expel Vamva was grossly disproportionate and constituted a grave violation of his right to free expression. The fact that a student who should be a graduate today has effectively had four years of his academic life taken away from him is an egregious injustice. It is symbolic of the intolerance that has become all too common in South African universities.

Defending free expression

This intolerance poses a threat to free expression and must be challenged in defence of the freedom that forms the bedrock of a free society.

Without free expression, other rights cannot meaningfully exist. It is a foundational right.

This is what makes an initiative like the FSU-SA so important. Its work will be narrowly focused on upholding and defending free expression against threats to it, while recognising that only forms of expression that fall outside the protection of the law should be subject to legal sanction.

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

South Africa is once again gripped by rising anti-immigrant sentiment. Protests demanding deportations of undocumented foreigners, fears of xenophobic violence, and rhetoric blaming migrants for unemployment, crime, and strained public services have intensified.

Hundreds or even thousands of African migrants have fled or been repatriated amid threats and attacks. While these frustrations stem from genuine hardships like our absurdly high unemployment rate, failing infrastructure, and overburdened services, scapegoating fellow human beings risks repeating cycles of violence and distracts from the policy failures that truly undermine prosperity.

As someone who values individual liberty above all, one recognises the tension within libertarian thought on immigration. The ideal of the free movement, of goods, services, and people, aligns with the entrepreneurial discovery process that drives human flourishing. People seeking better opportunities embody the same alertness that township spaza owners and informal mechanics demonstrate daily.

Restricting movement arbitrarily can hinder the voluntary coordination that markets enable. Yet borders and jurisdictions exist in our imperfect world of states unfortunately. Therefore, public resources financed by taxpayers raise legitimate questions of capacity and rule of law. The core issue is not “African foreigners” versus “locals,” but how state policies suppress opportunity for everyone.

Blaming migrants for our economic woes ignores root causes. South Africans do not lack enterprise; our policy environment actively suppresses it. Rigid labour laws, high minimum wages, licensing burdens, and compliance costs make it risky and expensive for small businesses, the engines of job creation, to hire.

Central planners in Pretoria cannot replicate the dispersed knowledge that allows entrepreneurs to match skills with needs locally. Migrants, often highly motivated and entrepreneurial, frequently fill gaps in the informal economy or take jobs locals avoid under current regulations.

But when the state makes formal employment a minefield, competition feels zero-sum. The solution is not mass deportations, but deregulating labour markets so more people, citizens and newcomers alike, can participate productively.

Public services are strained not primarily by immigrants, but by chronic mismanagement, corruption, and fiscal irresponsibility at every level of government. Collapsing infrastructure, unreliable electricity and water, and inefficient hospitals predate recent migration waves. Expanding the welfare and regulatory state without corresponding growth in productive capacity creates scarcity that fuels resentment.

Individualism teaches us that each person has the capacity to shape their destiny through choice and voluntary cooperation, provided rights are protected. Coerced redistribution and social engineering breed division; free enterprise coordinates diverse individuals toward mutual benefit.

The classical liberal-inspired approach offers a better path. Secure borders and sensible immigration policies that prioritise skills, the rule of law, and integration are compatible with liberty when paired with domestic reforms.

Enforce laws against crime and illegal entry consistently, without ethnic profiling that descends into violence. But pair this with Job Seeker Exemption Certificate-style labour exemptions, reduced red tape, tax relief, and privatisation of failing services.

Unleash entrepreneurship so the economy grows fast enough to absorb more workers. Studies and indices such as the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index show that freer movement alongside economic freedom correlates with prosperity – not because migration is costless, but because open, dynamic societies harness human potential.

Framing the debate in ethnic/nationalist terms, that is, African migrants versus locals, hijacks legitimate concerns and poisons discourse. The true divide is between policies that foster agency, property rights, and voluntary exchange, and those that entrench dependency and extraction.

History’s grievances should not excuse present failures in governance. South Africans of all backgrounds share aspirations for safe communities, functioning services, and economic opportunity. Migrants fleeing hardship often share these dreams; many contribute as traders, workers, and innovators.

Violent scapegoating undermines the rule of law we all need. It distracts from holding leaders accountable for the institutional decay that makes life harder for everyone. Instead of pitting groups against one another, we should demand a leaner state focused on protecting rights, deregulated markets that reward value creation, and an environment where entrepreneurial discovery by citizens and immigrants alike, can flourish.

Only then can South Africa move beyond resentment toward the free and prosperous society its people deserve.

Zakhele Mthembu, BA Law LLB (Wits), is a Policy Officer at the Free Market Foundation.

As a result of South Africa’s history, “forced segregation” has, for all practical purposes, become a dirty term. In contrast, “integration” is viewed as inherently meritorious, an almost untouchable concept. The prefix “forced” is also not overtly linked to the word “integration”.

In terms of South Africa’s democratic, compromise Constitution, however, integration is not enforceable. Furthermore, the lived reality since 1994 has not been one in which integration was legally enforced, because that is not permitted.

However, one gets the impression that it was simply assumed that, in South Africa’s case, integration would be the tacit consequence of the transition from apartheid to democracy in 1994. But, for the greater part of the post-apartheid years, the actual integration of all groups in South Africa has largely remained merely a continuous hope.

If something like integration is not legally enforceable, one would think that tactics of persuasion would have been employed to try to achieve that worthwhile goal. We know, however, that shortly after Madiba and Archbishop Tutu passed away, there were no serious efforts from the top down to encourage integration in South Africa. On the contrary, many divisive statements were made by Mbeki, Zuma, and Ramaphosa.

Far worse is the growing realisation that it was never the intention of our later rulers under the democratic Constitution, namely Mbeki, Zuma, and Ramaphosa, to integrate us as a nation. At least, not while retaining separate identities and cultures, especially, or specifically, if the identity and culture of a group are viewed as more synonymous with Europe than Africa.

If integration was indeed our government’s sincere objective, why, then, would it have continued with racial classification?

The recent “Bokkienaweek” for Afrikaner children caused a great deal of public noise and notably led Gauteng Premier Lesufi and Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture Gayton McKenzie to play the popular race card. Their reactions sounded to me as though some of our leaders might now indeed want to prefix integration with the word “forced”.

Their condemnations of the collective action, or “cultural” self-assertion, of Afrikaners through their “Bokkienaweek” were superficial and unbalanced. They sounded like deliberate attempts to target the Afrikaner minority group once again.

By implication, they objected to an ethnic group daring to act non-integratively by not opening the event to all racial groups. They therefore expressed, or implied, the opinion that integration is, or ought to be, a prerequisite for organising group activities or “cultural” events.

Everyone should therefore feel forced to approach everything in an integrated manner. They offered no carrot, or tactics of persuasion. They simply applied the stick.

Alternatively stated, they implied that the voluntary segregation of groupings is unacceptable. Or did they perhaps imply that only some people’s segregation needs are acceptable, but not those of others? I cannot recall any criticism of other cultural groups that did the same with respect to their own cultures.

Is it justified at all to condemn forced segregation out of hand while, at the same time, as government leaders, expressing a clear preference for forced integration, even if it is not legally enforced but is instead promoted through reactions that can be perceived as threatening?

We in South Africa know particularly well the negative consequences that forced segregation under the apartheid policy brought about. By now, that is history. But has our more recent past, say the last 30 years, shown or proven to us that integration is so much better in all respects?

Naturally, it is better in certain respects, such as freedom from coercion. But are we not increasingly seeing renewed attempts at coercion?

What do we see in practice? Apart from continued racial classification, racial groups are not treated equally under legislation. This occurs across many spheres of our “integrated” South African society.

A few prominent examples include equal access to state contracts, employment positions in the public service, and access to university disciplines that can accommodate only limited intake numbers. The Afrikaans cultural group’s rights to mother-tongue education in schools and tertiary institutions are also being undermined.

How do we escape the increasing hegemony of forces that place those in South Africa who do not wish to integrate, despite their protected right not to be forced to integrate, under pressure through threats and insults to integrate against their free will?

It is seldom, if ever, claimed that the forced segregation of groups, per se, has merit. But even such a general statement must be qualified.

Segregation may be necessary if groups are hostile towards one another to such an extent that they wish to, or could, cause each other harm. Such groups can mutually decide to segregate in order to preserve the peace.

Alternatively, a third party can force them to segregate if it is felt that, without segregation, they would pose a danger to or cause harm to third parties should their conflicts spill over elsewhere.

Fortunately, we already know that the Solidarity Movement is achieving great success through a solution of parallel governance practices. We also know that the above-average wealthy protect themselves in wealthy enclaves. We are further aware of the particular zeal of Lex Libertas in investigating alternative models for our constitutional dispensation.

This is all very encouraging, but the audacity of our so-called government leaders in hurling public insults at groups and people exercising their constitutional rights must come to an end.

The more noise we make about it in the media, and the more firmly we object to it, the greater our chance of teaching such “leaders” that they are not above the Constitution.

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.

News24 has finally done it. After an extensive investigation into AfriForum’s finances, its bombshell revelation is that organisations with hundreds of employees spend money on salaries.

Groundbreaking stuff.

Readers are breathlessly informed that almost 60% of AfriForum’s expenditure went towards salaries, marketing, advertising and recruitment, while only a portion was classified by News24 as “actual projects.”

Apparently, the lawyers arguing court cases, the staff coordinating neighbourhood watches, the researchers drafting policy submissions, the campaign managers organising public participation, the administrators keeping a national organisation running and everyone else required to deliver those “actual projects” somehow don’t count.

The article also seems astonished that a voluntary membership organisation spends money recruiting members. Imagine that. An organisation funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions advertises itself to attract new supporters. Would News24 criticise a charity for fundraising? A political party for campaigning? A media company for advertising subscriptions?

The underlying assumption appears to be that salaries and recruitment are somehow separate from the mission. They aren’t. They are how the mission is carried out. Organisations don’t litigate, campaign, conduct research or coordinate volunteers by magic. They employ people to do it.

What’s most remarkable is how little scandal there actually is. There is no allegation of fraud, corruption or theft. That doesn’t mean AfriForum’s spending should be beyond scrutiny. Any organisation handling hundreds of millions of rand should expect legitimate questions about efficiency, priorities and whether it delivers value for money.

