I’m tired of talking about antisemitism. And you, dear reader, are no doubt tired of hearing about it. Judaism is a millennia old tradition steeped in culture, religion and history, and however small the world’s Jewish population has always been, it has punched far above its weight in positive contributions to the world at large. It, and we, deserve far more than to be defined by the people who hate us.

But the sad, inescapable truth of it is that the floodgates of Jew-hatred that burst open in the immediate wake of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust have shown no sign of slowing any time soon. Quite the opposite, in fact. Antisemitism isn’t just fully out in the open for the first time in decades, it’s like it never left. For the first time since the 1940s, hatred of Jews is explicit, proud and increasingly mainstream.

According to a shocking but unsurprising recent study, 2025 saw the highest amount of diaspora Jews murdered in antisemitic incidents in thirty years. This was quickly followed by an even more shocking study that revealed that the United Kingdom was home to the highest number of “antisemitic assaults” in the world per capita. That’s right, the country that once fought and defeated Hitler and has been a relative safe haven for Jews for nearly four centuries, is now one of the least safe places for Jews on Earth.

Just this past month, in fact, has seen five synagogues fire-bombed across the UK, a video has gone viral over the last few days (at least within Jewish circles) of Israeli tourists eating quietly in a restaurant in Vietnam being accosted by an English woman, and four Jewish-owned ambulances were set alight in London shortly before Passover.

And the overwhelming response to all this; the very best defence that is offered: “yes, but, what about Israel?”

Well, what about Israel?

The Anti-Zionism Excuse

It should go without saying that the actions of a government in another part of the world should have no bearing whatsoever on the discrimination, let alone violent assault, of people who happen to share the same religion or ethnicity of that country. No one in their right mind would sanction the persecution of Persians in the UK for the actions of the Ayatollah – or Russians for Putin, or Chinese people for Xi Jinping. So why Jews for Benjamin Netanyahu?

“Ah”, comes the quick reply, “but most Russians, Chinese or Persians don’t support the leaders of their countries, but most Jews support Israel!” First, of course, not all Jews support Netanyahu. Not by any stretch of the imagination. There are even some Jews who don’t support anything to do with Israel – the so-called “good Jews” that “anti-Zionists”, for now at least, give a free pass, but that hasn’t stopped “traditional” antisemites from still going after them.

What is true, though, is that the vast majority of Jews do indeed support the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and defend its right to defend itself. But again, so what? No one expects Russian, Chinese or Persian expats to denounce the very existence of their ancestral homes or to ignore the murder of its citizens. So, I ask again, why must the Jews?

The answer, of course, is that antisemitism has always thrived on hypocrisy, irrationality, and a sort of anti-logic that has allowed Jews to be painted, at once, as being vermin, scurrying in the dregs of society and also immensely powerful and rich overlords who rule society from above. For being both rich and poor, communist and capitalist, religious and heathen. This is true of Jews as people and now Israel as a state.

The Anti-Zionism Lie

Israel is a flawed country. There are a great number of things that it can be accused of that are genuinely troubling. The spate of terror attacks by Jews on innocent Palestinians in Judea and Samaria are horrific and even worse is the government’s refusal to properly prosecute these terrorists – or even, in the case of far right ministers like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, openly endorse them. Indeed, there’s a whole litany of things that these men say and do that deserve the harshest possible condemnation.

Even beyond these extremes and extremists, there are serious and valid criticisms to level at the Israeli governments treatment of Palestinians or at societal discrimination even against Arab-Israelis. One can harshly condemn the building of settlements that would make the creation of a Palestinian state impossible and deeply question the morality and viability of perpetual military occupation of another people.

The problem with “anti-Zionists” isn’t that they ask these tough questions, it’s that they have shown a constant unseriousness in grappling with them. Oh sure, they bring them up as “proof” of Israel’s fundamental illegitimacy and how it is, quite literally, the worst country on Earth, but they never bother to actually understand the reality on the ground – certainly not for Israelis, but also not for Palestinians. They certainly offer no solution other than the obliteration of Israel and all that entails (hint: it rhymes with menocide).

Speaking of rhymes-with-menocide, the way that the war in Gaza has been used to delegitimize Israel and any of the Jews around the world who “support” it, is even more craven, even more disingenuous. It is now taken as absolute, indisputable fact that this was not a war but a genocide by Israel against the innocent people of Gaza. After all “experts” say as much and South Africa won its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Of course, these “experts” are usually a) not experts or b) have an axe to grind against Israel, and South Africa not only didn’t win the case at the ICJ, it’s struggling even to hold it together.

But why let facts get in the way of the hatred. The only way anyone with even an ounce of integrity could call the Gaza war a genocide is by completely and utterly erasing Hamas from the equation. It’s to say that 70,000 innocent Palestinians died and not mention that a third of those (if not more) were active combatants. It’s to insist that Israel started the war and not mention that it was a retaliation to Hamas’ unprovoked pogrom in southern Israel and the taking of hundreds of hostages. And it’s to talk about the mass destruction in Gaza and not mention that Hamas used the enclave’s entire civilian infrastructure for terror purposes.

This perversion of reality matters not just because of how it affects Israel, but more damagingly, how it affects Jews in the rest of the world. It is at the very heart of the rise, legitimisation, and acceptability of Jew-hate worldwide.

Language Matters

Of course, now that there is a ceasefire in place and the situation in Gaza is stable, if nebulous, all eyes have turned to Israel’s latest “crime against humanity”: its attack on Iran and, of course, how it’s all Bibi’s fault that America joined in on Israel’s “war against the Iranian people”. If the language around the Gaza war was incendiary, there was at least the very real suffering of the Palestinian people and the complexity of the relationship between the Israel and the Palestinians that could at least appear to justify it on some level. But the way Israel is talked about and viewed in its war with Iran can be seen as nothing but a blatant attempt to not just deligitimize Israel, but to paint it, its people and Jews worldwide as uniquely evil. After all, if Iran is bad and Israel is even worse then what does that tell us about the Jewish state and, by extension, the Jewish people?

It’s not for nothing that most of the antisemitic incidents in the UK over the past few weeks have been done in the name of Iran. And, in yet another shocker of a report, why more young democrats in the US are hostile to Israel than to Iran.

But let’s get something straight: Israel is not at war with the Iranian people, it’s at war with the Islamic Republic. It did not start the war – the Islamic Republic did when one of its proxies attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, which was soon followed by more of its proxies and then it itself launching thousands of attacks against the Jewish state. It has called for “death to America, death to Israel” since its founding in 1979 and has directly and indirectly killed thousands of people worldwide.

Israel and Iran do not share a border and Israel has no interest in Iranian land, and has not started a single one of its war with the regime. The regime, meanwhile, according to most reports, murdered more almost as many Iranian civilians in two days in January as Gazan civilians died over two years of the Gazan war, and has violently oppressed their “own people” over the past near-half-century. It is a regime that represents the literal opposite of every single value that those very democrats are supposed to hold dear: democracy, freedom, equality, separation of church and state, fairness, compassion, and human rights.

Not that any of these actual facts remotely matter to those who are driven by hatred of Jews. The only thing that matters to them is the “respectability” of the language they can now freely use to demonize Israel, Israelis and any Jew who dares support them.

Who Are the Monsters?

Now, it has to be said, in terms of actual antisemitic incidents, we in South Africa have been very lucky. Which is ironic considering the outright support for Hamas and the Islamic Republic by the ANC and by others in positions of power and influence. But as has been noted time and time again, to use the most extreme example possible, the Holocaust started not with actions but with words. If that’s the case, and it clearly is with any sort of hate crime, there is very real reason to be concerned.

Consider, for example, two separate letters/ opinion pieces from two separate publications, that were published over the past few weeks.

The first, a letter by James Cunningham published here in Business Day that, once again, ascribes to Jews a conspiratorial level of control over even the world’s greatest powers: in this case the “Masada mob”, as he puts, and its control of America. This is a reference to the Jews that stood up against the tyranny of the Roman Empire some two millennia ago, but reconfigured by Cunningham as a coercive force that caused “untold destruction” to the great empire.

He also calls the buffer zone that the Israeli Defence Forces are carving in Southern Lebanon as a response to the incessant missile and rocket attacks by Hezbollah a “kill zone” and recontextualises the Islamic Republic as the “reasonable” victims of this crazed mob of Jews. Cunningham does correctly identify the small strain of extremism running through the fringe parts of the settler movement, but conflates it with Jews and Israelis en masse. The religious extremism of the Islamic republic obviously isn’t even worth a mention.

And then, inevitably, there is the column by Oscar Van Heerden in Sunday World entitled, “Once upon a time in Iran and Gaza, monsters lurked.” Van Heerden has proven himself to be an absolutely unrepentant Jew-hater a thousand times over since 7 October 2023, but even by his rotten standards, this op-ed is utterly jaw-dropping. As you may have guessed, the “monsters” in question are not Hamas or the Islamic Republic, but those nasty, duplicitous Jews and their ultimate benefactor, the United States of America. This piece has it all: Holocaust inversion, dehumanization of Jews, and ye old antisemitic canards of absolute Jewish control and influence. Even the Ayatollah would be impressed.

I have to say at this point that this is not a knock on either publication. I was given an opportunity to reply to another of Van Heerden’s hate screeds in Sunday World recently and Business Day has never failed to showcase the “other side”; not least by happily publishing numerous articles by yours truly in defence of Israel and world Jewry. I have no doubt that these particular opinion pieces do not in any way reflect the views of either publication’s editorial, and are simply the result of their wanting to publish as wide a scope of opinion as possible.

But let’s be serious, if this was about any other minority group, no mainstream publication would touch such opinion pieces with a ten metre poll. Antisemitism, as long as it is couched, however thinly, in “anti-Zionism”, has reached a level of widespread acceptance that Jews are now the one and only minority group where such blatant bigotry is allowed to fly. So, yes, it is to South Africa’s greatest credit that actual antisemitic incidents, and most especially, antisemitic violence is kept to a relative minimum, but with this sort of rhetoric given free rein, just how much longer will this remain true?

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

Join David Ansara, Nicholas Woode-Smith and Ayanda Zulu as they dive into some of the most pressing issues of the week.

In this episode, we discuss how, as South Africa marks Freedom Day and Workers’ Day this week, the reality facing millions tells a very different story.

More than three decades after South Africa’s 1994 democratic elections, the promises of opportunity, dignity, and economic freedom remain out of reach for far too many. Unemployment continues to rise, crime remains a daily threat, and government control over citizens’ lives and livelihoods is expanding.

This isn’t what South Africans were promised in 1994.

Join us as we unpack the gap between promise and reality, and explore the reforms needed to restore opportunity, accountability, and real freedom in South Africa.

VF Plus leader and MP Dr Corné Mulder has justifiably criticised former President Jacob Zuma, who was part of the negotiations that led to the inclusion of Section 235 in the South African Constitution in 1996, for reigniting unnecessary political conflict against the backdrop of the MK Party’s attempt to repeal Section 235 of the Constitution through the Constitution Twenty-Fourth Amendment Bill.

While Zuma can be accused of many things, being historically naive, misinformed, and unreasonable when it comes to the importance of self-determination as a principle and its conceptual role in accommodating cultural autonomy and diversity in a unitary state like South Africa, is not one of them.

When he visited the town of Orania in September 2010 on an official state visit, he commended it as an exemplary model of self-reliance and cultural preservation, noting that it constituted a legitimate expression of self-determination within a broader national context.

