Patrice Motsepe’s polling lead is less a prediction of the 2027 conference than a revolt against the ANC’s existing leadership supply. The most consequential finding in the latest Social Research Foundation poll may not be the ANC’s fall to 34%. It is that Patrice Motsepe remains the clear public preference [...]
Every August, South Africa commemorates Women’s Month and recalls the courage of the women who marched to the Union Buildings in 1956. The ritual is historically necessary, but remembrance alone is politically insufficient. A democratic society cannot honour women symbolically while reproducing institutions, markets and households in which authority remains [...]
Author: Sandile Memela* The middle class is not one thing. It is not a single, neat block that thinks, votes, or acts the same way. It is split, uneven, and easily divided. That matters, because some think that we keep using “middle class” as an insult and as an [...]
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 [...]
Race Law or Constitutional Redress? A familiar narrative has returned to South Africa’s public debate: that post-apartheid South Africa is one of only a handful of countries in the world whose legal system treats legal subjects differently according to their perceived race or skin colour. The claim is attractive because [...]
PRESS RELEASE TEDA and Thinc Foundation Sign Memorandum of Understanding to Promote Trade, Investment and Public Engagement in Tshwane For immediate release City of Tshwane, Pretoria, 2026 The Tshwane Economic Development Agency (TEDA) and the Thinc Foundation have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) establishing a collaborative framework to [...]
A country often discovers the quality of its leadership not when an incumbent is in office, but when that incumbent must be replaced. South Africa is discovering, with painful regularity, that its crisis is not only a crisis of leaders. It is a crisis of succession. Investor confidence, public trust [...]