But that isn’t the analysis News24 provides. Does AfriForum’s litigation succeed? Do its neighbourhood watches make communities safer? Are its campaigns effective? Does it deliver value for the money it receives? Those would all be legitimate questions.

Instead, ordinary operating expenses are presented as though they are inherently suspicious. Rather than asking whether those costs are justified by the organisation’s results, readers are encouraged to see routine organisational expenditure as evidence of misconduct.

The closest the article comes to evaluating value for money is highlighting executive salaries of between R2 million and R3 million a year.

But compared to what?

Running a national organisation with more than 300,000 members, 182 full-time employees, an annual revenue of hundreds of millions of rand, multiple legal divisions, community projects and international advocacy operations carries significant responsibility. If those salaries are excessive, prove it. Compare them with executives at organisations of similar size and complexity. Compare them with NGOs, trade unions, media companies or other advocacy organisations. Instead, readers are simply presented with large salary figures and invited to conclude that they must be outrageous.

The same principle applies elsewhere. News24’s parent company, Naspers, disclosed a remuneration package of more than R1 billion for its CEO, Fabricio Bloisi, in 2025. Few would argue that the size of that package alone proves wrongdoing. Context matters. Executive remuneration should be judged against responsibility, performance and organisational scale, not simply because it is a large number.

The same standard should apply to everyone. Accountability should not be a one-way street.

This is a framing exercise rather than an exposé. Nor does it exist in isolation. It follows a string of highly critical reporting on AfriForum. There is nothing wrong with scrutiny. But when repeated investigations keep uncovering ordinary business practices dressed up as scandal, readers are entitled to ask whether the reporting is driven by evidence, or by a predetermined narrative.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the article is its reliance on loaded language such as “splurges” and “money machine” to create the impression of wrongdoing. Strip away the rhetoric and what remains is remarkably ordinary: an organisation funded by voluntary donations employs people, recruits supporters and pays salaries.

That is the “investigation”.

Investigative journalism serves an essential role in a free society. It exposes corruption, uncovers abuse of power, follows money trails and reveals facts that those in authority would rather keep hidden. South Africa needs more of that journalism, not less.

Which is precisely why articles like this are so disappointing.

Good investigative journalism changes what we know. It asks difficult questions, tests assumptions and follows the evidence wherever it leads. Had this investigation shown that AfriForum was misusing funds, or consistently failing to achieve the outcomes it promised its members, that would have been a story. Instead, it presents ordinary operating expenses as though they are evidence in themselves.

Readers are promised a smoking gun and handed an income statement.

Perhaps News24’s next investigation should examine how much of its own budget is spent on salaries rather than “actual journalism”.

Leigh-Ann Hallak is a Rational Standard contributor, a critic of mainstream media, censorship, and a proponent of free speech and liberty.

Across Africa, the overriding feeling is that the liberation of Africa remains incomplete. But it’s important to understand why it’s not complete, and in many cases we have gone backwards. The first thing to accept is that liberation was never about freedom from white people or only from Europe; many people from these groups have always supported African liberation, and it’s just not a productive way of looking at things.

This is an important starting point because there is far too much conspiracy theorising without any evidence. People feel the lack of freedom and because their framework is white vs black, they must invent a magical white force pulling the strings of current African governments. There is also a worship of the state that makes people unable to acknowledge that rather than more state power magically solving problems, their eyes are not deceiving them, it is the state itself that is causing the feeling of not being free.

Just look at Uganda over the past month. The Chief of the Defence Forces, who is also the son of Uganda’s President for life, Yoweri Museveni, has been kidnapping and torturing political opponents. He has been making unilateral decisions that ought not to be possible in a constitutional state. He has even made the absurd statement that no opposition that is not approved by him will be allowed to exist in Uganda.

So, which foreign element is causing him to oppress his own people?

The truth is, Africa’s problem is the state; a state in an environment where there is not a powerful enough and decentralised private sector. A state that does not derive its power from that private sector but rather from a centralised elite which has no interest in pushing for wider reforms, only conducting its business unmolested. This is why mineral wealth will not make any African state wealthier if we do not have a powerful and distributed private sector alongside.

Of course there is also foreign aid. It either insulates government from accountability by taking over the work the government should be doing via aid-funded NGOs, or worse, governments are funded through aid and therefore can rely less on their people. All forms of aid need to end. We need to exercise the muscle of building institutions from the ground up to serve our own interests – we cannot do that when billions of dollars are being dumped on the continent by foreign governments.

Decades of investing in god-like states that can’t do something as simple as building a road has been a total failure for the continent, and yet the statists are not deterred. They keep suggesting more and more things governments should do to fix our problems. The next phase of liberation should be about learning competence by building private institutions to solve real problems at all levels.

This phase of liberation has nothing to do with the government at all; preferably the government should leave people alone to do this, but it’s useless to expect a parasite to stop killing its host just because the parasite would also benefit from a healthy host. All the parasite knows is to consume until nothing can be consumed. So, we must do this despite the government.

What kinds of institutions do we need? It will differ for every individual and every community, but since it’s the World Cup, a good institution to build is a community-based, community-run football club. Once upon a time that model is what birthed the mighty Orlando Pirates; it was meant to be a place for the youth of Orlando to keep themselves busy and entertained in a healthy way. The Premier Soccer League (PSL) has departed from these principles – now most clubs are owned by individuals for their own personal benefit, and there is nothing wrong with that – but we also need the community club to come back.

It might help to solve the empty stadium problem faced by the PSL. Only when big clubs like Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates play are stadiums occupied to any decent level. Not even a successful team like Mamelodi Sundowns is able to do this consistently. Having clubs that primarily serve the community, no matter who the owner is, should lead to better stadium attendance for home games.

Another favoured institution of mine is the stokvel. This institution is seriously underestimated in terms of the transformational role it can play in any community. Our law allows a lot of freedom for stokvels, and of course it’s not perfect, but usually this kind of freedom is highly regulated for normal financial institutions. Small-scale financial institutions can be very useful for helping people start smaller businesses, informal or otherwise.

It doesn’t really matter which institution; the main thing is to adopt an attitude of ‘how can we solve this problem ourselves?’, instead of waiting for some politician to decide to do it. Institutions can be for-profit or non-profit, if the institution is solving a real problem you or your community faces.

And you will discover, by engaging in this institution-building, that you build trust among those involved. You build confidence in your ability to do things together. And you build resilience against the worst government decisions or indecisions. By doing this and developing this institution-building muscle, you also build competence and methods of determining who is competent and who is not.

Only by doing this can you then have a competent government because the lessons learnt from the private institutions are transferred to the government. This process often happens automatically – people don’t even know they’re implicitly transferring knowledge from one arena to the next – but that’s what always happens if you are to have a “good government”. Notice how none of this is about ideology per se, but because it is not about the abstract; it’s not about government policies, it’s simply about you and what you can do right now, it is different from what we think of as ideology or politics.

African liberation will remain incomplete without governments that rely on the people to govern. That cannot happen if we do not have decentralised institutions that can already do everything the government is supposed to do. Ultimately, we must change our perspective from ‘the government must’, to ‘the people must do it and then decide what to transfer to the government’. No government is created and suddenly knows how to do things; expertise and competence are first built up in the private sector in a decentralised manner so that the best way of doing things can rise to the top.

Stop waiting for liberation and go liberate yourself.

Mpiyakhe Dhlamini is a libertarian, writer, programmer and an Associate of the Free Market Foundation.

Written By: Penny Tainton

As we approach the final registration weekend ahead of our November 4 Local Government Elections, I once again find myself grappling with the emotions that elections always bring.

Because I get angry with people who don’t vote. Not irritated, angry. I have spent my career inside the machinery of government and political parties in this country, and I have seen up close what happens when citizens hand their power to whoever shouts loudest, or to no one at all. An empty ballot isn’t neutral. It’s a decision, and more often than not it’s a decision that benefits the people least deserving of it.

Because I get angry at how many of those same people spend the years between elections complaining. About the potholes, the water outages, the councillor who never answers a call, the party that promised and delivered nothing. All fair complaints, and I share plenty of them. But complaint without a vote is just noise. It costs nothing, it changes nothing, and it lets the person making it feel involved without ever being accountable for the outcome. If you didn’t vote, you handed your say to someone else and then complained about what they did with it. You don’t get to do both. Pick up the responsibility or stop pretending the outrage means anything.

Because I get angry with people who fall for promises that have already been broken a dozen times over. We’ve watched the same script play out across municipality after municipality: grand announcements, ribbon cuttings, five year plans that don’t survive contact with a single budget cycle. The promises still land because they’re aimed at desperation rather than judgement. I understand the desperation. What I can’t accept is that we, collectively, keep rewarding the people who manufacture it.

Then there’s the newcomer to every election - no track record, arriving with no history of delivery to be held against, which somehow gets mistaken for a clean slate. It isn’t one. It’s an absence of evidence, and we should treat it that way. even worse is the recycled “newcomer”, the one who failed inside an established party, left before they could be held to account for it, and repackaged themselves as a brand new movement, as if changing the logo erases the record. That’s not reinvention. It’s evasion, and it ought to disqualify someone rather than excite us. Leadership isn’t a personality contest. It’s a demonstrated capacity to govern, to manage a budget, to keep the lights on and the water running and the potholes filled. A track record, good or bad, is the only honest information a voter actually has. Walking away from one before the consequences land doesn’t make it disappear.

Underneath all of this sits something I find genuinely offensive, and I don’t use that word lightly. Racism, from any direction, is a moral failure. In the hands of a political strategist, it’s also a tool, and a reliable one. I’ve spent enough time inside political rooms in this country to know exactly how deliberately the race card gets played, and how well it still works, more than three decades after we were supposed to have triumphed over this. It isn’t conviction driving that choice. It’s arithmetic. Fear keeps people voting along old lines instead of new ones, and a divided electorate is an easier electorate to control. I watch that strategy succeed, over and over, and it turns my stomach every time.