Given this background, it can be reasonably deduced that Zuma is not at the centre of the party’s legislative attempt to repeal Section 235, and that it is rather MP Mzwanele Manyi - who has tabled the Bill - and other naive, misinformed, and authoritarian party members who are driving it, on the basis that Section 235 is vague and has been weaponised as an instrument for separatism.

As an elder with knowledge and experience on this topic and as a dictator of the MK Party, Zuma would do well to educate Manyi and others, who are gravely mistaken, about the political history of South Africa and the relevance of self-determination as a principle in fostering mutual recognition and peaceful coexistence.

Historical background of Section 235

Section 235 deliberately emerged as a vague and cautious political compromise after protracted contestation on the nature of the new political dispensation during the negotiations to end Apartheid. On one end, then ANC leaders like the late Nelson Mandela, Zuma himself, and several others were concerned about secessionism and potential future threats to the territorial integrity of the state, and were intent on pushing for a single, unitary system in which the state would play an active role in forging a national, overarching identity.

On the other end, opinions varied, with hardline and militant voices like the AWB demanding a separate state and other Afrikaner actors reluctantly accepting a unitary system but pushing for a self-determination clause that would make some degree of cultural autonomy and genuine cultural pluralism possible within a broader national context.

The pendulum could have swung in any direction and produced a clear winner, but the negotiations eventually culminated in a settlement that allayed fears about both secessionism (on one end) and cultural marginalisation (on the other end), by recognising the right to self-determination within a broader national context, with the self-determination clause being strategically vague enough about its practical implications and thus creating interpretive room for accommodation and flexibility in its application.

Public opinion remains contested, but arguably no side clearly “won” the negotiations, with both sides claiming partial victories that were necessary to avert serious conflict, and forging a somewhat workable arrangement that has, to this day, mediated some degree of mutual recognition and peaceful coexistence.

That Manyi and others are criticising the vagueness of Section 235 and its application in relation to what they see as separatism in towns like Orania demonstrates that they do not appreciate the complex history that explains its inclusion in the Constitution. In their historical naivety, ignorance, and desire to repeal an important mechanism that can limit the excesses of democratic majoritarianism, they are, as Dr Mulder has correctly noted, reigniting unnecessary political conflict and resurrecting deep tensions that historical negotiations tried to resolve.

Saying this may well be interpreted as a “threat”, but it is a blunt criticism of their policy agenda, and a frank reminder that the kind of authoritarian nationalism that lies at the heart of their legislative push to repeal Section 235 can have serious and damaging consequences for a polity that has, to some degree, created conditions for cultural autonomy and the practical expression of self-determination and cultural pluralism in a culturally diverse society.

There is broadly a need to revive robust political discourse around a viable political dispensation in South Africa and the limits of narrow authoritarian nationalism that does not appreciate the nuances of a layered principle like self-determination, but this falls outside the scope of this piece.

For now, it is worth re-emphasising that uBaba, as he is affectionately known, needs to rein in his misinformed and disrespectful children, who could potentially lead the country down a path of unnecessary political conflict.

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

I have previously discussed how anti-immigrant (African) sentiments, words, and actions harm our interests as South Africans. The moral side of this is just as important. It is essential that it be made clear that those who attack immigrants, express ill-informed opinions about them, and otherwise mobilise against them on the basis of ignorance, have no excuse. There is no amount of poverty or social deprivation that makes hate against an entire group of people acceptable.

What we are seeing on our streets, with mobs stopping people and asking them for their papers, is despicable. We are also now subject to regular violent pogroms against innocent people, often South Africans who are dark-skinned or speak Tsonga or Venda. There is also no nuanced understanding that naturalisation, permanent residency, employment and student visas, and asylum are all legal and valid reasons to be in this country.

We have a constitution that ensures free expression and various forms of political participation (voting, petitions, peaceful protests, commenting on government policy, court action), so there is no excuse to attack innocent people on the streets who may or may not be in the country illegally. Even for those who are here illegally, a violent attack is wrong. It is not a proportionate response to the violation committed. In fact, simply crossing a border is not a crime under natural law, since it does not violate the Non-Aggression Principle or the Harm-Consent Rule.

What these people are doing is as bad as what poor Afrikaners did in subjecting black South Africans to apartheid, and the justifications in both cases are very similar. In both cases, you have people who feel that they have a right to certain jobs by virtue of their identity (citizenship or race), and that strangers cannot contract freely with each other because of this identity-based entitlement. Whether the strangers are a South African business and an immigrant or black employee, “legal” or not, is beside the point. Apartheid legislation also reserved skilled labour for white people. Legally, it was still immoral.

What we must avoid doing is buying into the victimhood narrative that poverty justifies immoral behaviour. If this premise is accepted, we can no longer trust our poor fellow citizens to exercise moral agency. Taking that argument to its logical extreme means almost any immoral behaviour, e.g. eating your own children or selling them into prostitution, can be justified. As a society, we must never lose empathy for the poor, but at the same time, we must never treat poor people as anything less than human. They are not pets we must feel sorry for but who ultimately cannot be trusted to be moral. They are people with moral agency who must be held to a moral standard.

The fact that we live in a democracy also means we should expect a certain level of engagement around issues of public policy. We trust all adults with a vote, so all adults are expected to be amenable to logical arguments about public policy, otherwise it is reckless to entrust everyone with the vote. Adult citizens must be able to understand that immigrants do not lead to fewer jobs for South Africans, and that South Africans commit most of the crime in this country.

Are immigrants facilitating corruption in the public service? Do they have the political power to do that? Or is it South African politicians facilitating corruption? Do immigrants sell documents to themselves at Home Affairs? Do immigrants bribe themselves at the border to enter the country illegally?

The fact is, immigrant crime is largely a symptom of, and facilitated by, South African crime. Some stats suggest that in 70% of South African homicides, the victim knows the perpetrator, i.e. these are family members, friends, acquaintances, etc. These are not random (immigrant) strangers killing South Africans. It is mostly South Africans killing South Africans. Of the murders by random strangers, the vast majority are committed by South Africans.

South Africans have the power to pressure their government. A million-man march by unemployed youth, for example, would do it. They could go and camp peacefully at the Union Buildings until a policy like the FMF’s Job-Seekers Exemption Certificate (JSEC) was implemented. That would immediately remove a major barrier to hiring them and create possibly millions of jobs.

Choosing instead to organise into mobs and attack foreigners means that these violent degenerates know that they cannot persuade others of their ideas. I doubt they have persuaded even themselves that immigrants are the problem. It is just a convenient group to take out their anger on. Violence is never acceptable if it is not being used in self-defence, and crossing a border is not aggression.

I hope law enforcement does its job and arrests all of the ringleaders and anyone else who can be identified as participating in these violent acts. It is exactly the same as racism and the thinking that produced apartheid here and Jim Crow in the USA. Unfortunately, the victims are members of the groups who were most helpful to South Africans when they suffered under those past wrongs. It is evil behaviour, and it disgusts me. There is nothing to empathise with in this mindless bigotry.

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

Written By: Richard Tate

Every South African has their own set of woes, ranging from corruption and crime to power cuts and potholes. As an ex-Zimbabwean farmer whose farms were confiscated by the Mugabe government, and now living in Hermanus, my worry is that South African farmers could suffer the same fate. If the proposed property expropriation laws are not executed with extreme caution, the positive developments now appearing on the country’s economic front could sink back under the horizon.

Nearly 200,000 land claims have been lodged since 1995; only 34% have been settled. This seems like a total lack of commitment by the government. But no matter how many experts quote the percentages of land owned by white farmers, the land imbalance remains in dispute. No number of warnings of potential losses in export earnings or food shortages will help, should this issue be mismanaged.

The state may take property for public benefit, but it must be lawful, justified, and fair, and the owner must be compensated. Who decides justified and fair? In the event of expropriation, the most valuable tool for farmers is the valuation of their land as well as every single improvement on it, down to the fencepoles, boreholes, and pumping equipment.

We had professional valuations done in Zimbabwe, which were recognised and applauded by the World Bank.

South African farmers are skilled and able to feed the country. Many are helping their less fortunate neighbours get into production. But that won’t be enough to satisfy the voters under an African National Congress that is now clearly on the backfoot.

To put these storm clouds to rest, a national scheme, supported by all sectors, is crucial.

Firstly, we need new leaders of stature who understand the needs of the populace and can tell government: Look, we will fix your problem over, say, the next 10 years by, for example, identifying a number of keen young farmers every year and getting them properly settled on the land.

Next, we need buy-in from the agricultural unions. They must be part of the solution, even if farmers ask, “Why should we, what’s in it for us?” But if the unions can be positive about outcomes, the government should really be very happy, since the politicians simply don’t have the skills and know-how to make agriculture work.

In Zimbabwe, the tobacco trade finances the farmers (since banks refuse to provide loans without title deeds) from seedlings to point of sale, including capital items.

The unions should be supported by farmers’ co-ops, the big downstream agri industries, and banks.

And, of course, the government ministries need to be involved. All backed by a guaranteed fund of several billion rands aimed at expanding the farmer base.

But without the knowledge and skills of the current farmers, the scheme will fail. Training centres need to be built to draw new farmer-pupils. These pupils will learn the basics of farming, how to service a tractor, understanding the soil and fertiliser needs, weather patterns, horticulture, water & micro jets and stock management. Re-skilled agricultural extension officers should train and monitor the new farmers as they become established. Commercial farmers should be encouraged to employ new graduates with tax incentives.

A successful programme is a must to prevent chaos. Big Business may not quite appreciate the importance of farming, but if they don’t support a national scheme they must expect a rude awakening.  Examples of success and failure are just across the border in Zimbabwe, for all to learn from.

Initially stability will have to be ensured by not interfering with the “super farmers” – the big food producers and exporters. Paint them green and leave them to feed us. First world farms are essential, especially in the face of changing international market demands and consumer pressures.

Then work through an accurate, up-to-date land audit to see where the viable spare land lies and how best to settle new farmers. There will be some difficult questions for existing farmers on vacant and unproductive land but that will be the price of a peaceful countryside.

As yet, war is a long way off. In fact, despite the difficulties, South Africa’s lights are coming on again after the downturn that followed the euphoria of the first democratic elections. Let’s not shoot out those lights for short-term political points.

Granted, there are some major differences between Zimbabwe and South Africa.

The economy of the latter is much more diverse and depends far less on agriculture. Also, South Africa’s high-potential soils are limited, with the vast, harsh, bone-dry interior consisting mostly of low-productive, environmentally sensitive semi-arid veld. In contrast, Zimbabwean commercial farmers were able to build 20 000 irrigation dams. And Robert Mugabe was strong on schools. He saw good education as non-negotiable and built 1,800 schools and nine universities. 

To return to “land imbalance” regarding ownership percentage as perceived by millions of South Africans: The pattern has been the same throughout Africa since Harold McMillan’s speech, “Winds of change” in Cape Town.

As government views its potential losses at the ballot box, so the risk of the Expropriation Act being implemented increases. This can clearly be seen after the Government of National Unity meeting with the White House. Irrespective of pressure, the Act remains law.

I am anxious that when the tenure of the two DA ministers of agriculture and public works expires at the next general election, the incoming ministers will be prepared to operationalise the Act, resulting in lack of confidence, a falling rand, and uncertainty for the business community, let alone the farmers.

