The crisis over foreign nationals is not only a migration dispute. It is a warning that South Africa’s state is losing the ability to govern visibly, lawfully and competently where citizens feel most abandoned. Introduction South Africa’s migration flashpoints are not only about foreign nationals. They reveal a deeper crisis [...]

On Mandela Day, memory invites us not only to honour Nelson Mandela as a global icon, but also to ask what his presence meant in the lives of ordinary people who encountered him at close range. For me, that meaning is captured in a handshake. It was brief, almost ordinary [...]

  One of South Africa’s humblest proverbial shoes to fill. Should we deploy or commission into such shoes? The unresolved normative tension at the heart of a meritocratic and professional South African state South Africa’s public-administration crisis is often described as a deficit of skills, ethics or enforcement. Those diagnoses [...]

Democracy does not first collapse in constitutional texts or policy frameworks; it frays in the ordinary places where people wait for the state to arrive. It frays at the communal tap where buckets stand in a patient queue for water that may not come; on the dark street where a [...]