What makes it worse is what it betrays. We were promised, once, that this country would become something genuinely new, a place where a person’s future was no longer written by their race at birth. That promise underpinned our transition to democracy. Every time a politician reaches for race to win an election rather than to redress a real, specific wrong, they’re betraying that promise for their own short term gain, telling us the new South Africa was always just a slogan and the old categories are too useful to retire. That’s a betrayal of everyone who believed 1994 meant what it said, and of every young person since who has grown up being told their identity is a battleground. It is simply unforgivable.

None of this is abstract. The cost shows up in service delivery failures that keep entire communities locked in poverty, in municipalities that can’t process a water leak let alone plan a budget, in the daily, grinding indignity of a life made harder than it needs to be because some politicians find it more useful to keep a nation divided than to build one. Identity politics doesn’t put a child through school or fix a sewage line. It only ever protects the people who benefit from the status quo. It’s long past time someone said so plainly.

And this isn’t only our challenge. Look anywhere in the world right now and you’ll find the same hollowing out of leadership, the same preference for the leader who performs over the one who does the harder, quiet work of governing well. Populists everywhere have learned the lesson our own politicians learned long ago: it’s easier to be loved for what you promise than respected for what you deliver. Tough decisions, the ones that actually fix a budget or a failing utility or a broken procurement system, rarely win applause in the short term, so fewer leaders are willing to make them. We keep being asked to choose between a comfortable lie and an uncomfortable truth, and too many electorates, not just ours, keep choosing the lie.

Falling for that rhetoric is never free. Populism sells itself as the movement of the ordinary person against a distant elite, but it rarely governs for them once it wins. It hollows out institutions instead of building them, because a leader who answers to no one finds checks inconvenient. It replaces expertise with loyalty, so the people running ministries and municipalities are chosen for how loudly they cheer rather than whether they can do the job. It spends the future to flatter the present, because a promise that sounds generous today and bankrupts a treasury in five years still wins the next election.

By the time the bill arrives, the blame has already been pointed elsewhere, at a minority, an institution, a predecessor, so the cycle can start again with someone new. The people who can least afford another failed experiment, the ones already queuing for water or waiting years for a house, are the ones who pay for it. Populism doesn’t just disappoint the people who believed in it. It costs them, directly and disproportionately, every time.

We deserve better than this, everywhere. We deserve leaders who put the interests of the people they serve ahead of their own survival in office, and who are still willing to make the unpopular calls good governance requires, cutting what doesn’t work, saying no to what sounds good but doesn’t add up, holding the line on institutions even when it costs them politically. Serving people and governing well are not in tension. They’re the same job, done properly. The real tragedy of our politics, here and elsewhere, is how rarely we’re even offered that choice.

What keeps me doing the work I do, despite the anger, is a stubborn belief that most South Africans are better than the politics being done to them. I meet young leaders every year who want none of this. They want competence, honesty, and a country they can build a life in without their surname, their language, or the colour of their skin determining their prospects. They want a South African identity that’s actually about being South African, not a coalition of grievances managed for electoral gain. That’s not naive. I think it’s the only realistic way forward, and it’s worth being angry, loudly and without apology, on its behalf.

Penny Tainton brings over four decades of leadership experience across corporate, political, government and state-owned enterprise environments, having served as strategic adviser to two Western Cape Premiers and Executive Director of Policy and Governance for the DA. She now directs the DA’s Young Leaders Programme and presents internationally on governance and leadership development for the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung.

South Africa does not lack political parties – it lacks political seriousness.

As the 2026 local government elections approach, voters will once again be asked to choose between parties promising everything, understanding little, and delivering even less. Every party will claim to represent “the people”. Every manifesto will pretend to solve unemployment, crime, corruption, housing, electricity, water, inequality, potholes, education, healthcare, land, dignity, transformation, and whatever else sounds good on a poster.

This is not politics. It is wish-list writing.

The tragedy is that South Africa’s core problems are not mysterious. They do not require a new ideological vocabulary, a twenty-point framework, or another social compact. They require government to do the few things it is meant to do.

Let people work. Stop criminals.

Everything else depends on those two foundations.

This is why the Democratic Alliance (DA) remains such a frustrating political force. Like it or not, the DA is still the best shot South Africa has at replacing ANC misrule in enough municipalities to show that decline is not inevitable. It has the scale. It has the structures. It has the voters. It has the donor base, councillors, administrators, institutional memory, and entrenched support that most smaller parties can only pretend to possess.

This does not mean the DA is perfect; it means political reality matters.

Many opposition parties are personality cults, protest movements, ideological hobby clubs, or coalition bargaining chips pretending to be governments-in-waiting. The DA, for all its faults, is a serious electoral machine. It governs the Western Cape better than the ANC governs anywhere. It has shown that competent administration is possible in South Africa.

That is exactly why its failures are so maddening.

The DA should be entering these local elections with a simple message: where we govern, things work better. Give us more municipalities, and we will fix what the ANC broke.

Instead, it too often finds ways to complicate the obvious. It gets swallowed by internal drama. It scores own goals. It speaks like a policy conference when voters need plain English. It allows its opponents to drag it into arguments about personalities, race, factionalism, and whatever social media controversy happens to dominate the week.

This is political malpractice.

When people are sitting without water, dodging potholes, living behind burglar bars, and watching their towns collapse, they are not looking for cleverness. They are looking for competence.

The DA should understand this better than anyone. Its strongest argument has never been ideological poetry. It is that it can govern.

But perhaps South Africa needs the thought experiment of a new party to clarify what all the existing parties have forgotten.

If one were to build a party from scratch, it should not try to appeal to everyone. That is how parties become vague, cowardly, and useless. A political party must know its constituency, its principles, and its purpose. It must be honest about what it believes, whom it represents, and what it is trying to achieve.

A serious new party should be a two-issue party.

Jobs and safety.

That’s it.

On jobs, it should be unapologetically free market. South Africa does not need more state-led employment schemes, master plans, ministerial summits, empowerment rackets, or politically connected development funds. It needs to make it easier for ordinary people to work, hire, trade, build, transport, sell, and start businesses.

A job is not created because a politician announces a target. A job is created when someone believes it is worth risking money, time, energy, and reputation to employ another human being.

Government’s role should be to stop punishing that decision.

That means cutting red tape. It means exempting small and new businesses from destructive labour laws that make hiring too risky. It means ending municipal harassment of informal traders. It means speeding up permits, protecting property rights, reducing compliance costs, and allowing entrepreneurs to operate without being treated as enemies of society.

The spaza shop owner, mechanic, plumber, hairdresser, hawker, small manufacturer, delivery driver, construction subcontractor, and young freelancer do not need speeches about inclusion. They need government to get out of the way.

On crime, the party should be equally blunt. South Africans are tired of hearing theories about crime from people protected by bodyguards. Poverty may help explain the conditions in which crime grows. It does not excuse criminals. And it does not comfort the victim of a hijacking, robbery, rape, murder, assault, or home invasion.

A state that cannot protect peaceful people from violent criminals has failed at its most basic duty.

Solving crime does not require fashionable slogans. It requires common sense policing. More visible policing in high-crime areas. Better detectives. Functional forensic capacity. Proper case management. Serious investigations into syndicates. Cooperation between SAPS, municipal law enforcement, prosecutors, private security, neighbourhood watches, and communities. Consequences for corruption inside the police. Fast prosecution for violent crimes.

The point of policing is not public relations – it is to make crime risky again.

At present, South Africa too often does the opposite. The peaceful are regulated while the violent are tolerated. The trader is harassed over a permit while the extortionist shuts down a construction site. The homeowner pays rates, taxes, insurance, private security, and armed response while the burglar treats arrest as a temporary inconvenience.

This is backwards.

The state must stop being powerful against the peaceful and weak against the violent.

Jobs and safety are not separate issues. Businesses do not invest where trucks are burned, shops are looted, staff are robbed, and construction sites are invaded. Workers cannot take opportunities if trains are unsafe, roads are dangerous, and communities are controlled by gangs. Parents cannot build stable lives while their children must navigate violence on the way to school.

Crime is an economic tax. Unemployment is a social time bomb.

That is why “the basics” is not a small agenda. It is the foundation of every other agenda. You cannot fix housing, education, healthcare, infrastructure, or service delivery while the economy is strangled and communities are terrorised.

South Africa does not need more parties trying to sound profound. It needs parties willing to sound clear.

The DA remains the most viable vehicle for opposition success. Smaller parties should be honest about that. But the DA should also be honest with itself. Scale is not enough. Good governance is not enough if voters are forced to peer through layers of confusion, internal drama, and avoidable own-goals to see it.

The coming local elections should not be a competition to produce the thickest manifesto. They should be a test of seriousness.

Who will make it easier for South Africans to work? Who will make it harder for criminals to operate? Who will govern municipalities as service institutions rather than ideological playgrounds?

A party that truly focused on the basics would not need to promise paradise. It would promise something far more radical in modern South Africa. A country where honest people can work, and criminals are afraid.

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

Written By: Mthulisi Shongwe

When Portia Anyamba pleaded guilty in a Tennessee courtroom, the framing in most coverage was straightforward: a former SA Air Force brigadier general, working inside a US Department of Energy facility, had acted as an agent for South Africa’s own State Security Agency and had lied on her US security clearance forms about her contact with an SSA officer based at the South African embassy in Washington. This is, on its face, a story about South Africa spying on an ally, not about South Africa being infiltrated by anyone else.

I want to be upfront about that, because it would be intellectually dishonest to suggest otherwise. Nothing in the charging documents or the plea implicates Iran and I’m not going to pretend they do. But the case is worth sitting with for a different reason: it is a rare, court-verified window into how South Africa’s security cluster actually behaves when it is put under pressure to produce results, who gets tasked, how loosely, and with what oversight.

It is only one case, and no single prosecution can prove systemic institutional failure. But it is one of the few public cases that offers an unusually clear glimpse into how sensitive tasking and oversight function when exposed to judicial scrutiny. And once you look at that picture honestly, a harder question opens up: if the SSA was willing to run an operation this exposed against a treaty ally, using a serving general with access to a national laboratory, what does that say about whether the same institutional environment could be attractive to someone else entirely?