I think that government will be very wary of “food security”. High on the agenda of both farming unions and government should be the transfer of skills to new farmers. Without this agenda the new farmers will be at great risk of failure.

A further concern that I have is the valuation of farms in South Africa. There seems to be three levels. First is municipal valuation for rates and taxes, second the banks valuation on a higher level, and thirdly a professional valuation higher and more realistic for a sale. In Zimbabwe the farms were valued by professional valuers and applauded by the World Bank in the farmers’ quest for compensation.

Farmers with multiple title deeds will also experience pressure, in spite of these title deeds being essential to make farming profitable.

There is a lot of homework required by farming unions in dialogue with government to help them understand the issues required for a successful industry to feed the nation.

Richard Tate, during his tenure as President of the Zimbabwe Tobacco Association, settled 6000 small scale farmers, still farming today. Later, as President of the World Tobacco Association, he represented 35 million small scale farmers. His two farms were acquired by the Zimbabwe government. He is an Associate of the Free Market Foundation.

South Africans are expected to accept, without question, that race law is a form of justice, that economic coercion is empowerment, and that the same state that cannot keep the lights on should decide who owns, hires, supplies, and succeeds.

But the results are now too obvious to ignore. Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) has not empowered South Africa; it has helped bleed it dry.

The damage is not abstract. It is visible in slower growth, fewer jobs, higher costs, weaker investment, and a procurement system designed less to serve the public than to feed a politically connected class. Ordinary South Africans pay the price.

Workers are denied opportunity in a stagnant economy. Consumers face higher costs. Taxpayers fund a corrupt and inefficient government.

This is not empowerment for any race; it is corruption enabling and destroying the economy.

Research by the Free Market Foundation and Solidarity estimates that BEE costs South Africa as much as R290 billion a year in compliance costs and lost economic activity. That is roughly 3% of GDP. Since 2004, the cumulative damage may have exceeded R5 trillion. Annual growth may have been cut by between 1.5% and 3%, with around 192,000 jobs lost every year.

A poor country does not get rich by punishing production. It does not reduce unemployment by making business more expensive, more complicated, and more politically contingent.

Yet that is exactly what BEE does. It turns entrepreneurship into an obstacle course of codes, targets, scorecards, ownership deals, and compliance rituals. Time, capital, and management attention are diverted away from growth and into bureaucracy. In a country with mass joblessness, this is economic vandalism.

When ideology matters more than growth, the poor pay first.

Defenders of BEE like to speak as if criticism of the policy is criticism of justice itself. That is the oldest trick in the South African policy playbook. Dress up failure in moral language and hope nobody notices the wreckage. But there is nothing just about a system that entrenches elite access while millions remain excluded from real prosperity. There is nothing transformative about laws that enrich insiders while townships decay, municipalities collapse, and young people sit without work.

BEE did not build a broad black middle class. The vibrancy and enterprising nature of the South African people can be thanked for that. All that BEE built is a politically-connected tollgate.

That tollgate is most obvious in public procurement. The Institute of Race Relations argues that BEE-linked procurement premiums cost taxpayers more than R100 billion a year. Perhaps as much as R150 billion. The Treasury itself recognises the existence of preference premiums, capped at 25% in most contracts, yet the total burden is not clearly disclosed to the public. That should be a scandal.

South Africans are told there is no money for policing, infrastructure, clinics, maintenance, or reliable electricity. The fiscus is strained, taxes are high, and every budget speech arrives with another excuse. Yet there always seems to be money to pay more for less when race law and political access enter the equation.

BEE has helped legitimise corrupt extraction. One of the great myths of post-apartheid South Africa is that corruption is merely the abuse of an otherwise noble system. It is not.

In many cases, corruption is the natural consequence of a system that gives officials discretion over contracts, ownership, and access in the name of transformation. Once merit, price, and competence are displaced by political criteria, corruption is no longer an aberration. It becomes the logic of the system.

This is why the defence of BEE has become so hollow. Its champions can no longer point to broad upliftment. They point instead to intentions, slogans, and moral intimidation.

They ask South Africans to ignore outcomes and submit to doctrine. Even now, as the policy’s failures mount, the political class does not speak of real solutions. It speaks of redesign, review, and new funding mechanisms. A proposed Transformation Fund is presented as reform. In truth, it is merely a new method of centralising tribute.

Government calls it transformation; productive South Africans experience it as punishment.

The deeper problem is philosophical. BEE rests on the idea that the state should engineer economic life through race, coercion, and bureaucratic control.

That idea has failed everywhere it has been tried in one form or another. Prosperity comes from liberty, from secure property rights, from competition, from voluntary exchange, from institutions that reward productivity rather than political closeness. South Africa’s decline is not mysterious. It is policy driven. We have chosen control over freedom, ideology over competence, and symbolism over growth.

South Africans are governed by people who mistake control for justice.

There is an alternative. Scrap the procurement premiums. End racialised ownership coercion. Replace scorecards with equal rights and open competition. Make public procurement transparent and value-driven.

Let businesses focus on serving customers, hiring workers, and building wealth instead of feeding a compliance industry. If government wants to help the poor, it should stop sabotaging the economy that could employ them.

BEE has had decades to prove itself. It has produced corruption, stagnation, and elite enrichment dressed up as virtue. It has weakened the productive economy and made the state more parasitic. It has not healed South Africa. It has deepened the incentives that are breaking it.

Prosperity will not come from better management of race law; it will come from freedom.

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. You can follow him on X: @NWoodeSmith.

Written By: Robert Khumalo

Five years ago, Calla Walsh was a teenage political prodigy from Cambridge, Massachusetts. She moved in establishment circles, worked on Democratic campaigns, and was profiled as part of a new generation of savvy, socially conscious activists. Today, she is based in Beirut, embedded in networks aligned with Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” appearing on state media, and chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”.

Her journey did not happen overnight. It moved in stages. From mainstream activism to ideological radicalisation. From protest to direct action, including attacks on Israeli-linked facilities that led to arrest and jail time. From there, deeper entanglement - trips to Cuba, relationships with international far-left organisers, and ultimately relocation into the orbit of Iranian state influence and Hezbollah-controlled environments.

A parallel story is unfolding in South Africa.

In June 2018, the SA Jewish Report documented an incident at the FotoZA Gallery in Rosebank Mall. Three young people dressed in black arrived and plastered posters on the gallery’s windows to protest an exhibition showcasing the work of Israeli and South African photographers. They were caught by mall security, handed to police, questioned, and warned. One of those three was Julia Eccles, then 32. When a journalist asked her what Hamas stood for, she replied that Hamas was “a political party and organisation in Palestine that goes around building things like schools.” She added that she had heard Hamas was “propped up by America and Israel, which gave it money.” Ignorance, on its own, is not a crime. People hold uninformed views and change them. What is striking about Eccles is not that she was uninformed in 2018 — it is what happened next. She did not educate herself and revise her position. She became a hardened propagandist. By 2024 she was actively denying the atrocities Hamas committed, dismissing documented accounts of rape survivors as fabrications, and spreading conspiracy theories about Israeli intelligence. The trajectory from 2018 to 2026 is a story of radicalization.

In May 2024, she wrote publicly: “There is no forensic evidence of ‘systematic sexual violence’ on Oct 7th, it simply doesn’t exist. This narrative was all fabricated using emotive, misleading language and it was done by IDF officials and their PR consultants. What ‘victims’ are we supposed to believe when there has not been a single victim, 7 months later? Give me a break.” She paired this with praise for the Electronic Intifada (a publication known for minimizing Hamas atrocities) for a video purporting to debunk Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary on the October 7 mass rapes.

In January 2024, she shared content from an account called @hoaxvstruths framing New York Times reporting on October 7 rape survivors as “propaganda.” When Facebook removed her posts on this subject, she told her followers to screenshot and spread her content to avoid Facebook’s rules. By September 2025, she was sharing content from Richard Medhurst dismissing eyewitness testimony about the October 7 murders as staged by “soldiers and government actors posing as civilians.” That same month, Facebook removed another of her posts entirely.

The oldest antisemitic smear is the blood libel; the accusation that Jews murder, exploit, or abuse non-Jewish children for their own purposes. It drove the pogroms and the Nazi propaganda machine. Eccles has spread modern blood libels in her public posts. In November 2022, responding to an AIPAC post about Israeli medical technology improving American healthcare, she endorsed a comment describing it as “Innovating organ theft.” The organ theft conspiracy, the claim that Israelis harvest the organs of Palestinians, is one of the most widely circulated iterations of the blood libel. It has been repeatedly investigated and debunked. It maps precisely onto the medieval accusation: Jewish hands on the bodies of innocent victims. On February 1, 2026 she posted an image depicting an Israeli tank crushing Palestinian civilians, accompanied by the text: “You can pull the lever to stop the slaughter of Palestinian children, but Mossad will leak footage of you on Epstein Island.” Her caption: “So now that the whole thing has finally been blown wide open, what happens next?” The claim that Israeli intelligence controls Western politicians through child sex trafficking footage is the blood libel in its most contemporary form.

In November 2025, Eccles shared a Workers and Socialist Party (WASP) poster depicting several women as feminist icons. Among them, holding a rifle, is Leila Khaled, the Palestinian hijacker who participated in the 1969 TWA Flight 840 hijacking and the 1970 Dawson’s Field hijackings; operations that targeted Jewish and Israeli civilians. Khaled is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, designated a terrorist organisation by the European Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Eccles shared it approvingly, as a vision of the kind of women her party celebrates. Violence against Jewish and Israeli civilians is not a crime to her. It is heroism, provided the perpetrator is on the right side of her ideological ledger.

She takes the extremist view that Israel has never had the right to exist.

Eccles is an organized political operative with multiple institutional roles, a media platform, and a clear ideological agenda. On April 3 2026, she appeared on News Central TV as a WASP representative. In February 2026 she raised funds for the SA BDS Coalition’s anti-imperialist protests, publishing bank details in her own name. In November 2024 she published an opinion piece in the Cape Argus calling Amazon’s cloud contract with Israel “digital genocide” and describing Jeff Bezos as the face of “corporate tyranny.”

Julia Eccles’s record is well documented. She has denied the October 7 rapes. She has called survivors “‘victims’” in scare quotes. She has had content removed by Facebook for violating community standards on multiple occasions. She has endorsed the organ theft blood libel. She has spread the Mossad-Epstein conspiracy theory. She has shared imagery glorifying a terrorist who targeted Jewish civilians. The blood libel does not require a medieval dungeon. It requires only someone willing to wield it, a TikTok video to spread it, and a media ecosystem willing to amplify it before the facts are established.

There is a temptation to dismiss voices like Eccles as fringe. But Walsh was once a teenager posting and organising online. Today, she is cited by intelligence officials as someone embedded in networks connected to sanctioned groups, operating from within regions controlled by them. It remains to be seen where Eccle’s journey ends.

Robert Khumalo is a political analyst and classical liberal commentator.

The tension between absolute liberty and public safety is often tested at the intersection of “risk” and “aggression”. To a libertarian, the line is usually drawn at the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP): the idea that force is only justified in response to the initiation of physical force. However, as critics rightly ask, must we wait for a body to hit the ground before a crime has occurred?

​The Threshold of Aggression: Risk Versus Violation

​In the libertarian view, the distinction between a “risky act” and “aggression” lies in the crossing of a physical boundary. Speeding on an empty road is a victimless act; reckless driving in heavy traffic, however, begins to edge into the territory of implied threat.

