Five key steps to fixing Joburg
I grew up in Johannesburg. Without getting soppy, those noisy streets and cracked sidewalks raised me. Like many who grew up there, I no longer live there, but it will always be my home. My home isn’t what it used to be. The streets are scarier and more blistered, the taps are drier, and the […]
PSC Bill: centralisation masquerading as reform
South Africans have grown used to government overpromising and underdelivering. But sometimes, the state does take that one step further: it actively undermines the freedoms of the very citizens it is meant to protect, all while insisting it is “strengthening governance.” The Public Service Commission (PSC) Bill currently before the National Council of Provinces is […]
The battle for our classrooms: why parents, not politicians, must decide
In the light of the Department of Basic Education’s proposed BELA regulations, ordinary South Africans are once again confronted with a stark choice: do we allow the state to tighten its continued strangling grip over our daily lives, or do we insist that communities remain the rightful custodians of their and their children’s own futures? […]
Cutting fat or just rearranging it?
Action SA MP Athol Trollip’s Constitution Twenty-Second Amendment Bill, which is currently open for public comment, rather boldly proposes the abolition of the office of Deputy Minister. He has some other proposals as well, such as tightening the rules on Cabinet appointments, and introducing parliamentary oversight over ministerial selections, but the most juicy nugget is […]
GNU without results
In his book Common Sense, Thomas Paine famously wrote that “(i)t is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies”. Paine clearly did not have South Africa’s Government of National Unity in mind as it remains profoundly clear that the GNU still battles to unite behind common sense governance. But this national coalition certainly […]
Sending violent criminals to eSwatini is essentially sending them to South Africa
The saying goes that if the US sneezes, South Africa gets the flu. Well, in this case it appears to be the reality, Washington is sending a massive viral load of deported criminals from the US to Eswatini and no doubt South Africa will also suffer as a result. Under a new “third-country” removal scheme […]
Leon Schreiber Is Quietly Proving That Coalition Government Doesn’t Have to Be Chaos
Few would have predicted that the Department of Home Affairs would be one of the few early bright spots of South Africa’s post-ANC political transition and trial-run coalition government. Yet here we are. While many eyes remain fixated on the packed-action, high drama unfolding within the Government of National Unity (GNU), Leon Schreiber is quietly […]
I read the National Security Strategy so you don’t have to
On the 15th of July, the National Intelligence Coordinating Committee released its National Security Strategy (2024–2028) – a 35-page bureaucratic epic intended to chart South Africa’s path through an increasingly unstable world. True to South African policy form, it is an ambitious document. It’s also, in equal measure, vague, anxious, self-congratulatory, and confused. Seeing as […]
From diagnosis to action: SA’s missing link
At the height of any political crisis, a few essential questions inevitably arise. The first is diagnostic: What exactly is the problem? This is where we usually excel. In South Africa, we’ve become adept at naming the issues – widespread corruption, bloated state-owned enterprises, an oversized cabinet. We know we’re paying far too much in taxes and […]
The District Development Model: A Doomed Bureaucratic Fantasy
There is a certain charm to our government’s enduring belief that the answer to South Africa’s woes lies in yet another grand plan with a fancy title, yet another set of caging regulations, yet another bureaucratic layer of policy. Enter the District Development Model (DDM)—a policy so riddled with conceptual and practical flaws that it […]