That question matters right now because Iran’s own external operations doctrine has changed in ways that are extremely well documented, and almost none of it looks like what people picture when they hear “Iranian spy.” Since the 2018 foiled bomb plot outside Paris ended in an Iranian diplomat’s conviction, Tehran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and Ministry of Intelligence have shifted hard toward proxy recruitment, deliberately building distance between Iranian officials and the people who actually carry out the work.

MI5’s Director General has told Parliament that Iran has been linked to at least twenty potentially lethal plots on British soil since 2022 alone, and that the IRGC now routinely works through “criminals as proxies” from international drug traffickers to low-level crooks, rather than trained intelligence officers. In France and Germany, investigators found Iranian handlers working through drug traffickers based inside Iran, who in turn hired local European criminals to photograph and surveil Jewish targets for a few thousand euros each. In Sweden, established gangs including Foxtrot and Rumba have been accused of carrying out attacks against Israeli interests at Tehran’s direction.

Germany saw the IRGC contract a fugitive biker-gang boss to organise attacks on synagogues. Analysts who track this activity call the emerging pattern “proxy-of-a-proxy”: foreign nationals recruiting other foreign nationals, sometimes without either fully understanding who is ultimately directing them, with tasking and payment increasingly moved onto encrypted apps and cryptocurrency to keep Tehran’s fingerprints off the operation entirely. There are documented cases of teenagers being recruited online for surveillance and low-level sabotage work, apparently unaware of the chain above them.

It is also worth noting what this model is and what it is not. Tehran’s preferred approach is increasingly not to recruit serving military officers or intelligence officials directly, but to exploit people on the periphery: organised crime, commercial facilitators, ideological sympathisers, online recruits, and individuals whose access or proximity makes them useful without necessarily making them aware of the broader operation. The objective is not necessarily penetration at the highest levels, but the construction of deniable networks through successive layers of intermediaries.

None of this is a Middle Eastern curiosity happening far from South Africa’s concerns. Iranian intelligence interest in African soil isn’t new either. Israel’s embassy in Nairobi warned Kenyan authorities as far back as 2013 that Iran and Hezbollah were actively gathering intelligence on Israeli and Jewish targets across the region, South Africa included in the broader sweep of concern. South Africa, for its part, sits in a genuinely unusual position.

It maintains warm diplomatic and economic relations with Tehran, has consistently opposed unilateral Western sanctions on Iran, and through BRICS and its broader South-South foreign policy orientation has cultivated exactly the kind of environment in which Iranian diplomatic, commercial and political engagement is unusually extensive. None of that implies improper conduct. But countries that maintain broad networks of legitimate engagement can also present wider opportunities for hostile actors seeking cover, access or facilitation. A country doesn’t need to be an adversary’s target to become its access point; sometimes it’s simply the friendliest door in the building.

So here is the uncomfortable version of the question I think this moment demands: if Iran’s preferred model is now to recruit through cut-outs who may not even know who they’re really working for, and if South Africa’s own security cluster has just demonstrated, in open court, that it was capable of running an operation whose governance ultimately collapsed into criminal prosecution abroad, why would anyone assume that vulnerability is exclusive to operations South Africa itself initiates?

I’m not claiming there is a known Iranian cell inside South Africa’s security cluster; there is no such evidence on the public record, and I won’t manufacture the appearance of some. Nor am I suggesting that the Anyamba case proves South Africa’s institutions are systematically compromised. What I am saying is that it provides one rare, evidence-based opportunity to examine how vetting, oversight and accountability function under pressure. Those are precisely the kinds of institutional characteristics that hostile intelligence services assess when deciding where opportunities may exist. If Iran’s documented proxy model is built around identifying environments where oversight is weakest, then asking whether South Africa has adequately stress-tested its own institutions against that threat model is not an accusation. It is a prudent counter-intelligence question.

There’s a decolonial dimension to this worth naming honestly, too. It would be easy, and it’s a trap I want to avoid, to reach for “foreign infiltration” as a reflexive explanation the moment something embarrassing happens to South African institutions, the same reflex I’ve criticised elsewhere when it’s aimed at movements like March and March. The difference here is that I’m not asserting infiltration has happened. I’m asking whether the country’s institutions are actually resilient to a specific, externally documented method, using a real case as the diagnostic rather than the accusation.

That’s the audit I’d want the security cluster’s oversight committees to actually run, not “was Anyamba an Iranian asset” (she wasn’t, and saying so does nobody any favours), but “given what this case reveals about our own vetting, tasking and oversight, have we adequately assessed whether our institutions are resilient to the kinds of proxy recruitment models that hostile intelligence services are now demonstrably using elsewhere?” It’s a fair question. More importantly, it’s a question that extends well beyond Iran. The Anyamba case ultimately tells us less about who South Africa was spying on than about the importance of ensuring our own institutions are resilient against anyone seeking to exploit the same vulnerabilities in future. I don’t think anyone currently in a position to answer that has been asked.

Mthulisi Shongwe is a former student leader and community activist with a background in international relations and political commentary. His interests include geopolitics, with a focus on the Middle East, China–South Africa relations and Sudan.

Written By: Thando Nzimande

The Middle East is not a single tech economy, and treating it as one obscures more than it reveals. Ask who leads regional tech and the honest answer depends entirely on what is being measured. The UAE dominates on capital and executive firepower: it accounts for 25 of the 53 executives on Forbes Middle East’s 2026 Top Tech Leaders list, 47 percent of the total, and continues to pour sovereign wealth into AI infrastructure and cloud capacity at a scale no other regional player can match. Saudi Arabia has overtaken the field on raw digital infrastructure, a result of years of state investment in connectivity and digital government systems.

Israel leads on neither capital concentration nor infrastructure scale, but on ecosystem depth and applied sector expertise.

It is routinely excluded from regional startup rankings not because it underperforms but because analysts treat it as a global tech ecosystem in its own right, built on decades of R&D intensity, venture-backed exits, and a track record of turning scarcity into export industries in exactly the sectors South Africa needs most: water, health and infrastructure resilience.

That distinction matters more than it first appears, because it points to which country South Africa should logically be doing business with, and why. The UAE and Saudi models are capital-and-infrastructure plays, built for governments with sovereign wealth funds and the fiscal room to buy entire systems outright. South Africa’s public finances do not resemble that picture, and copying a Gulf state’s approach would mean chasing a scale of investment the country cannot realistically mobilise.

Israel’s model is different in a way that suits South Africa’s actual constraints: it is built around mid-sized, exportable, sector-specific technology, developed by hundreds of individual companies rather than a handful of sovereign mega-projects, and sold on commercial terms to municipalities, hospital groups and farming cooperatives rather than only to other governments.

That is a far easier entry point for a country working with strained municipal budgets and a private sector, not a sovereign fund, as the more realistic buyer. It is also, not incidentally, the model in which South Africa already has the deepest trade relationship, longest history of technical exchange, and the clearest existing case studies, from Western Cape agritech delegations to Ethiopian irrigation financing pilots to informal cross-border talent flow through people like the South African-born engineers now working at Kinneret Innovation Center.

Start with water, because the numbers are the starkest. South Africa loses an estimated 48 percent of its treated water to leaking pipes, unbilled consumption and ageing infrastructure before it reaches a household tap, a figure that makes the crisis fundamentally one of management rather than absolute scarcity.

Drip irrigation systems developed in the Negev cut agricultural water use by roughly half compared to flood irrigation, a saving commercial farmers in the Western Cape and Northern Cape could apply within a single planting season, while off-grid, solar-powered wastewater purification units address both water scarcity and load shedding at once. Agricultural credit schemes piloted elsewhere on the continent, giving smallholder farmers financed access to Israeli seed and pump technology, have reportedly lifted yields by more than 60 percent in a season. The technology performs consistently. What breaks down is the pathway from a successful demonstration project to a scaled, publicly funded rollout.

Healthcare presents a parallel but distinct opportunity, and arguably a more urgent one given South Africa’s disease burden and workforce shortages. The country’s public health system, like much of the continent’s, is short on clinicians relative to population and long on the kind of administrative burden that digital tools are specifically designed to strip away.

South African healthtech firms such as Docy and GreenNotes Medical have already begun building AI-driven clinical documentation tools that save practitioners hours of paperwork, and private groups like Netcare have invested heavily in digitally enabled, data-driven care models. Israeli health tech, developed across roughly 1,800 active companies spanning diagnostics, remote monitoring and AI-assisted clinical decision support, sits in a similar space but with a longer track record and more capital behind it.

The overlap is not accidental: both countries are building digital health infrastructure to compensate for workforce shortages and uneven geographic access to specialists, which means Israeli remote-diagnostics and AI-triage tools, tested at scale in a health system that also serves a dispersed and unevenly resourced population, could be adapted for South African primary care and rural clinic networks with less translation work than importing equivalent technology from Europe or North America. The obstacle again is not the technology. It is that health data partnerships require a level of regulatory trust and interoperability planning that neither government has prioritised building between the two systems, leaving individual hospital groups and private health-tech firms to negotiate access on their own, deal by deal.

Infrastructure is the least discussed of the three but may be the most consequential, because it underwrites the other two. South Africa’s chronic power constraints, port inefficiencies and cybersecurity exposure are not separate problems from water and health delivery; they are the substrate those systems run on. A wastewater purification unit is only useful if it has power. A telehealth platform is only useful if the network holding it up is secure and reliable.

Israel’s infrastructure technology sector, built initially around defence needs, has produced globally deployed capabilities in smart grid management, water-network leak detection sensors that can pinpoint losses in real time rather than after the fact, and cybersecurity systems now protecting critical infrastructure in dozens of countries, including several with far less diplomatic alignment with Israel than South Africa maintains in practice. Leak-detection sensor networks in particular are directly relevant to that 48 percent water-loss figure: the technology to find and flag failing pipes before they flood a street already exists and is commercially deployed, it has simply never been procured at municipal scale in South Africa.