​Aggression takes place the moment an individual’s actions infringe upon the private property or physical safety of another without their consent. In the case of discharging a firearm at a rally, the “victim” status is determined by the environment. If a person fires a gun in a crowded shopping mall, they are creating a direct, immediate threat to the lives of non-consenting bystanders. This is an act of aggression because the threat is credible and uninvited.

​However, a political rally functions under a different set of ethical parameters: Implicit Consent.

​The Rally and the “Consent of the Crowd”

​The individuals attending an EFF rally are not accidental bystanders. They are voluntary participants in a highly choreographed, militant political subculture. By entering that space, there is a level of implicit consent to the environment – the noise, the rhetoric, and even the provocative displays of “revolutionary” theatre.

​If Julius Malema fires a weapon into the air in that specific context, and the crowd remains, cheers, and engages, the libertarian argument is that no aggression has occurred because the participants have waived their right to claim “threatened” status. They have accepted the risk as part of the assembly. Just as a boxer consents to being hit in a ring, a rally-goer consents to the militant atmosphere of the event. To the libertarian, the state’s intervention here is paternalistic; it seeks to “protect” people who never asked for protection and who do not feel victimised.

​Where Speech Becomes Action: “Kill the Boer”

​The conversation shifts significantly when we move from the discharge of a weapon to the incitement of violence through song or speech, such as “Kill the Boer.” Libertarians are often absolutists regarding free speech, but even the most ardent defender of the NAP recognises that speech can bridge into incitement when it leads to a direct violation of rights.

​If Malema utters these words, he is navigating the razor’s edge between “political hyperbole” and “solicitation of a crime.” To resolve this, we must look at the consequences.

​If a member of that crowd, fuelled by the rhetoric of the rally, goes out and commits a murder against a white person within a reasonable timeframe (say, one year), the link between the speech and the aggression becomes a matter of ethical liability. In a libertarian framework, while the individual who pulled the trigger is primary, the person who incited the act bears a secondary responsibility for orchestrating a violation of the NAP.

​A Proposed Standard for Prohibitive Speech

​A consistent libertarian position could argue for a “consequence-based” restriction on speech. If it is found that Malema’s utterances are consistently followed by actual physical harm (the killing of “Boers” or farmers), then the state has a legitimate reason to treat those specific words as a direct threat.

​Under this standard, if a causal link is established by a pattern of violence following his speeches, Malema should be prohibited from uttering “Kill the Boer.” This prohibition would not be a violation of free speech, but a recognition that the phrase has transitioned from “song” to “instruction for aggression.”

​The weight of these words should be treated with the same social and legal gravity as uttering any other word or phrase recognised in South African law as an act of crimen injuria. “Kill the Boer” must be held to a standard of accountability when it translates into physical action.

​Conclusion

​Libertarianism is not a license for recklessness. While we must defend the right to own firearms and engage in provocative assembly without state interference, we must also demand absolute accountability for the results of those actions. We should not wait for someone to die to recognise a threat, but we must be careful not to criminalise “danger” itself.

​The moment the rhetoric of the rally manifests as a corpse in the field, the speaker’s “right” to that rhetoric ends. Justice, in its truest sense, is the protection of the innocent from aggression – whether that aggression comes from a stray bullet or a command to kill.

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

Written By: Robert Khumalo

Geordin Hill-Lewis is easy to like if you are inclined toward the Democratic Alliance. He is polished, articulate, administratively credible, and far more convincing as an executive than as a mere parliamentary combatant. Now, after his election on 12 April 2026 as the DA’s new federal leader, he arrives at the head of South Africa’s second-largest party at a moment of genuine consequence.

The DA is no longer simply an opposition formation heckling from the sidelines. It is part of the Government of National Unity, it is heading into local elections, and it is openly trying to position itself as a future governing party. Hill-Lewis himself has made that ambition unmistakable. He has said he is not satisfied with the DA remaining a junior partner, and that the party must aim to become the largest in South Africa and lead national government.

That makes the obvious question too small. The real question is not whether Hill-Lewis is good for the DA. He probably is. The real question is whether he is good for liberalism in South Africa, or whether he is merely the latest, and perhaps most polished, custodian of the DA brand.

Those are not the same thing. A party can improve its electoral prospects without deepening its principles. It can become more professional, more careful, and more broadly acceptable while saying less and less that is philosophically distinct. In fact, that is often how parties grow. They swap conviction for calibration and then call it maturity.

Hill-Lewis has the chance to do the opposite. But that remains only a chance.

The best case for Hill-Lewis is straightforward. He brings something South African politics desperately lacks: a leader with a visible governing record in a functioning administration. His whole political appeal rests on the claim that where the DA governs, the basics work. In his acceptance speech, he made that argument central. Budgets are managed responsibly. Competent people are appointed. Institutions function. Services are delivered. He framed that not simply as a DA boast, but as proof that South Africans do not have to accept decay as normal.

And unlike many politicians who make these claims in the abstract, Hill-Lewis can point to Cape Town. Under his mayoralty, the city has pushed a record infrastructure drive, including a three-year R40 billion infrastructure programme, with the city and allied reporting repeatedly presenting this as a historic investment effort. It has retained a strong audit reputation, with the Auditor-General’s 2023/24 local government outcomes listing the City of Cape Town among municipalities with clean audits. It has also pursued one of the most concrete market-oriented reforms anywhere in the country through independent power procurement and a longer-term energy strategy aimed at reducing reliance on Eskom and expanding private and diversified supply.

That matters. Liberalism in South Africa has often suffered from sounding like a seminar when it needed to look like a government. Hill-Lewis offers liberals something more tangible than a stack of think tank papers. He offers a mayoralty that has at least tried to turn decentralisation, market participation, and competent administration into visible policy.

His instinct on several major issues is also recognisably liberal. In his first speech as leader, he defended property rights against expropriation, attacked cadre deployment, rejected crony enrichment masquerading as empowerment, backed mother-tongue education, and tied the defence of freedom to the practical task of lifting people out of poverty. He also made law and order his top national policy priority, arguing that without safety there can be no growth, no flourishing community, and no healthy democracy.

That last point is especially important. Too many South African elites still treat crime as background noise, a grim but permanent feature of life to which ordinary people must simply adjust. Hill-Lewis has done the opposite. He has put the restoration of legal order near the centre of his politics. Properly understood, that is not illiberal at all. It is one of the first duties of a liberal state. Freedom means little where extortionists, syndicates, and predators operate without consequence. He is right to say that law and order is not one priority among many, but foundational.

So yes, there is a real liberal case for Geordin Hill-Lewis.

But there is also a reason to be cautious.

The DA has long had a habit of translating liberalism into managerialism. Instead of making the moral and economic case for freedom, markets, dispersed power, and equal citizenship under the law, it often defaults to a simpler message: we run things better. That message is not false. In many cases it is plainly true. But it is also incomplete. Competence is not a philosophy. Clean audits are not a theory of justice. Better refuse collection is not yet a defence of liberty.

Hill-Lewis risks falling into the same pattern. His pitch is sharper and more ambitious than that of many predecessors, but it still leans heavily on performance, trust-building, presence in communities, and a politics of practical delivery. Those are all necessary. None are sufficient. Liberalism cannot survive as a mere tone of voice for well-administered municipalities. It must be argued as an answer to South Africa’s national crisis.

That crisis is not simply one of poor management. It is a crisis of political centralisation, cadre deployment, legal decay, race patronage, state monopolies, and elite extraction. If Hill-Lewis wants to be good for liberalism, he must say so plainly and repeatedly. He must explain that South Africa does not suffer only from incompetent rulers, but from an anti-liberal governing model.

This is where the uncertainty begins.

He has shown the right instincts on B-BBEE, or at least on what it has become. Reuters reported this week that he reaffirmed the DA’s opposition to the current B-BBEE framework while trying to communicate more effectively to black voters that opposing the model does not mean indifference to black advancement. That is exactly the right terrain on which a serious liberal should fight. South Africa does need black advancement. It desperately does. But it does not need more politically connected rent-seeking, more elite brokerage, and more race arithmetic in place of broad-based growth. Hill-Lewis seems to understand that. The question is whether he can make that case forcefully enough to break the stale ANC framing that only patronage is compassionate.

He also seems to understand that the DA’s problem is not merely media hostility or unfair caricature. He has acknowledged a real trust deficit with black voters and said the party must become more present in communities that have never supported it. That honesty is refreshing. Too much of the DA’s internal culture has oscillated between self-congratulation and grievance. Hill-Lewis at least seems to grasp that voters are not obliged to reward a party simply because it believes itself more competent. Trust must be earned politically, not demanded morally.

But here again there is a danger. Trust-building can become a euphemism for ideological softening. The DA’s challenge is not just to be liked by more voters. It is to persuade more voters that liberal principles serve their interests better than racial statism, cadre deployment, and state dependency do. That is harder. It requires not only presence, but conviction.

Cape Town itself illustrates the double-edged nature of Hill-Lewis’s appeal. Supporters see a city with better administration, large-scale infrastructure ambition, cleaner governance, and a real attempt to use municipal autonomy for practical reform. Critics see a city that still reproduces deep spatial inequality and whose leadership can sound too quick to dismiss structural grievances. Civil society organisations such as Ndifuna Ukwazi, Equal Education, and the Equal Education Law Centre have sharply attacked Hill-Lewis over his handling of spatial apartheid language and housing policy, arguing that managerial success has not undone entrenched exclusion. Whether one accepts all of that criticism or not, it points to a real weakness in the DA model. Administration alone does not settle questions of justice, access, and inclusion.

The GNU creates another test. Hill-Lewis says the DA must be a principled coalition partner, not a passenger collecting positions. He has vowed to oppose GNU policies that block progress while helping steer government in a better direction. That is the correct posture. But coalition can also blur ideological lines. It can train a party to manage the pace of ANC decline rather than offer a genuine alternative to it. The DA under Hill-Lewis must resist that temptation. If it does not, then he may prove very useful to the DA while doing little to renew liberal politics in the country.

So, is Geordin Hill-Lewis good for liberalism, or just good for the DA?

For now, the fairest answer is this: he is almost certainly good for the DA, and potentially good for liberalism.

He is good for the DA because he gives it executive credibility, strategic ambition, and a stronger claim to being a party of government rather than a professional opposition. He is also one of the few prominent South African politicians who can plausibly connect clean governance, local reform, energy competition, merit, property rights, and law and order into a single public persona.

But for liberalism, promise is not enough. If Hill-Lewis merely perfects the DA’s managerial pitch, then he will help the party without changing the country’s ideological direction. If, however, he uses his leadership to argue boldly that South Africa’s future lies in freedom under law, market-led growth, real decentralisation, secure property, and a state constrained to doing fewer things better, then he may become something much more important.

He may become the leader who finally turns DA competence into a genuinely liberal national alternative.

That is the test before him now.

Robert Khumalo is a political analyst and classical liberal commentator.

As the debate on immigration continues to rage in a context where it may even influence the outcomes of local government elections, it is increasingly clear that some of the tension stems from the fact that ordinary people and elites are speaking past each other.

From the outset, it is worth noting that not all elites disagree with the sentiments expressed by many ordinary citizens. Equally, not all citizens disagree with the views put forward by some elites. The term “elites” in this piece refers specifically to certain academics and media pundits who are dismissing the discourse around immigration as scapegoating and Afrophobia, while “the people” refers largely to poor South Africans who are represented by grassroots organisations such as Operation Dudula and March and March.

What appears to the people as elite indifference, and to elites as popular prejudice, is in fact a sign that both sides are missing something fundamental about the other’s reality.

Lived experience and intuitive reasoning

For the people, the issue of immigration is interpreted at the level of lived experience and pattern recognition. Scenes of immigrants who commit crimes in their communities, spaza shops that are almost exclusively immigrant-owned, and public institutions that are visibly used by immigrants come together to form a story of displacement and encroaching dominance by outsiders.

In this context the natural response is to view these outsiders as the source of their problems and to call for their complete expulsion as a solution, whether rightly or wrongly.

While the people’s concerns are valid and deserve genuine attention, a downside of reasoning intuitively in this case is the tendency towards overgeneralisation and misattribution. Overgeneralisation occurs, for example, when all crime is blamed on immigrants. Misattribution happens when problems are ascribed solely to immigrants, rather than to government failures and, to some extent, the people themselves.

Abstraction and misreading

The elites, who mostly operate at the level of theories and ideas and therefore interpret the issue on an institutional level, are not entirely wrong in identifying a nationalistic impulse as one driver of grassroots frustration. They are also not entirely wrong in criticising some misinformed leaders of these grassroots organisations who are clearly exploiting the people’s frustration to advance their own agendas.

But what they are missing – and this is not being said condescendingly – is that the average person on the ground is not operating at the same level of abstraction. The average person is not thinking critically about uneven development in Africa and the pressure this inevitably places on their country.

They are not analysing systemic corruption in immigration institutions, crunching crime statistics, or considering the complex factors behind the economic success of immigrants. Nor are they attuned to arguments about state capacity and the failure to deliver social goods. They are simply responding intuitively to the reality they experience and the patterns they observe around them.

Criticising the limits of intuitive reasoning and calling for more nuanced responses to a complex issue is undoubtedly important. But being dismissive and immediately reaching for labels without appreciating that it is somewhat unfair and even unrealistic to expect people to operate at the same level of abstraction is problematic. Expecting people to communicate in polished, scholarly language rather than the raw, unfiltered terms in which they articulate their concerns is also problematic.

Both tendencies create the false impression that elites do not care because they simply do not share the same experiences. The ultimate outcome on the people’s end is resentment and a feeling of being ignored and disrespected.

Towards a middle ground

This may well sound idealistic, but perhaps a potential way forward is a middle ground that acknowledges different frames of reference and addresses immediate, tangible experiences without losing sight of the deeper institutional and structural dynamics that are driving the problem. The aim here is not to get everyone to start thinking in the same way, but to find common ground for mutual understanding and practical action. This could well be the approach that makes everyone in the discussion feel acknowledged.

One must reiterate that this piece rests on no presumption of ignorance or simple-mindedness on the part of the people, and it is not a thinly veiled justification for elite-driven conscientisation of supposedly ignorant masses. Some level of thinking and reasoning is arguably a universal human capability, and human behaviour is always partly shaped by ideology, even when that ideology operates unconsciously for many.

The key nuance lies in how the human mind can be sharpened – or can sharpen itself – to resist the natural urge to default to intuitive reasoning and ascend to higher levels of abstraction that allow for a more reflective and informed understanding of complex social problems. This again is a universal human capability, and it should be remembered that elites themselves are humans who do not always interpret issues at high levels of abstraction.

In closing, who is wrong on immigration? The simple answer is that no one is, at least not entirely. The more complex, and perhaps unsatisfactory, answer is that we need to appreciate how different frames of reference can lead to different understandings of social reality as we engage constructively in dialogue on a way forward.

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

Unemployment is the fundamental problem with South Africa. We have many systemic and endemic issues, but most of our woes would be solved if more people had jobs.

The fiscal crisis would be solved with more taxpayers. Petty crime would drop if people could earn an honest living. Extra tax revenue could equip law enforcement to prosecute the violent criminals. Wealth would grow, equipping South Africans to feed their children, solve nutritional deficiencies, and send their kids to better schools.

According to StatsSA, 31.4% is the official unemployment rate. If you include those jobseekers who have given up and other potential members of the labour force, that number jumps to 42.1%. That means that for every ten South Africans of working age, between 3 – 4 of them don’t earn a living. They don’t pay tax. Often, they are dependent on grants paid for by tax money – or puts financial strain on a family member.

When you look closer at these stats, the cause of unemployment becomes starker. 57% of people aged 15 – 24 are unemployed. 39.2% of 25 – 34-year-olds are unemployed. That number drops as people get older, with only 20.4% of people aged 45 – 54 being unemployed.

Unemployment disproportionately affects young, entry-level workers. Older people with experience and skills are less likely to face unemployment.

Some would think that having younger, more energetic workers would be a boon for a company. Especially, if we’re being pessimistic, considering that younger workers can be paid less than their older counterparts. Yet South African companies are hesitant to employ entry-level workers.

South Africa is cursed with a host of regulations and laws that stifle business freedom and discourages companies from employing workers unless they really must, and unless they really trust the person being hired.

The Labour Relations Act (LRA) grants far too much power to trade unions, allowing these unions to shutdown entire industries and to standardise unworkable and unprofitable wages. Companies fear firing their workers because they may be required to pay hefty compensation (up to 12 – 24 months’ salary) and even be ordered to rehire the fired worker.

The Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) pushes huge requirements on the employer to justify dismissal. This discourages employers from hiring workers at a whim or taking a risk. They need to be very sure when they hire someone, or they risk never being able to fire them.

The Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA) raises hiring costs through mandatory benefits, pricing low-skilled workers out of employment. These rules also stop companies from flexible planning and operations. This pushes employers towards automation and contract workers.

The Employment Equity Act (EEA) actively discourages companies from wanting to grow their business or employ anyone, as they will be required to employ people based on race, and have the demographics of their company reflect the racial ideology of the government. Non-compliance can lead to fines in the millions. While employers can try to justify straying from the EEA, the risk is still present.

The National Minimum Wage Act inflates labour costs, pricing out entry-level positions and making it uneconomical to hire people for certain jobs. Bargaining councils also inflate the minimum wage to even higher than the national mandate, further discouraging employers from hiring.

The Unemployment Insurance Act (UIA) and other related funds require employers to bankroll part of the financial safety nets of their employees, while also becoming wrapped up in paperwork and red tape. This discourages the hiring of even temporary staff, lest the company take on ongoing liabilities.

The law is not on the side of employers, and they know this, and so, they don’t risk hiring new workers. Trade unions threaten to shutdown entire industries while demanding exorbitant pay rises – often using violence to achieve their ends. Of course, we don’t have a lot of jobs! The government doesn’t make it easy to want to provide jobs.

So, what’s the solution?

First, we need to liberalise the labour market. We need to make it as easy to hire and fire people as possible. If someone visits an office and asks for a job, that company should be fully incentivised to say: “Hey, if it doesn’t work out, we can just dismiss you.”

Allow companies to take risks on their own terms, and don’t protect workers from economic realities or accountability.

We must also reduce red tape across the board. Business licensing and registration must be abolished or streamlined. Regulatory and paperwork burden must be reduced as much as possible. What should matter is that a company is hiring someone and is paying them. Unless that company is genuinely harming that employee, it is no business of the state.

We must also abolish Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and the EEA. Racialised legislation disincentives companies from growing their businesses, lest they must give a portion of their company away to a politically appointed “partner”.

The government must also make South Africa friendly to foreign investors and companies. US firms already employ over 250,000 South Africans. Imagine if South Africa guaranteed property rights and provided policy certainty to foreign investors. Even more companies would flood into the country, bringing jobs and capital.

To accomplish this, the government needs to adopt a truly non-aligned approach to foreign policy, and stop antagonising the US and other Western countries, as well as getting rid of policies that may threaten property rights – like the Expropriation Act.

The government must also cut the red tape on the creation of private colleges and schools. Public schools have proven to not provide satisfactory education. And there are far too many young South Africans who need tertiary education to develop skills. The solution isn’t to encourage them all to study unmarketable subjects at universities – but to expand the range of technical, vocational and private colleges to raise the supply of study positions. Allowing the creation of private medical colleges would simultaneously raise our supply of doctors, lowering medical costs.

Finally, the Reserve Bank needs to relax its controls over South Africans receiving income from abroad. Many enterprising South Africans have turned to working digitally overseas to bring in an income. Yet the government makes it incredibly hard and onerous to receive this money. It is perfectly easy to spend money on foreign products, but very difficult to get paid.

South Africans earning a living and bringing money into the country should be encourages and the process to receive remittances eased.

I am not alone in thinking all this; 86% of South Africans support liberalising the labour market to make it easier to get a job.

South Africa does not need more slogans, plans, or excuses. It needs jobs. And jobs will only come when government stops treating employers as suspects, workers as permanent liabilities, and growth as something to be managed rather than unleashed. Liberalise the labour market, slash red tape, restore policy certainty, and let South Africans work. Only then can we begin to end unemployment.

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. You can follow him on X: @NWoodeSmith.

The founder and leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, Julius Malema, has been found guilty of firearm offences and sentenced to five years direct imprisonment.

I support the guilty verdict (which came a few months earlier) and I think the sentence may actually be too lenient based on past precedent. Even though I do not support criminalising mere possession of an unlicensed firearm, I support the outcome because the rule of law demands it.

I do not share Malema’s politics. His socialist ideas amount to nothing more than theft, cloaked behind a legitimate need to restore previously stolen property. Mr Malema perverts a desire for justice by suggesting policies that would in essence effect a transfer of all land and much of the rest of the property within South Africa to the state. Mr Malema should not be imprisoned for his advocacy of theft or for singing “kill the Boer”, which some see as incitement for murder, because it is mere speech.

Nobody should be imprisoned for possession because having a firearm in your possession, without informing the state, does not violate anyone’s rights.

Similarly, the other lesser charges such as discharging a firearm in a built up area, do not in themselves indicate a violation of someone’s rights - actually shooting someone would. But there may be a case to be made for civil charges if someone who attended the event where the firearm was discharged felt their life was needlessly put at risk.

Yet, I support Malema’s conviction and I think his sentence may be too lenient because the rule of law must trump all other considerations, especially when the accused person is a member of Parliament.

The rule of law has various elements associated with it, but in my opinion, the first and highest value is equality before the law. Laws must apply equally to the subjects (citizens) as they do the lawmakers (MPs and all other members of government and their families and friends), otherwise it is too easy to write tyrannical laws because they do not affect the people writing them.

This is particularly true of firearm rights in South Africa.

In recent years we have seen rhetoric and even proposed amendments to the Firearms Control Act, that would in effect, disarm peaceful, law-abiding citizens. This has occurred while the VIP protection component of the police budget has been increased faster than the rest of the budget, in essence a reduction of protection for ordinary citizens while protection for ministers, the President, etc., is increased.

We must also remember that the statute that Julius Malema violated. I focus mostly on the charge of possession since it has the longest sentence, and without which the rest of the sentences would amount to just a fine. Possession of an unlawful firearm carries a 15 year mandatory minimum sentence under the Criminal Law Amendment Act (105 of 1997), if the firearm is of the semi-automatic or automatic variety. This can be reduced only if there are “substantial and compelling circumstances”.