What ties all three sectors together is the same underlying failure, and it is a business and institutional one rather than a technical one. South African municipal and provincial procurement systems are not built to accommodate rapid piloting of imported infrastructure, particularly from a source country that triggers political sensitivity at the national level even when provincial governments, hospital groups and commercial farming bodies are enthusiastic.

That sensitivity creates a quiet tax on every transaction: deals get structured through intermediaries, funded through NGOs or private chambers of commerce rather than public budgets, and kept deliberately low-profile to avoid becoming a political flashpoint. Each workaround adds cost, slows implementation, and caps the scale at which proven technology can be deployed. A leak-detection network that could transform municipal water management instead reaches a single pilot ward, because no official wants to be the one who signed a large-scale Israeli infrastructure contract in an election year.

None of this requires South Africa’s government to alter its diplomatic posture, and it would be naive to pretend the political tension disappears because a business case is compelling. What it requires is a deliberate separation of tracks: letting provincial water authorities, hospital groups, commercial farming bodies and infrastructure agencies pursue proven Middle Eastern, and specifically Israeli, technology partnerships on commercial terms, insulated from the national political relationship the way trade with several other diplomatically fraught partners already operates.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia may lead the region on capital and connectivity, but neither offers South Africa a realistic template given the difference in fiscal firepower. Israel does, because its model was built the way South Africa would have to build one: incrementally, commercially, and out of necessity rather than surplus.

South Africa’s opportunity is not to resolve the politics before acting. It is to build the institutional structures, procurement pathways and local technical capacity that let the country act on water, health and infrastructure with the partner whose model actually fits its constraints, regardless of how the politics eventually settle.

Z. Thando Nzimande – is A Wits Alumni, a Future Voices scholar and researcher at MEARI, A Neuroscience researcher, economic and geopolitical commentator/analyst and his goal is to provide insightful, well-researched analysis on global affairs, informed by his scientific training, critical thinking skills, and leadership experience.

Join Martin van Staden, Nicholas Woode-Smith and Ayanda Zulu as they unpack some of the most pressing issues of the week.

In this episode, we discuss the controversy surrounding the newly merged Financial Mail and Currency News, the debate over race and representation in the publication’s promotional campaign, and what it says about identity politics in South Africa’s media. We also examine the ongoing campaign against data centres and what it could mean for the country’s digital future.

​Written By: Charl Heydenrych

The recent scenes at the Pietermaritzburg High Court on 22 July 2026 represent far more than a localized administrative spat. The urgent interdict brought by members of the Comrades Marathon Association (CMA) against KwaZulu-Natal Athletics (KZNA) is a pivotal battle for the soul of the world’s most iconic ultramarathon. But beyond the borders of KwaZulu-Natal, this conflict exposes a dangerous and growing trend: the systematic and predatory encroachment by state-aligned bureaucratic federations into the operations of independent, civil society sports organizations. This overreach not only threatens the survival of well-run sporting events but also stands in direct contravention of the foundational international agreements that safeguard the autonomy of sport.

​The “locals only” ploy and democratic disenfranchisement

The immediate catalyst for the court action was KZNA’s desperate attempt to enforce a “Domicilium Rule” ahead of a crucial CMA Special General Meeting. This was a thinly veiled gerrymandering tactic designed to restrict CMA membership and voting rights exclusively to residents of KwaZulu-Natal. By attempting to disenfranchise thousands of passionate CMA members across the country, KZNA leadership exposed its true motive: an autocratic capture of the CMA. This “Locals Only” rule was never about fostering local talent or improving the race; it was a brazen political manoeuvre to consolidate control over a financially lucrative entity.

​The allegations of maladministration, political interference, and self-enriching practices swirling around KZNA make this attempted coup even more alarming. Why should a globally respected, independently successful organization like the CMA surrender its democratic autonomy to a provincial body accused by the running community of squandering public funds on frivolous legal battles to exert control?

​Extortionate levies and bureaucratic overreach

The financial and operational demands placed on the CMA by KZNA further illustrate this bureaucratic extortion. KZNA claims it is owed approximately R4 million in levies for the 2026 race – effectively a tax imposed on the CMA’s independent success. When the CMA rightfully asserted its independence and attempted to terminate its membership, arguing that it does not require provincial sanctioning to operate, the provincial body resorted to threats. The CMA’s proactive announcement that the historic 100th Comrades Marathon will take place on 13 June 2027 was further met with ultimatums from KZNA, who threatened to strike the race from the official fixture list.

​Disappointingly, Athletics South Africa (ASA) has also endorsed this overreach, officially directing that the CMA remains subordinated to KZNA’s jurisdiction and that the 2027 date must receive provincial approval. By siding with provincial bureaucrats over the civil society members who actually build and sustain the sport, ASA is acting less like a custodian of athletics and more like an instrument of heavy-handed institutional control.

​Violating the international principles of sports autonomy

This brings us to the most critical violation at the heart of this dispute: the blatant disregard for the autonomy of sport. The Olympic Charter and the fundamental frameworks of international sports governance unequivocally recognize that sports organizations must possess the right to self-regulation, free from undue political, state, or quasi-governmental interference. The autonomy of sport is a globally recognized legal and ethical standard designed specifically to prevent politicians and bureaucrats from hijacking sports for financial extraction or political grandstanding.

​When ASA and KZNA attempt to strong-arm an independent voluntary association like the CMA, demanding millions in levies and dictating operational terms under the threat of unsanctioning, they are violating the very spirit of these international agreements. They are treating the Comrades Marathon not as a cultural treasure to be supported, but as a cash cow to be milked by an entitled sporting oligarchy. The precedent this will set is deeply chilling. If a financially self-sustaining, globally recognized entity like the CMA can be held hostage by provincial sporting bureaucrats, no independent sports organization is safe from capture.

​The line in the sand

As CMA members prepare for the crucial Special General Meeting on 1 August 2026, the stakes could not be higher. This is no longer just a vote on federation affiliation; it is a referendum on democratic autonomy versus bureaucratic subjugation. The members rallying to keep the Comrades independent are defending the fundamental right of civil society to self-organize without being preyed upon by the state’s sporting apparatus.

​The Comrades Marathon belongs to the runners, the volunteers, and the community that has built it over a century. It does not belong to the boardrooms of KZNA or ASA. Civil society must vigorously reject this encroachment and reaffirm that the true power of sport lies in its independence.

Charl Heydenrych is a retired human resources practitioner and a libertarian.

Written by: Jodie Chatterton

In 2009 I wrote an opinion piece on my frustration with the Minister of Sport at that time, and it seems nothing has changed.

At the beginning of this year, my Dad and I drove from KZN to the Western Cape. Instead of taking the highway, we drove another route which took us through many rural areas. Do you know what I noticed? When it was the end of the school day all the children went home. No sport. Where were all the politicians?

I wrote then that quotas are an easy thing to do as they were made from the comfort of a boardroom, with no sweat involved. Seventeen years later, I could republish that piece word for word and it would still be true. And now we have a new number to look at and illustrate exactly how out of touch our current Minister of Sport is and that is - R30,945,370.15.

That’s what the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture spent sending a delegation to the 2026 FIFA World Cup. This paid for exhibition spaces in Mexico City, Atlanta and Monterrey, official match tickets, a Legends exhibition match, and travel for a delegation of officials, supporters, influencers and artists. The Minister feels all this spending is necessary as an investment to promote South Africa and that it cannot be done over Zoom.

Do those in the department actually appreciate what R31 million means? It shows how out of touch those in public service can become when they are spending other people’s hard-earned money. What could R31 million buy? What facilities could be offered?

What one could get for R31 million

A basic basketball court in South Africa costs somewhere between R160 000 and R300 000 to build; levelling, a concrete base, a hoop, some paint. A netball court is much the same. R31 million spent on a World Cup delegation is one trip. R31 million could also provide over 100 multipurpose courts at schools that have never had any facilities. I use basketball as an example because the courts do not require much space and other than a ball and hoop very little equipment is needed and they can be multipurpose spaces.

Another way to look at is; the Department’s own annual conditional grant for the entire country’s School Sport Programme is around R220 million a year. One trip cost roughly two months of the whole nation’s schools-sport budget and this was spent watching soccer instead of enabling it.

The children that could have benefited

According to the Department of Basic Education’s own infrastructure system (EFMS) in 2021 43% of the schools had no sport facilities. Its latest report, from August 2025, shows 9248 of the country’s 22381 public schools have no sports facilities at all, that is 41.3%. In five years, and after losing nearly 900 schools from the count altogether, it has improved by less than two percent. That is not progress, that is failure.

Eastern Cape sits at 58.1% of its schools with nothing (2901 of 4990) and KwaZulu-Natal at 54.1% (3110 of 5753). Compare that to North West at 20.4% and Gauteng at 24% - a child in the Eastern Cape is close to three times more likely to attend a school with no sport than a child in North West. Netball is the only sport offered at more than 40% of schools nationally (44.9%). Soccer follows at 38.3%. After that the numbers drop dramatically - rugby 6.3%, cricket 6.5%, athletics 5.9%, hockey 3.6%, swimming 2.6%, squash at 0.3% (67 schools in the entire country). Some you understand, a swimming pool is a huge expense and comes with a lot of maintenance, but athletics at 5.9% is the most insane of all of them. It needs almost nothing. Rural schools sitting on the most beautiful natural cross-country terrain in the country don’t even have that.

Two-thirds of South Africa’s schools are no-fee schools. Some are struggling to keep the lights on. A budget for sport in many of these schools would be considered a luxury when there are still schools with no library or even a computer.

Sport is not just about producing professionals. It teaches discipline, teamwork, how to lose without falling apart, how to win with grace, how to belong to something bigger than yourself and most of all to have fun. It’s one of the most effective tools we have against exactly the things the Minister himself has built his public story around; his own path through crime and prison, and the addiction and hopelessness that many children in the country succumb to daily. He is currently not doing enough in the area where it is needed the most.

Compare that to hockey

While the department funded retired footballers to fly out and play an exhibition match, South African hockey players have had to fund their own way to World Cups, most hockey players have to have a job in order to represent their country. Meanwhile there was apparently R31 million available for a trip for officials and retired players.