Another important component of the rule of law that applies in this case is precedent or stare decisis (Latin for “to stand by things decided”). This means that we must be guided by past legal decisions when we encounter similar facts. To my mind this is important because it is too easy to be unjust to people in the past or people in the present, through inconsistency in the legal system. I have a right to expect that, given similar facts, a similar outcome in the legal system will result.

Ordinary citizens have been convicted and given worse sentences than what Malema has received for possession under less severe circumstances (no discharge of the firearm in a built up area and these people were not lawmakers).

Let’s examine some of these cases.

The first case I could find was The State v Thembalethu (2008) where the accused used a semi-automatic pistol during a robbery. The firearm was unlawfully possessed and he was given 15 years for this as per the minimum. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of Appeal. His appeal was rejected and he was to serve the whole 15 years.

The second case is Madikane v The State (2010) where the accused was found with a semi-automatic firearm and initially sentenced to the prescribed minimum of 15 years. This was despite the fact that the accused did not commit any other crime like discharging the firearm illegally or committing a robbery. The accused also pled guilty and took responsibility for his actions, even though his testimony seems to show that he was hanging out with friends and took the gun from them just before the police raid. It was not even his gun. The sentence was reduced to seven years on appeal.

Compare this to Julius Malema, who pleaded not guilty to all five charges and tried to argue that the gun he was seen firing on video was not a real gun. Instead of taking responsibility he also alleged a political conspiracy in his prosecution. This is despite the fact that the National Prosecuting Authority only made a move to prosecute him after AfriForum laid charges and threatened to prosecute him via their private prosecutions unit.

Given these facts, it can be argued credibly that any prosecutorial bias was on Mr Malema’s side.

The last case is The State vs Mlambo (2025). The accused was a 36 year old single father to three children, a member of the South African National Civics Organisation (SANCO), a former member of his local Community Policing Forum, and a business owner with two fast-food businesses. He was found with a concealed weapon with 15 rounds of ammunition due to an anonymous tip. He was sentenced to six years in prison specifically for the possession. He had pleaded not guilty, claiming he did not know how the weapon had come to be in a bucket behind the door of his shack.

From this it is clear that Malema actually got off lightly. He committed other offences in addition to possession. He pleaded not guilty, lied that the gun was a toy despite clear video evidence and thousands of witnesses. He did not take responsibility and cited a fake conspiracy against him.

Being a lawmaker entrusted with the responsibility of passing laws for the country, he also swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the Republic, as an MP.

If you believe the crime of which Malema is convicted is not worth sending people to prison over, I agree with you. So let us repeal the Firearms Control Act or at least make unlawful possession subject only to a fine and not imprisonment. Then, release everyone convicted of unlawful possession from prison and pay restitution for all the time served for unlawful possession.

That is: If your objections are principled and not merely meant to protect one man because deep down you think your favoured politicians are members of an aristocracy that sits above the law.

Join Martin van Staden, Zakhele Mthembu and Ayanda Zulu as they dive into some of the most pressing issues of the week.

In this episode, we unpack the sentencing of Julius Malema and question whether justice is applied equally. We also examine the immigration debate, asking whether deporting foreign nationals will create jobs or distract from deeper economic issues.

Written By: Charl Heydenrych

Despite the legal verdict finding Julius Malema guilty, a strict libertarian analysis, grounded in the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) and consent axiom, suggests that the state’s conviction represents a triumph of administrative bureaucracy over the fundamental ethics of liberty.

From this perspective, the court’s decision to penalise an action that resulted in no physical injury or property damage highlights a fundamental disconnect between statutory law and natural justice.

The Victimless Crime Paradox

The central tenet of libertarianism is that a crime requires a victim. Without an aggrieved party whose person or property has been violated, the state has no moral standing to initiate force, in the form of fines or imprisonment, against an individual.

In the case of Malema firing a rifle at a rally, the facts remain that no one was hit, no property was destroyed, and no individual came forward claiming their rights were physically infringed.

By finding him guilty, the state has effectively criminalised a victimless act. To a proponent of the NAP, the conviction is an act of aggression by the state itself, using the threat of violence to punish a man for an action that, while perhaps reckless in the eyes of the public, did not actually breach the peace by harming another.

Licensing as a Violation of Property Rights

The conviction regarding the unlawful possession of a firearm and ammunition strikes at the heart of the libertarian critique of the regulatory state. Libertarians view the right to own and carry tools for self-defence or recreation as a natural extension of self-ownership.

Prior Restraint: Requiring a licence to possess a firearm is a form of prior restraint. It assumes the state owns the right to grant or deny the exercise of a fundamental liberty.

Property Rights: A firearm is a piece of private property.

The act of possessing it, regardless of whether a government agency has issued a piece of paper or plastic card authorising that possession, does not constitute an initiation of force.

By convicting Malema for lacking a licence, the legal system has prioritised compliance over conduct. The state is not punishing him for what he did to someone else, but for failing to ask the state for permission to exist as an armed individual. In a libertarian framework, the lack of a permit is not a moral failing or a criminal act.

Risk Versus Reality: The Problem With Proactive Law

The state’s justification for such convictions usually rests on the management of public risk. The argument follows that firing a gun into the air is dangerous, and the law must intervene to prevent a potential tragedy.

However, a libertarian rejects the idea that the state should have the power to punish individuals for potentialities. If an action could cause harm but does not, the NAP has not been violated. If we allow the state to prosecute people based on the statistical probability of danger, we invite a Minority Report-style system of justice, where the government regulates every aspect of life, from driving speeds to calorie intake, under the guise of safety.

By finding Malema guilty for an act that resulted in zero casualties, the court has ruled that the state’s desire for an orderly, permitted society outweighs the individual’s right to act freely, as long as they do not hit anyone.

Consent and Private Assembly

Furthermore, the rally was a private political gathering. The attendees were there voluntarily, participating in an event known for its militant aesthetics and provocative symbolism. In a purely libertarian society, the rules of conduct at a private assembly are determined by the property owners and the participants. If the participants did not feel their rights were being violated by the display, the state’s and AfriForum’s intervention as a third-party prosecutor is an unwanted and unnecessary intrusion into private association.

Conclusion: Law Versus Justice

The guilty verdict against Julius Malema may be a victory for the South African Firearms Control Act, but from a libertarian point of view, it is a loss for individual liberty. The conviction reinforces the precedent that the state can cage or fine an individual for actions that harm no one.

When the law punishes the unlicensed possession of an object or the unauthorised discharge of a weapon that strikes no victim, it ceases to be a system of justice and becomes a system of control. For the libertarian, the verdict is a reminder that under current legal paradigms, the state considers the violation of its own arbitrary rules to be a greater sin than the actual initiation of force against a human being.

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

I may disagree with interventionists on the right, left and center, but that doesn’t make me a non-interventionist. There are many people who seem to have developed the stupidest form of nationalism, that imagines a country can be free and prosperous while closing its borders and ignoring everything that occurs outside of that country. This is what I call Wakanda nationalism because it only works in fiction. In the real world it only leads to disaster, as it did for China, Korea and Japan in the past.

What we learned from those examples is that countries that shut themselves off become poorer and less developed than everyone else. China shut itself off first through the Haijin policy, or sea bans, which restricted maritime trade, from about 1434 to 1567. Then again from 1757 to 1842 specifically to limit Western influence on China, there was even a missed opportunity in 1793 to peacefully open trade with the British and that refusal not only led to the opium wars that initiated China’s ‘century of humiliation’, it meant that China was ill-prepared to fight the war due to it being left behind the Western world who were industrial powers by that point.

Keep in mind that if you had described industrialisation to a well-informed medieval European, they would have most likely assumed that China would be the first country to industrialise. The Chinese were known for innovation and manufacturing going back to ancient times. This is why trade along the silk road was such a big deal and why the trade route was called by that name. They also produced other goods like tea and porcelain, invented gunpowder, paper etc.

The Chinese also had a large market and an abundance of capital (unfortunately the emperors squandered this). No one would have dreamed, certainly not the medieval British, that Britain would be the place where the first instance of industrialisation would occur. Yet that is exactly what happened because the British, whether through blind luck or something else, developed a society that had robust, decentralised institutions with trade links to Europe and the rest of the world.

As an island nation, the British understood that their very survival depended on trade. They also had a limited population, particularly after the bubonic plague, and knew they could not rely on a large internal market like the Chinese could. All of these and other factors contributed to Britain winning the industrialisation race while China and its East Asian neighbours shut themselves off from the world and were left behind while the West, they used to think of as primitive, surpassed them and eventually defeated them.

Both the Chinese and Japanese were forcibly opened by Western powers, China by Britain in 1842 and Japan by the USA in 1853. Japan, to its credit, quickly learned its lesson and applied them via the Meiji restoration in 1868 (a mere 15 years later, this shows how adaptable Japan and its institutions were/are). China would take longer to adapt and did not really learn the lesson until the 1978 reforms under Deng Xiaoping.

Korea on the other hand, was not opened by a Western power, it was opened and then colonised by Japan. Things would go downhill from there and it was not until the end of the Second World War and the establishment of South Korea that any part of Korea would start to gain prosperity and some freedom. It would take the military dictatorship from 1961 to 1979 for South Koreans to see rapid gains in prosperity. A central pillar of the dictatorship’s policies was making South Korea a competitive exporter (partly through allowing markets to set wages) instead of the failed policy of import substitution (a policy that modern South Africa still relies on despite an abundant of evidence of its failure).

Similarly, Sub-Saharan Africa was a late bloomer in terms of development. While global trade links did exist from East Africa to the East and via the Sahara, this was nothing compared to the trade links enjoyed by the Mediterranean civilisations. This is why so little was known of Africa as long ago as the 19th century, with the African interior being referred to as the dark continent.

All of this to make the point that the Wakanda strategy of isolation cannot create prosperity, closing borders makes you worse off culturally and economically. This cartoonish form of nationalism is gaining traction in South Africa. Europeans might have an objection to Middle Eastern and African immigrants, but in general they understand the importance of at least being connected to your neighbours, South Africans seem to live under the delusion that we can be safe and prosperous while cutting all ties with our neighbours.

Firstly, our best and most natural allies are on the African continent. These people have a similar culture as us, with most South Africans having originated in West Central Africa and made their way East and South during the Bantu migration more than 1500 years ago. Sub-Saharan Africa is also where the African Christian states are concentrated. The religion that dominates SA is also dominant across Sub-Saharan Africa.

In fact, from South Africa in the South to Kenya, Uganda, the Central African Republic and Cameroon in the North, there is a remarkable similarity in language, genetics and culture. This is also the part of Africa where the African part of the British Empire was located and today there is a clear division in African politics between the Northern (largely) Francophone countries and the Southern (largely) Anglophone countries, which further reinforced the similarities in terms of the institutions inherited from the British empire.

Another point is that African borders are arbitrary. Why do we have so many Basotho in the Free state and other parts of SA bordering Lesotho? Why are there so many Swazi people in Mpumalanga? Why are there so many Batswana in the Northwest province instead of Botswana? Why are there so many Ndebele, Venda and Tsonga people in Zimbabwe?

These are all peoples who make up South Africa; there’s even a sizable Xhosa population in Zimbabwe. In Mozambique, Tsonga people make up over 20% of the population. And these peoples all derive from or are related in some significant ways to other people in Sub-Saharan Africa. There is no cultural reason to close our borders, which is not to say we must not control the border.

We have also seen how isolationism can lead to a country falling from a position of being relatively more advanced than its neighbours and trade partners, to falling far behind to the point that the country becomes easy to conquer. Our closest relationships should naturally be formed with our Sub-Saharan African neighbours. This includes cultural, diplomatic, trade, security and other relationships.

This cannot happen when there is this rhetoric that demonises other Africans and implies they are all criminals. I have even seen some truly heinous statements referring to Africans as dirty. Clearly this is meant to dehumanise the people who are closest to us. I will always find it interesting that by demonising these people in this way, given how close they are to black South Africans, the ones doing the demonising essentially agree with those who are racist against black South Africans.

You may see yourself as better than the Zimbabwean, but you are clearly not so much better that you have nothing at all in common.

On a more pragmatic level, the closest people we can trade with or cooperate on security or other matters, are our African neighbours. In fact, trade with Africa does much of the work of reducing our trade deficit. Our trade with the West and with China either widens our overall deficit or only reduces it through the export of raw commodities for the most part, Africa buys our processed goods and services.

When it comes to security, our non-ocean border is our northern border with other African countries. With good diplomacy, we can work to make sure to secure ourselves against any security threat from the North. This could include military bases in some of these countries, radar, satellite ground stations, missile batteries (particularly important on the East and West coasts of Africa) etc to ensure any invasion attempt against us can be deterred either before the enemy lands on the continent, or far from our borders.

I can honestly say there is no hope of South Africa resolving its many problems on its own as many like to say (the idea that before unity all African countries must resolve their individual problems). The right kind of cooperation is how we resolve our shared problems and build shared prosperity and security. There is simply no historical precedent of a country going it alone or ignoring its neighbours and succeeding.

This means we also must take responsibility for stabilising Africa. The quicker our neighbours stabilise and live in peace with the rule of law, the quicker we can trade freely. Stable neighbours also reduce immigration to South Africa, but this is far from being the most important benefit.

When we speak of Africans derisively, looking down on them because they are poorer than us, we better hope that fortunes will never be reversed as they were in the case of China and the West. Africans will remember South African insults, even when future South Africans have forgotten them and need Africa’s cooperation to succeed. We have an opportunity now to build good relations with our neighbours from a position of strength; it might not last long.

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

Written By: Vivienne Vermaak

The battle with the body is one that no human is spared.

From Narcissus of Greek mythology who pined away while admiring his own reflection, to the portrait of Dorian Gray, which bears the brunt of his ageing while his flesh remained youthful, to us mere mortals, whose battles are less epic, the struggle is real.

It is perhaps not surprising that neither Narcissus nor Gray was fat. Being obese remains one of the most shameful things a person can be, despite attempts from the ‘body positivity’ movement to make the fuller figure more desirable. There are some good reasons for this; body weight is a primary marker for age, virility and vitality, for instance. Human beings instinctively know a lot about your general mating potential even from a distance of 150m, by making an instant assessment of your silhouette shape. Obesity is also a valuable health marker. A BMI (body mass index) of over 30 is a red flag for diseases like diabetes, heart problems, depression, and certain cancers. Being plus-sized is a big deal.

In the Western World we live in a curious age where, for the first time in history, more people are dying from eating too much than too little. Free markets, free choice, and convenience have resulted in a strange conundrum – we are living longer and becoming more ill, at the same time. We can also become very thin, not because we are hungry, but because we choose it that way.

Drugs like Ozempic have become household names over the past few years and are associated with dramatic weight loss. The active ingredient is a semaglutide called GLP-1. A recent lapsing of a patent held by Novo Nordisk for this product has opened the floodgates for cheaper versions to become available to larger sectors of society. This is the invisible hand in action. Once only available at high cost to elite athletes illegally, this class of drugs found its way to Hollywood, amongst bitter denials from the red carpet, then via medical aids to specialists and now available in compounded forms online without prescription. Health enthusiasts exchange numbers of instructors who are vendors, and GPs are selling cheaper versions with fewer side effects directly from their practices. The market decided, and all of this without advertising. People simply saw a product that worked for someone else and wanted it. Supply, and demand, and demand, and supply.

Of course, with great freedom comes great responsibility. GLP-1 use is accompanied by some risk, predictable moral judgments, and arguments of terrible quality. To the classic liberal, the principle should be simple: “My body, my choice.” Most people can conceive of that idea, but it is the idea of extending this freedom to others where some stumble: “Your body, your choice,” becomes a harder principle to truly apply without pointing patronising fingers.

Certainly, these drugs are powerful and have side effects that are concerning, as with any medication, but there is no proof that they are more damaging than statins or vaccines, and the trade-off with lowering disease rate and feeling good about yourself might be a fair one for modern man. When taken to extremes, we see examples like Kelly Osbourne, who cut a shocking figure on the red carpet recently by looking emaciated with grotesquely exaggerated features due to plastic surgery. It is like watching the picture of Dorian Gray come alive in a ghoulish real-time horror show. Narcissus, in turn, is alive and very well in the form of Bryan Johnson, whose motto is: “Don’t die.” He means it. Johnson’s Project Blueprint is an intense $2 million a year anti-ageing protocol aimed at reversing his biological age. He follows a strict, data-driven routine involving a 04h30 wake-up, over 100 daily pills/supplements, a vegan, calorie-restricted diet, 1 hour of exercise, penis enhancement protocols, and 8h34m of sleep, managed by relentless daily biometric monitoring. Myth has become real, morality a live soap opera on Instagram.

Some people feel that these drugs are doing something ungodly and interfering with the natural way of things, while others contend that it is the most significant medical breakthrough since antibiotics. Elon Musk falls in the latter group. He has taken GLP-1s for weight loss, as has SA billionaire Rob Hersov. The arguments against the drug now shift not to the inherent dangers or ungodliness of it, but to the fact that it is unfair that not everyone can afford it. Musk campaigns for the drugs to be cheaper (through a government roll-out plan, one of his companies might benefit from, perhaps?) A restratification of society is happening. It used to be that the poor were emaciated; now it is the rich.

The have-nots will want what the haves, have. Vanity, envy, and desire are the energy behind the invisible hand that turns the wheel of commerce. The weight loss industry is massive and growing. Valued at over $150 billion now, figures are expected to double by 2030. The ‘Big is Beautiful’ industry is collapsing, with many of its frontline influencers suddenly shrinking. If you are not already on the drug, you will soon be curious or have loved ones who are taking it. Should you take it or not? Should you judge people who do? What are your options?

Fat or thin, it is hard being human. As Thomas Sowell says: “There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.” The trade-off for liberals here should be clear – it is not about optimal choices, but about the freedom to have them. Mostly, not about a freedom you wish for yourself, but extending that courtesy to others. And that freedom should include the liberty to make mistakes. My body, my risk. Your body, your choice.

Vivienne Vermaak is an award-winning journalist and public speaker. Vivienne is a Senior Associate of The Free Market Foundation. She writes in her personal capacity.

Despite evidence to the contrary, the notion that “corruption” is a bug of BEE rather than a predictable outcome of its systemic design continues to persist among staunch proponents of it.

“The policy itself is not the problem,” they argue. “It has just been leveraged by corrupt actors for their own selfish ends.”

Incentives and human behaviour

While this argument sounds convincing, it misses an important point about the relationship between human nature and policy or systemic incentives. It is the legendary Thomas Sowell in his classic, A Conflict of Visions, who reminds us that humans are rational actors whose behaviour is shaped by incentives.

Put simply, humans are self-interested agents who naturally respond to policies and systemic incentives in ways that allow them to maximise benefits for themselves. Even when these incentives encourage perverse practices and behaviours that harm others and appear “corrupt”, these practices and behaviours remain rational to them in their pursuit of self-interest.

Crucially, even policies with supposedly good intentions can produce perverse outcomes if their incentives encourage perverse behaviours that allow actors to maximise their benefits.

Welfare is not the best example in the South African context because the picture is more nuanced, but one could argue that the expansion of the welfare state over the past three decades has, at the margin, contributed to a degree of dependency and a decline in entrepreneurial initiative. This stands in contrast to the entrepreneurial drive among some immigrants, who almost always operate under very different incentives.

Some may regard this trend as a reflection of inherent traits, but this misses the point. For those who have come to rely on the state as a consistent source of support, adjusting behaviour around that reality is not irrational. It is a rational response to the incentives they face.

Applying the argument to BEE

The case is not very different when it comes to BEE, particularly around the principle of preferential procurement and the issue of fronting, which proponents of the policy often criticise.

It is no secret that BEE premiums exist, and that the South African state has no issue with paying additional premiums to companies with high BEE scores to encourage transformation. This, however, has contributed to inflated tender contracts, where some companies deliberately overcharge the state for procurement and pocket money at the expense of taxpayers.

This may appear selfish or “corrupt” to outsiders who are concerned about the misuse of their tax money, but it is rational to companies that are simply exploiting an existing incentive to maximise their gain from a policy with high compliance costs. While some companies do not push the premium and take it as is, the key point here is that the system contains a perverse incentive that encourages this perverse behaviour.

Some legacy companies, which have very high BEE scores, are often criticised by proponents of fronting and not being genuinely committed to transformation. The criticism goes that black shareholders and managers exist in name only without any real power or control.

This is indeed a real issue (depending on who you ask), but focusing on a few “bad” actors misses the bigger picture about a system that rewards those who are most compliant with it. The state privileges companies with high BEE scores in tendering processes to promote transformation.

This creates a predictable outcome where some actors, even if their transformation is largely symbolic, game the system and deliberately ramp up their BEE scores by ceding equity stakes to political elites, for example, to gain a competitive advantage in state tendering processes. Of course, some actors do not do this, but the key point again is that the system has an incentive structure that makes such behaviour a rational strategy for those seeking to maximise their benefits.

A problem of design

If one accepts the premise that incentive structures built into systems can drive human behaviour – perverse behaviour at that – then one can reasonably conclude that such systems must either be reformed to prioritise cost efficiency and other market considerations or scrapped altogether.

Both possibilities do not deny history or the imperative of justice but underscore the importance of not misdiagnosing problems and pursuing justice in ways that encourage perverse behaviour and waste resources needlessly.

As the debate on BEE continues, it is important to recognise that the problem lies not in a handful of bad apples – even as corruption is real and harmful – but in a system that makes such behaviour a rational response to the incentives it creates.

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

Petrol is an essential good. Fuel that not only keeps our economy chugging but enables all South Africans to work and live. As we head into a possible oil crisis due to the war in Iran, the government needs to stop the anti-poor and archaic tactic of taxing petrol to make up for shortfalls in its fiscus.

Between the start of the war and when this article was being written, the price of oil had increased by 36%, with constant surges and plummets as policy uncertainty and the status of the Straits of Hormuz fuels speculation.

20% of the world’s oil travels through the Straits of Hormuz. And while South Africa gets most of its oil from Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, there will no doubt be a ripple where the price of oil across the globe rises to meet demand.

On top of this, the government plans to raise the Road Accident Fund (RAF) fuel levy for the first time in five years. The RAF Levy added R2.18 to every litre of petrol and diesel and will now be raised by an additional 7c.

The RAF has been awash with accusations of mismanagement, bad accounting and corruption.