Even if the trip had legitimate official purposes, the level of expenditure appears difficult to justify when many South African athletes struggle to secure funding to compete internationally and many schools lack basic sporting facilities.

Does this office even need to exist?

I think we have 2 options:

1. Scrap the position entirely. We need to reduce the size of the government and this is one department that is not a necessity. Allocate the budget where delivery on the ground has to happen and send the funds straight to facilities and federations. The Minister’s salary alone would pay for around 15 multi-purpose courts.

2. Keep it but trim it. No more international “branding” trips, no hospitality budgets. A small, focused office where the minister’s performance is measured on facilities built and programmes funded and not appearances at tournaments.

Right now, the role looks like a very expensive jol for someone who never has to personally pay for the flight, the hotel, or the ticket. If you earn your money and want to fly business class, that’s entirely your business. But this isn’t your money. It’s a civil servant’s job, funded by taxpayers who are, in many cases, struggling to keep their own lights on. The public deserves evidence that the scale of the cost is justified. It is difficult to see why the same benefits could not have been achieved at a far lower cost.

Government is not the only one who has a role to play here

I don’t think every one of these problems needs government funding to wait to solve, because it’s too easy to make this only about what the government has failed to do.

If your child’s school has no sport, you don’t have to wait for the government. Get the other parents together. If it’s a rural school ask a local farmer if he will level a patch of ground. We have mowed our local farm school’s soccer field for free over the years. I doubt we are the only ones. When roads nearby are being re-tarred, ask what happens to the leftover tar (in a higher trust society this would be easier), that could be a basketball court’s worth of surfacing that costs the school nothing. Organise inter-school matches. Ask the local taxi drivers (Saturdays they are less busy) to transport children to other local schools. None of this needs the government, it needs people willing to contribute.

And what many people in poorer communities have, even without money, is time. Unemployment in these areas is part of why no-fee schools exist in the first place, you may be unemployed and have no money to contribute but it also means you may have afternoons free. A parent who can’t contribute financially can volunteer to coach their child’s soccer team. That is putting into your child’s education in other ways, that is communities coming together to invest in their own schools. And we need communities to start building them up and investing in them because that is the foundation of a functioning civil society.

The distraction

We spend an extraordinary amount of energy looking for or creating problems at the country’s well-resourced schools; a comment mishandled, a controversy over language or identity, a teacher sneezing incorrectly - while thousands of schools with nothing at all barely register a headline. It is far easier to have an opinion about a private school’s latest controversy than to sit with the fact that 41% of this country’s schools have no sport.

I said in 2009 that it was time politicians got to work and did their jobs. In 2026, I could still make that same statement. The problem hasn’t changed. Only the latest price tag on how out of touch the response has become - R30,945,370.15.

Jodie Chatterton is a dairy farmer in the KZN Midlands and Stellenbosch University graduate with degrees in Commerce and Law.

Written By: Thando Nzimande

South Africa’s Government of National Unity has spent its first eighteen months learning to argue without collapsing. Formed in the aftermath of the ANC’s fall to 40.2% support in the 2024 national election, the coalition brought the Democratic Alliance into government for the first time since 1994, alongside smaller partners deliberately chosen to exclude the EFF and MK.

It has survived a budget crisis, disputes over National Health Insurance, and running battles over expropriation policy. But the local government elections set for 4 November 2026 will test something the GNU has not yet faced: an actual contest for power between its own members, fought ward by ward, in front of the voters who will decide whether coalition politics can work below the level of Cabinet meetings and joint statements.

The clearest flashpoint is Johannesburg. DA stalwart Helen Zille has been announced as the party’s mayoral candidate for the city, while the Patriotic Alliance has put forward its deputy president, Kenny Kunene, meaning three parties that currently sit together in the GNU will be fighting for control of the country’s biggest metro. It is a peculiar arrangement: partners in Pretoria, rivals in Braamfontein.

A similar dynamic has already played out in the Western Cape, where the DA and PA, former local coalition partners, have clashed over control of George Municipality, with the PA defeating the DA twice in a string of tightly contested by-elections. If a party that campaigns hard against you in one province is a governing partner in the next, the question of what the coalition actually stands for becomes difficult to answer credibly on a doorstep.

This is not simply intra-GNU rivalry. It is also a story of internal ANC contradiction. In Gauteng, the ANC governs in a minority administration without the DA, even as the national party has signed a formal coalition agreement with the DA that deliberately excludes the EFF and MK. Premier Panyaza Lesufi has, in effect, been caught between a national leadership working with the DA and local structures more inclined to work with the EFF, an arrangement analysts have described as difficult to reconcile with better service delivery in the province. The local elections will force a decision that the party has so far avoided making explicitly: does it campaign as a GNU partner, or does it campaign as an ANC seeking to claw back the votes it lost to parties further to its left.

Political analysts are split on how much this fragmentation actually threatens the national coalition. One reading holds that regional government is simply a different beast from national politics, with different relationships and looser loyalty patterns, so friction at municipal level need not spill upward.

The opposing view, associated with analysts such as Ralph Mathekga, holds that regional ANC leaders may increasingly see the GNU itself as a threat to their local power base, which would make the local elections not a sideshow but a referendum on the national arrangement. What both camps agree on is that the aftermath matters more than the campaign: the coalitions that form after the vote, the number of hung councils, and the minority governments that result will determine how much instability the country absorbs going into 2027.

The numbers give both sides in the GNU reason for anxiety. Analysts are forecasting further ANC decline, with support potentially dipping toward 30% in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, provinces that between them contain some of the country’s most contested metros. Compounding this is the ongoing Madlanga Commission, which is investigating allegations of criminal cartel involvement, interference, and corruption within the police and criminal justice system.

In January 2026, President Ramaphosa instructed police to establish a special task team to investigate fourteen police officers and Ekurhuleni municipal officials named in the commission’s interim report, precisely the kind of daily, televised corruption narrative that does the ANC’s brand no favours in the run-up to a vote. Meanwhile the DA arrives at this election in a genuinely new position: for the first time in a municipal poll, it is not the official opposition but a party of national government, which means voters can now hold it to account for delivery rather than simply for rhetoric.

There is a case, however, that the coalition will survive the noise. Both ANC and DA spokespeople have publicly emphasised the GNU’s institutional resilience, a maturing culture of negotiation, in the ANC’s framing, and a demonstration that political competition and cooperation can coexist, in the DA’s. Investor confidence has firmed since the coalition’s formation, South Africa exited the Financial Action Task Force’s grey list in 2025, and GDP growth ticked up to 1.1% in 2025 from 0.7% in 2023, with unemployment easing slightly to 31.9% by the third quarter of last year. Neither the ANC nor the DA has an obvious incentive to be blamed for the coalition’s collapse, particularly with an economy showing tentative signs of recovery.

But neither party has an incentive to lose seats to protect the other’s local standing either, and that tension between governing together and campaigning apart is the real story of this election cycle.

The GNU was built to answer a national arithmetic problem: no single party commanded a majority, so several had to share power. Local government does not obey that same arithmetic uniformly, some municipalities will produce clear majorities, others will replicate the national deadlock in miniature, and a handful, Johannesburg chief among them, will force GNU partners into direct, public combat for the same office.

What emerges from that combat, and how gracefully the winners and losers return to the Cabinet table afterward, will say more about whether South Africa’s experiment in coalition governance is durable than anything that has happened in Parliament since 2024. The local elections were always going to be a test. The open question, six months out, is whether they are a stress test the GNU passes, or the moment its founding compromise starts to unravel from the ground up.

Z. Thando Nzimande – is A Wits Alumni, a Future Voices scholar and researcher at MEARI, A Neuroscience researcher, economic and geopolitical commentator/analyst and his goal is to provide insightful, well-researched analysis on global affairs, informed by his scientific training, critical thinking skills, and leadership experience.

Written By: Charl Heydenrych

The entire debate surrounding immigration, national borders, and civil protest is typically conducted using the language of collective identity, macroeconomic utility, or state sovereignty. However, if we strip away the layers of political rhetoric and analyse the situation through a single, uncompromising moral framework – the Harm-Consent Rule, the entire landscape changes.

​The Harm-Consent Rule is absolute: an action is only wrong if it inflicts unconsented physical harm upon a person or their justly acquired property. Violence and the threat of violence are inherently illegitimate, and consent is the mandatory prerequisite for any action that affects an individual.

​When this single principle is applied consistently to all actors in this crisis involving the undocumented migrant, the local citizen, the protestor, and the state, the messy political arguments dissolve, leaving a clear, binary distinction between peaceful cooperation and wrongful aggression.

​The undocumented migrant and the principle of non-harm

​Under the Harm-Consent Rule, the mere act of crossing an invisible geographical line called a border cannot be classified as a crime or a moral wrong. Why? Because peaceful movement inflicts no physical harm on any individual or their property.

​Consider an undocumented African migrant who walks across a border, rents a room from a willing landlord, and takes a job from a willing employer.

​The Factor of Consent: Every transaction in this chain is fully consensual. The employer consents to exchange money for labour; the migrant consents to exchange labour for money. The landlord consents to exchange space for rent.

​The Absence of Harm: No physical violence has occurred. No property has been damaged or stolen.

​To claim that the migrant has “stolen” a job or “strained” a resource is a violation of logical property rights. A job is not a physical object that can be stolen; it is a voluntary, ongoing contractual agreement between two parties. A local citizen does not own a job vacancy, nor do they own the market demand for labor. Therefore, the migrant’s peaceful entry into the market does not violate anyone’s consent or property. Under this rule, the migrant is entirely innocent of any wrongdoing. They are simply exercising their right to self-ownership and peaceful association.

​The anti-immigration march and the initiation of threat

​Now, let us examine the marches, the ultimatums, and the anti-immigrant mobilizations through the same lens. The Harm-Consent Rule states explicitly that violence and the threat of violence are wrong.

​When a group organises a march specifically to demand the removal or expulsion of a group of people, they are not engaged in peaceful expression; they are issuing a systemic threat of violence. Expulsion cannot happen peacefully without consent. If an undocumented family does not consent to leave their home or their business, the only way to remove them is through the physical initiation of force (either by dragging them out or threatening them with violence) until they flee.