Even without the RAF, a third of the price of fuel goes to tax; notably, a general fuel levy and VAT. And above that, additional taxes on every level of the supply-chain continues to inflate the price of fuel. It’s taxed when it’s shipped from overseas, it’s taxed when it lands here, the transport company is taxed, the fuel depots are taxed, and the petrol stations are taxed again. And all this tax is inevitably wasted on corruption and bad policy.

Cheap fuel is the bread and butter of an economy. Workers need fuel to get to work. Every physical product requires fuel to get between A and B. Fuel is needed to keep generators running. The only reason we’ve escaped loadshedding is because Eskom has been spending more on diesel.

Between 1 April 2025 and 5 March 2026, Eskom spent R6.32 billion on burning diesel to keep the lights on; an average of R18.6 million per a day. While this burn rate has diminished slightly, the fact that we rely on heavily on diesel to power the economy should make it clear the importance of cheap fuel.

When the price of fuel rises, the price of everything rises. It’s likely the single biggest source of inflation, besides mass-money printing. The knock-on effect of an oil crisis can sink an economy.

But the government can remedy this situation and help millions of South Africans escape the brunt of the fuel crisis.

Dropping the price of fuel by a third by removing all taxes on fuel would cause a positive ripple across the economy, freeing up more cash for consumers to spend and save, and allowing companies to either drop prices or re-invest the savings in growing their operations – fuelling job creation.

Petrol and diesel are essential goods. Without them, there is no economy. No food, no pumped clean water, no electricity. Petrol tax shouldn’t be treated like a get rich quick scheme by the Treasury.

The shortfall that this leaves needs to be addressed in the same way our fiscal shortfall should be addressed in general. We need to cut wasted expenditure and adopt policies that lead to job creation.

We cannot keep taxing a minority of taxpayers into the dirt. We need to enable mass employment so that the tax base widens. This simultaneously leads to less dependence on public spending, simultaneously lowering the need for high taxes in the first place.

South Africa has the tools to make life better for everyone and to make the best of a bad situation. The government must only stop seeing how it can drain the taxpayer dry and assume its role as the country’s enabler, not its abuser.

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. You can follow him on X: @NWoodeSmith

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

In this episode, we discuss how SARS is collecting record levels of tax from South Africans while government waste continues unchecked. We unpack concerns around the newly proposed history curriculum and what it could mean for education in South Africa. We also examine Ibrahim Traoré’s recent comments on democracy and the broader implications for governance and accountability.

The supporters of the Iran war tell us that the war is being waged for moral reasons, in addition to the security imperative of preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. That’s if they bother to give coherent justifications. Trump has given many, often contradictory, justifications. Yet the focus on the Middle East comes at a cost, not just in financial terms but also strategically and morally as it pertains to East Asia, and more specifically, the Korean Peninsula.

All governments are evil to some degree, but there is no worse government than the brutal, dystopian dictatorship that runs North Korea. The Kim family treats North Koreans like their personal property. They undergo the most intrusive surveillance, and the regime perverts relationships, trying to get people to turn against each other. As of 1997, it was estimated the Kim regime had murdered a minimum of 710,000 North Koreans. These are innocent, unarmed civilians whose murder qualifies as democide.

There is no level of depravity the Kim regime has not sunk to. Everything is justified if it ensures regime survival. Kim Jong-un is particularly brutal, having presided over a purge that brutally murdered his uncle through a firing squad using anti-aircraft shells. His entire family and associates were then killed, including children. Kim also killed his own brother in 2017 using the VX nerve agent, which was rubbed on his face by two women who were tricked by North Korean agents into believing the whole thing was a harmless prank.

The Kims have their own caste system, called the Songbun system. It classifies every citizen using three main categories: core, wavering, and hostile. These designations are as terrible as they sound. Among the latter are the descendants of landlords who had their lands seized by the Kims’ communist revolution in 1948. These designations determine your success under the regime, including how much food you can access.

There is no individual innocence or guilt in Kim’s Korea. If your family member defects, then you are guilty too. It is impossible to overstate how evil the regime run by that little fat man is. This is why I believe America’s intervention in Korea in 1950, leading UN forces, was the last unambiguously good intervention by the USA. Life under the Kims is no life.

Of late, reports coming from North Korea are that the younger generations have been consuming more South Korean media than usual. They have been buying more South Korean goods in the black markets. They are also reportedly not as attached to the regime as some older Koreans. This has led to Kim executing teenagers for such petty crimes as watching South Korean dramas on their phones and other devices.

America deserves the world’s appreciation for rescuing the Korean people from being overrun by the murderous Kims and their totalitarian ideology. Thanks to the US decision, the world got to experience Korean culture, learn about and interact with Korean people, including their businesses such as Samsung, which had the biggest share of the global smartphone market until recently, when Apple overtook them, at 19% and 20% respectively.

Yet under Trump, the US is signalling that the Korean Peninsula is just not that important to America. South Koreans were alarmed to see Americans dismantling THAAD and Patriot missile batteries for use in the latest Middle Eastern conflict. THAAD missiles are used to intercept ballistic missiles just inside or outside the atmosphere during their re-entry phase, while Patriot missiles are more short-range. Both are needed to adequately defend against missiles and all other aerial threats.

To be clear, America did not take away everything, but it took away enough to cause concern, given how long these missiles take to manufacture and the demands from both Ukraine and now the Iran war. The US is failing to prioritise. It is focusing on the small fry of Russia and Iran and leaving the Chinese big fish to grow even larger. Trump has effectively abandoned the Obama-Biden Chinese containment strategy. Remember, he also exited the TPP during his first term.

The reason South Koreans are so worried is because this comes as Kim Jong-un launches the most significant ideological shift towards the South since the ceasefire was signed. Under the new hostile states doctrine, North Korea no longer seeks peaceful reunification with the South. Cooperation avenues have been closed, and dialogue has been curtailed.

Most disturbing is that, in February of this year, the Korean Workers’ Party was finalising this change by amending its party charter. This is higher than the North Korean constitution. In March, the North Korean People’s Assembly further confirmed this change and increased its military budget. Kim delivered an address labelling South Korea as the most hostile state. They then test-fired 12 short-range ballistic missiles, after testing cruise missiles from a new destroyer class.

These significant developments have largely gone unnoticed outside the peninsula due to the Ukraine and Iran wars. North Korea has refused attempts by South Korea to restart dialogue and, rationally, with America seeming less interested in the peninsula, President Lee Jae-myung has made moves to increase South Korea’s independence from the USA, both militarily and diplomatically.

Militarily, Korea is developing its own versions of THAAD and Patriot missiles. Korea is also making moves to become a nuclear threshold state by negotiating for the right to enrich its own uranium, ostensibly to power its new fleet of submarines. But this capability could also enable the South to enrich uranium for its own nuclear weapons. It has also increased its military budget by 7.5%. Much of this is going towards force improvement programmes, which would allow it to take over Operational Control (OPCON) from Washington by 2030. This would allow it to take control of its own military during wartime.

Diplomatically, President Lee visited China in January this year for a four-day state visit, the first visit by a South Korean leader since 2019. While the subject of the visit was mostly economic, with 15 memoranda signed, the underlying subtext was clear in the context of the other moves being made by South Korea: Washington can no longer be relied on. The only other power that can rein in Kim is China.

At a deeper level, the North Korean threat to South Korea will always exist as long as China feels it needs to keep Kim as a buffer against the US. The only way China can feel secure enough to allow the unsustainable North Korean economy to die a natural death is if the US leaves the Korean Peninsula and China is allowed to resume its historic role as hegemon over the Korean Peninsula. The only way South Korea can allow that is if it is able to defend itself against North Korea.

Trump pulling out more than a third of THAAD and Patriot missiles came at exactly the wrong time, showing extraordinary indifference to South Korean security during a time when the country was most under threat, possibly since the ceasefire was signed. The ramifications are going to be swift and irrevocable. South Korea will accelerate its drive for independence from the US and closer ties with Beijing, now with increased support back home.

It is funny that so many people think Trump is shoring up US power when he is systematically dismantling it. Just recently he humiliated the Japanese Prime Minister in the Oval Office by joking about why she didn’t warn him about Pearl Harbor. The question being asked was why Trump didn’t tell his allies about his attack on Iran beforehand. The implication is clear: he could not trust Japan, NATO allies, South Korea, and even his Five Eyes alliance partners, but he could trust Israel.

Trump doesn’t understand power. It is not just the ability to execute military operations. It is much more subtle than that, especially in East Asia, a region which has some of the most subtle forms of expression, and a history much longer than the US has existed. I support South Korea doing what it has to do to survive. If it can provide enough reassurances to China, hopefully China will allow it to reunify the peninsula under its control.

Yes, South Korea is a democracy, but unlike North Korea, China does not have the insecurity in its political system that prevents it from trading with democracies. Trade is only restricted when Beijing feels it has been insulted by leaders of those countries, as when the Japanese Prime Minister implied that Japan would be willing to defend Taiwan against China. Economically, China, Japan, and South Korea are closer to each other in terms of economic systems than they are to North Korea.

To collapse the North Korean regime should be relatively easy if China gives its tacit support. One of the other reasons China might want to do this is Kim Jong-un’s obvious attempts at diversifying his benefactors to include Russia. Not only did he send North Korean troops to fight for Russia, but Putin, not Xi Jinping, sent a congratulatory message after Kim’s “election” to the leadership of North Korea recently.

But nothing can happen until South Korea achieves strategic independence, including an independent nuclear deterrent, from America. The South must then make secret deals, using intermediaries in the North. There should be informal contacts with the key decision-makers, even if official contacts have been terminated. A deal could involve the following:

1. Elites getting land and shares in state-owned companies after the South takes over.

2. Kim Ju-ae, the daughter of Kim Jong-un, who is currently being groomed to be the next leader, being appointed transitional President after South Korea takes over. She is young enough for the South to control her.

3. The Northern military being converted into a police force for the North after the South takes over.

4. Kim Ju-ae being given a generous lifetime pension after leading the transition for not more than two years.

Then the next step would be China cutting off aid to North Korea. Southern intelligence services must simultaneously work on causing or fanning unrest in the North. Then China would close its border with the North and position troops on the border.

The South would then deploy its own troops to “stabilise the situation” and prevent the nuclear weapons from falling into the wrong hands. It is essential that those who control the firing of the nuclear weapons be given the most generous deals beforehand among all elites. The type of reunification must not overly burden Southerners. It must be in the form of a confederation, with the South just creating a legal environment that allows investment in the Northern economy. Northerners cannot be given Southern citizenship, and they cannot get Southern welfare, but they would be able to travel across the border freely.

After 20 years or so, both peoples may be ready to become citizens of the same country if they want to do that, or just continue as two countries with the same defence and foreign policy, handled by the South, and the same rights, but different governments.

The survival and prosperity of the Korean people adds value to all mankind. In a way, this is similar to the Persian people. These are some of the most brilliant people among all mankind when it comes to all facets of what makes us human: music, art, business, science, engineering, and philosophy. It is in all our interest if they don’t just survive, but thrive. In the Kim regime, the Korean people face an extinction-level event in a way that is not true of any other relationship between people and those who would govern them. The only thing standing in the way of probable disaster is South Korea. Everything depends on them and the moves they make.

Mpiyakhe Dhlamini is a libertarian, writer, programmer, entrepreneur, and associate of the Free Market Foundation. I write about personal finance and wealth-building from an SA perspective, South African and African issues, policy, politics, and anything else that interests me. The views in this article are my own and not those of any organisation I am associated with.