​Marching to demand that the state or a community remove peaceful individuals is a vicarious initiation of force. It says, “If you do not leave voluntarily, we will use or compel the state to use physical violence against you.” Because the migrants have not initiated physical harm against anyone, any threat directed at them is a primary moral wrong. Under the Harm-Consent Rule, those who organize or participate in such marches are the actual perpetrators of a wrong, because they are introducing the threat of violence into a situation where only peaceful, consensual commerce previously existed.

​The “scapegoats” and the fiction of collective aggression

​The framework also thoroughly dismantles the standard justifications used by commentators and protestors, specifically the targets of “government corruption” or “white monopoly capital.”

​From the perspective of the Harm-Consent Rule, collectives do not exist as moral agents; only individuals do. You cannot harm a collective, and a collective cannot consent. Therefore, concepts like “white monopoly capital” or “the community” are abstract proxies used to justify unconsented actions.

​If a local resident feels aggrieved by systemic poverty, they cannot point to a peaceful individual, whether a wealthy corporate owner or a penniless migrant, and initiate force against them based on a collective narrative. Unless a specific individual has physically harmed your property or violated your explicit consent, you have no moral right to use force or the threat of force against them. Blaming a group or a system is simply an attempt to evade the absolute prohibition against harming innocent individuals.

​The state as a systemic violator of consent

​Finally, we must look at the institution that both sides often appeal to: the State. The Harm-Consent Rule is most radical when applied to government governance.

​By definition, state border enforcement, municipal trading bylaws, and immigration quotas are systematic violations of the Harm-Consent Rule. When the state prevents a local business owner from hiring an undocumented Zimbabwean, the state is violating the consent of both the employer and the employee. It is using the threat of physical force (fines, imprisonment) to stop a peaceful, mutually agreed-upon transaction.

​Similarly, when the state taxes citizens without their explicit individual consent to fund public infrastructure, it violates the rule. The subsequent “strain on resources” that local citizens complain about is not caused by the migrant, but by the state’s monopolistic, non-consensual management of public property. The state creates a system where resources are allocated by coercion rather than consent, making friction inevitable.

​Conclusion: The clarity of a single principle

​When the problem is tackled from the Harm-Consent Rule and nothing else, the complex socio-political debate becomes remarkably simple:

​Peaceful migrants are acting morally because they rely entirely on mutual consent and do no physical harm.

​Anti-immigrant protestors are acting immorally because their demands rely inherently on the initiation of violence and the threat of force against peaceful people.

​The state acts immorally whenever it uses coercion to prevent peaceful individuals from associating, trading, or moving freely.

​What nobody seems to understand is that the crisis is not a conflict of economic scarcity or cultural incompatibility. It is a conflict between peaceful consent and initiated force. If society simply accepted the principle that no physical harm means no wrong has been perpetrated, the march would cease, the borders would open to peaceful trade, and the conflict would evaporate overnight.

Charl Heydenrych is a retired human resources practitioner and a libertarian.

I want to refer specifically in this opinion piece to the South African state sector and South African state-owned enterprises. For the purposes of this opinion piece, “state sector” includes the entire central government, provincial authorities, and municipalities.

The largest and most prominent state-owned enterprises are well known to us: these are Eskom, Transnet, PRASA, and many others in South Africa. They will all also be classified here as part of the growing “compost heap” of state-linked institutions in South Africa. These are institutions that apparently do not realise the importance of maintenance, or simply place it very low on their priority lists, if it is to be found on any “to-do list” of those respective institutions at all. Or perhaps it is written down on paper somewhere, but simply remains words that are never, or rarely, turned into actions.

The concept of maintenance is simple: it is to keep objects or systems and institutions in good condition. Seen in broad terms, how it should be done is also not complicated to understand: it simply requires the regular evaluation of condition, and then care and repairs where necessary.

Yet we see how state-linked institutions in South Africa simply fail to carry out maintenance at all, or do so suboptimally. The physical decay of infrastructure and superstructures can be seen in all sectors in South Africa where state responsibility should have prevented such decay from taking place through simple, regular maintenance.

We can subsequently also look at the decay of state-linked institutions as organisms and their systems; those elements that are less visible to the eye, but which are probably the flawed foundations causing the visible part of what they are supposed to provide to collapse.

Name any state-linked institution in South Africa and you can identify its institutional decay if you look at its inner workings. Closer investigation will point out how the systems on which those institutions are based are also not subjected to the discipline of maintenance. Institutions must continuously be evaluated as functioning organisms, and the defects must then be addressed with the help of maintenance or reform, with a view to the sustained and effective delivery of the products and/or services for which they were established.

Institutions consist of many elements, from policy instruments to organograms, human resources policies, financial systems, procurement policies, and much more. Those elements must be regularly maintained, reviewed, and adapted where necessary. They are not static, because institutions function in a continuously changing environment.

Private sector institutions have implicit incentives that spur them on to continuously perform maintenance. Their profit margins, reputations, and nothing less than their survival depend on the kind of maintenance I referred to above. This is self-evident and taken for granted by such private sector institutions. And believe me, they do not find it the most pleasant and exciting part of their operations either.

It is much more “sexy” and exciting to expand the business, for example, whether by acquiring greater market share or diversifying products and services. Or simply to make the “bottom line” look better by operating the institution or business more effectively. Then, a massive incentive to be successful in the private sector is, of course, the source of funds that had to be invested to start the business. This could have been money from the entrepreneur himself or herself, money borrowed from a financial institution, or much more complex financing mechanisms involving the issuing of shares and stock exchanges, local or foreign listings, and so on. Often, however, it is a combination of financing mechanisms.

But the underlying great truth is this: the entrepreneur is, in the first and last instance, responsible for how the funds are utilised, how they are repaid through profit generation, or how the further issuing of shares allows shareholders to earn returns on their investments through annual dividend payouts.

The long and short of it, however, is accountability in the private sector.

Contrast this with the state-linked sector. The state gets its money from taxpayers, or borrows money based on the creditworthiness of the economy, meaning taxpayers, or the state simply creates money out of nothing by printing more physical money and/or allowing electronic credit to grow.

Those funds are then allocated on an annual basis through a national budget to the state-linked institutions that must use them to deliver products and services to the taxpayers. This amounts to a form of compensation to taxpayers for being forced to entrust their tax money to the state. Taxpayers find themselves in a social contract with the state: taxpayers give a portion of their personal funds to the state, which then undertakes to utilise it on their behalf for the benefit of all citizens, in the first place.

The above descriptions of the heart of the “models” according to which a state sector like that of South Africa and the private sector in South Africa function, respectively, are of course highly simplified. But they expose the core of why the disease of poor maintenance occurs in the state sector rather than in the private sector: accountability in the state sector is relatively easy to evade, while private sector institutions literally have to answer for their actions from day to day, week to week, and month to month.

In light of the above reasoning, all elements of the state sector can of course be compared with all elements of the private sector. Why then did I decide to focus on maintenance out of all those elements?

It is because what we observe on the growing compost heap of South Africa, namely general and widespread deterioration and decay, is in my opinion primarily caused by an overwhelming lack of maintenance in the state household. There are numerous other reasons for it as well, but many of them are mere fabrications to try and obscure the true state of affairs.

Let us subsequently look at some of those “excuses” for decay heard from the mouths of the state sector and that sector’s political masters.

Probably the most popular excuse is a lack of funds. There will certainly be such cases, but mostly it is simply a lie. I venture to say that every allocation of funds through the national budget provides for maintenance, or assumes that a portion of those funds will be utilised to protect what already exists because it has already been financed.

We find a practical example of the logic of this in our own lives. Who among us has not had a need to improve, upgrade, or enlarge our houses? Who has not considered acquiring a better and larger house? But how do we handle those aspirations? First and foremost, we take our budgets into account. If the budget is not sufficient for what we would like to have, then we content ourselves with what we have.

But now we realise anew what an asset we possess, and we apply every cent we can pinch to ensure first of all that the roof tiles are replaced or sealed where there are leaks. We realise that leaking taps will drive up our water bills and thus increase our running expenses. We therefore replace tap washers or the taps themselves, if necessary.

We could endlessly expand the list of personal preferences for maintenance rather than further capital expenditure. But what stands out is our mostly rational choice to concentrate on maintenance first with the funds at our disposal, and then wait for additional income before embarking on the territory of upgrading or expansion. Only irrational and irresponsible persons would make the “nicer” choice. The reason for our rationality and responsibility is self-evident: we are accountable to ourselves for our own actions.

The South African state stands in stark contrast to private sector institutions and individuals, although it should not be so. From the lowest rank in the public service to the president, accountability and responsibility should be just as crucial as in the private sector. But it is not. Theoretically, yes, starting with the highest responsibilities as set out in our Constitution down to the humblest by-law at, say, municipal level.

But compliance is subject to the extent to which accountability and responsibility are realised. And it does not realise spontaneously as in the private sector, where there are built-in incentives for it, as already discussed. Accountability and responsibility must therefore be enforced in the state sector.

But when the will to do so no longer exists due to institutional state decay, the vicious cycle begins: no accountability and responsibility for all practical purposes, and therefore no maintenance either. It is a vicious circle and it feeds itself. The less accountability and responsibility are enforced, the fewer reasons there are to fear the consequences of non-compliance. This gives rise to even less compliance and even greater decay.

After that, it is just a short step to the commission of corruption, which we know is endemic to our South African state sector.

Piet Du Plessis 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.

South Africa has rediscovered the oldest trick in politics: when the state fails, blame the foreigner.

When jobs vanish, blame the Zimbabwean. When crime rises, blame the Nigerian. When hospitals collapse, blame the Malawian. When police cannot police, municipalities cannot provide water, and Home Affairs cannot administer its own systems, blame the human being desperate enough to cross a border in search of work, safety, or dignity.

This is the poison at the heart of South Africa’s xenophobia crisis. The March and March protests, and similar movements like Operation Dudula, built themselves around the arbitrary 30 June 2026 deadline for undocumented foreign nationals to leave. They emerged from a country that is angry, unemployed, afraid, and tired of being governed badly.

But legitimate frustration does not justify hatred; it does not justify turning peaceful people into prey.

In the lead-up to the marches, foreign nationals fled their homes, shops were shuttered, and people were threatened, evicted, or attacked because of their nationality or perceived nationality. This is not border control, and it is not law and order. It is mass scapegoating dressed up as patriotism.

South Africa has the right to control its borders. Foreign nationals who commit crimes should be arrested. Undocumented people should be processed according to the law.

But this is precisely the point: according to the law. Not according to the mob. Not according to whether someone speaks with the wrong accent, owns the wrong shop, has the wrong surname, or looks like they might be from the wrong side of a colonial border.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has stated that enforcing immigration law is the responsibility of the state, and the state alone. No ordinary person may demand proof of nationality. This is the minimum required of a constitutional state.

And yet, the state has too often spoken with two mouths. It condemns vigilantism, then performs immigration enforcement that makes vigilantes feel vindicated. Days before the planned marches, government announced intensified enforcement operations, roadblocks and checkpoints, and thousands of immigration-law arrests.

If this is a lawful, rights-respecting migration strategy, government should say so and prove it. But if the timing and rhetoric are meant to appease a xenophobic crowd, then the state is telling the public that intimidation works.

That is not the rule of law; that is rule by the mob.

South Africa should know better than most societies what happens when ordinary life is turned into a permanent demand to produce papers. The apartheid dompas controlled movement by making permission to exist in certain spaces dependent on documentation.

Today’s immigration law is not apartheid. But when people are stopped because they look foreign, sound foreign, or come from a community associated with migrants, the logic becomes chillingly familiar.

“Show us your papers.”

“Prove you belong here.”

That logic should terrify South Africans.

What differentiates a foreign African from a local South African in the eyes of the crowd? Biology? There is no biological marker for nationality. A border is not in the blood. It is ink on a map, enforced by paperwork.

Culture? That argument is even weaker. Zimbabweans, Basotho, Batswana, emaSwati, Namibians, Mozambicans, Malawians, Zambians, and other Africans living here are not alien civilisations. They are neighbours, workers, spouses, relatives, and cultural cousins.

The line between “South African” and “foreigner” in Southern Africa is often not a deep civilisational divide. It is a product of colonial borders, imperial administration, and modern bureaucracy. A person does not become morally alien because a colonial administrator drew a line across Southern Africa.

This is why xenophobia is such a stupid hatred. It invents a vast moral gulf where there is none. It turns paperwork into a measure of human worth.

They are human beings.

If they violate the rights of others, they should be punished for that violation. Not for their nationality. A South African murderer is not morally preferable to a Zimbabwean shopkeeper. A South African extortionist is not better for the country than a Somali trader who pays rent, feeds his family, and sells bread to the community.

Crime is caused by criminals. It is enabled by weak policing, broken prosecutions, corruption, and a state that cannot protect life and property. It is not solved by harassing random foreigners for documents.

The same is true of unemployment. Immigrants did not destroy South Africa’s education system, collapse municipalities, create load-shedding, loot state-owned enterprises, or build a patronage state. The foreigner is not the architect of this crisis – the government and its ruling party are.

The xenophobe does not see individuals. He sees categories. Every crime committed by one foreigner becomes the guilt of all foreigners.

And it never stops where its defenders claim it will stop.

Today, the target is foreign Africans. Tomorrow, it is Indians. Then it is “European settlers.” Then it is coloured people in the wrong province, Afrikaners, Jews, Muslims, whites, blacks, or anyone else who can be framed as alien enough to hate.

The mob always needs another target.

If citizenship becomes something ordinary people must prove to strangers, what protects tourists, naturalised citizens, permanent residents, refugees, mixed families, or South Africans who simply sound different?

Once suspicion becomes social policy, no one is safe.

South Africa needs proper border management, a competent Home Affairs, and a clear, fast, fair migration system. It needs to punish criminals, regardless of nationality.

But none of this requires hatred. None of this requires mobs. None of this requires humiliating peaceful people in the street.

Hatred is easy because it gives people a face to blame. But hatred creates nothing. It does not create jobs, arrest murderers, fix schools, process visas efficiently, make hospitals work, or make South Africans safer.

Criminals should be punished because they are criminals; peaceful people should be left in peace.

That is the only moral position. Once a country accepts hatred as a legitimate political tool, it will never run out of enemies. It will only run out of excuses.

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.

Join Nicholas Woode-Smith, Zakhele Mthembu and Ayanda Zulu as they unpack some of the most pressing issues of the week.

In this episode, we discuss Cape Town’s push to establish its own detectives as concerns over crime and policing continue to grow. We also unpack how Amazon appears to have found a way into South Africa’s satellite internet market while Starlink remains sidelined by licensing and ownership regulations.

Originally Published on OntLaer in Afrikaans (18 June 2026)

The left-liberal media and populist political parties in South Africa make a point of using the Afrikaner’s relative prosperity as a weapon. This narrative, which also resonates strongly in foreign media, is deployed to silence Afrikaners regarding legitimate community concerns. The implication is always that Afrikaners are “complaining with a silver spoon in their mouth” and should rather count their blessings and keep quiet.

Such arguments are deliberately aimed at disempowering and marginalising the Afrikaner, and at sweeping historical and contemporary grievances under the carpet. They facilitate the systematic sidelining of the Afrikaner from the public sphere, from the civil service and state-owned enterprises to public schools and universities that are being deliberately anglicised.

At the same time, the factual history of the Afrikaner is either ignored or distorted to such an extent that the entire group is portrayed as historical outcasts, land thieves, and oppressors. Perspective is deliberately disregarded. In this way, an understanding of the complex history of a minority that itself had to rise from oppression, escape extreme poverty, and fight for decades to preserve its language and culture against the former power of the British Empire is prevented.

This systematic disempowerment is not a coincidence. It is a calculated strategy to neutralise the Afrikaner’s remaining influence. The post-1994 rulers realised that it would take a long time to weaken the Afrikaner’s economic base. They knew, however, that economic power would eventually wither if the cultural legitimacy behind it was first eroded and destroyed. Economic power without cultural power is simply not sustainable in the long run. To understand this dynamic, we must look at the insights of the great Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci.

Gramscian Hegemony

Gramsci (1891–1937) was an Italian intellectual and politician who opposed Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. His outspoken thinking landed him in prison, where the regime sought to silence his voice permanently. It failed. In prison, Gramsci wrote his famous Prison Notebooks, in which he developed the concept of “cultural hegemony”.

Gramsci asked why the Marxist revolution of 1917 succeeded in the less developed Russia, but repeatedly failed in more advanced Western European countries such as Italy and Germany. His conclusion was that the ruling class in the West does not rule merely through the army or police, that is, through coercion, but through culture.

Ironically, a hundred years after Gramsci, we see that Western Europe is indeed beginning to yield to a silent revolution. The influx of, and cultural takeover by, immigrants with non-Western cultures is causing the hegemony of Western culture to be increasingly displaced by the cultural hegemony of non-Western groups. Total Western hegemony is thus slowly but surely disappearing into nothingness.

When a group achieves cultural hegemony, it imposes its own worldview, values, and morality so successfully on civil society that it is accepted as almost normal. Gramsci postulated that if you control people’s cultural and intellectual framework, you do not need to force them with physical violence. They will police and direct themselves in the direction you desire.

The Afrikaner and Cultural Hegemony

Before 1994, the Afrikaner established cultural hegemony in South Africa by dominating the most important institutions of civil society: the state administration, municipal governance, state-owned enterprises, the military, police, schools, universities, the media, churches, and the arts. This granted the Afrikaner exceptional institutional power, which served as a shield for the economic power built up over generations. This combination enabled a small minority to survive politically and culturally in a demographic sea of fellow citizens with other cultures.

With the transition in 1994, the Afrikaner agreed to a new, egalitarian constitutional order. Although political power was relinquished, the Afrikaner business elite managed to protect large parts of their economic capital. This was largely achieved through strategic wealth-sharing with the new politically connected elite, a process that, for all practical purposes, served as a mechanism for coordinating economic survival through the creation of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). It was an immediate outcome in the early years after 1994, but eventually turned into the corrupt, unearned, and elite-favouring monster we experience today, to the detriment of broad-based economic upliftment. The same success could not, however, be achieved with regard to the Afrikaner’s cultural hegemony.

Why Economic Power Is an Illusion

Ownership of economic capital gives a minority group merely a false sense of security. If you no longer control the cultural and moral narrative, you control nothing. When the dominant hegemony portrays you as immoral, or as a historical or even contemporary enemy, those economic assets can at any time be targeted through legislation such as aggressive BEE targets or expropriation.

Herein lies Gramsci’s greatest warning: without the preservation of your own cultural institutions that tell and defend your own story, the minority group’s children will over time internalise the ruling class’s guilt narrative. We already see this in the current school curricula, where Afrikaner history is presented one-sidedly, distorted, and without historical context.

This leads to internalised guilt in a new generation that is subtly programmed to view its own culture as inferior. They buy into the hegemonic idea that the current state occupies the exclusive moral high ground, and that draconian “transformation” is the only logical reality.

The “War of Position”

How does a minority fight back against this domination? Gramsci’s answer was the “war of position”. Because a minority will lose a direct frontal clash with the state, the institutions of civil society must be gradually reconquered or built from scratch.

Institutions such as Solidarity, AfriForum, and Sakeliga fit perfectly here as practical, counter-hegemonic instruments. Akademia and Sol-Tech are not merely educational infrastructure; they are incubators for what Gramsci called “organic intellectuals”: people who give the minority’s own worldview new intellectual stature and articulate it effectively.

At the same time, for example, the FAK does essential work to reclaim historical heritage and prevent the state from rewriting history. Sakeliga and its networks of business chambers, in turn, are building an economic ecosystem that can function independently or semi-independently of the state’s coercive transformation demands. Only by linking economic power to the reconquest of their cultural capital can Afrikaners ensure that the majority state’s hegemony does not ultimately swallow them.

Piet Du Plessis 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.