A lesson for SA, and in particular Johannesburg and Pietermaritzburg.

בגלל העניין והחשיבות הציבורית אני ורחלי החלטנו ביחד עם הגרדיאן שהסרט נז״א יהיה נגיש באינטרנט בחינם, ללא הגבלת זמן, כדי שכל אדם יוכל לצפות בו ובעדויות החיילים. זה יקרה בעוד כמה שבועות, בנובמבר, במועד הכי מוקדם שהצלחנו לקבוע. עד אז פנינו לבתי קולנוע בישראל והצענו להם את הסרט ללא עלות, בתקווה שיוקרן בארץ כבר עכשיו, במקביל להפצתו בבתי קולנוע בעולם. הצגתו תהיה החלטה אמיצה אל מול אלימות גדולה שמכוונת להסתרתו. אני יודע שיש ביקוש אדיר לצפות בסרט ואני מקווה שבאופן הזה כולם בקרוב יוכלו לראות אותו: בין אם בבתי הקולנוע ובין אם באינטרנט בעוד כמה שבועות. הרבה דברים לא נכונים נאמרו עלינו ועל הסרט בשבוע החולף. הסרט מבוסס על תחקיר עיתונאי מקיף של שלוש שנים והפרטים בו מאומתים ומוצלבים. הוא ידבר בעד עצמו והאמת סופה להתבהר. עשינו את הסרט כדי לעורר דיון ציבורי לגבי המעשים של הממשלה בעזה, ההרג של יותר מ73,000 בני אדם, רובם אזרחים, הנרמול של מלחמת השמדה, של התפיסה ש״אין בלתי מעורבים״. עשרים וארבעה חיילים וחיילות עשו צעד ודיברו מול מצלמה על מה שחברה שלמה לא רוצה לדבר עליו. ההכרה בזוועות בעזה לא מפחיתה לרגע מהטבח הנפשע של השבעה באוקטובר, שחמאס אחראי עליו, שחיילים מדברים עליו בסרט, ושאין לו שום הצדקה. להפך. הרי ההתעלמות ממה שקורה בעזה היא מהגורמים שסללו את הדרך לשבת הנוראה ההיא. וההתעלמות הזו נמשכת. עיתונות היא לא בגידה. ביקורת היא לא בגידה. זו חובה של כל אזרח שממשלתו מבצעת פשעים לדעת ושל כל חייל שהיה עד להם לספר. מסתובבים כאן אלפי חיילים כאלה, שיצפו בסרט ויזהו את מה שמתואר בו באופן אישי: את ההרג של אנשים לא חמושים שחוצים קו מדומיין, את אישורי הנז״א במאות, את התקיפות המערכתיות בבתי משפחות, את השריפה וההשמדה הפיזית של עזה, רצח וירי על אנשים רעבים במרכזי מזון ופשעים נוספים שאין להם הצדקה. גם אם זה מפחיד, זו חובתכם למצוא את הדרך להעיד על מה שראיתם. יגידו לכם שכדאי להסתיר את האמת למען הסברה בחו״ל, אבל זה קשקוש. שם יודעים כבר הכל. פשעים לא מסבירים אלא עוצרים. הסתרת האמת קודם כל מרעילה את החברה שלנו ומעל הכל מאפשרת לפגיעה בבני אדם בעזה להימשך. ובנימה אישית: אני כותב על מדיניות האש של הצבא בעזה בעברית ב״שיחה מקומית״ כבר שלוש שנים. התחקירים זכו להתעלמות בישראל. עכשיו בפעם הראשונה משהו נסדק במסך ההתעלמות - וזה דבר חיובי. זה דבר בריא. כן, זה מגיע עם מחיר אישי גדול. היה שבוע קשה. אבל בתוכו גם יש המון תמיכה, והרבה נדיבות. מה שבטוח: האיומים לא יעזרו. זה לא מרתיע אותנו. אני ורחלי נחזור לארץ ונמשיך להיאבק על עתיד המקום הזה ביחד עם שותפים רבים.

Meet Wits’ new Registrar, Tasneem Wadvalla! 💙🏛️ With 18 years of institutional, legal and governance expertise, Wadvalla brings extensive knowledge of Wits and its governance environment to one of the University’s key statutory roles. Read More: ow.ly/j9eV50ZQwWe #WitsForGood #WitsUniversity #WitsNews

A new five-country consortium led by UCT will put advanced, locally built and maintained light microscopes into the hands of African researchers. They will use these tools to tackle tuberculosis (TB), malaria, and other understudied diseases, where these diseases hit hardest and the tools are scarcest. Read more: qr.codes/PwWvhl

This is a terrible situation. Dr Shihuwa Sishuwa should not be abandoned in any way. Thank you South Africa for coming to the rescue. Academics on the continent and outside of it must clearly condemn the Zambian government for its action. We stand by Dr Shihuwa Sishuwa.

Carney (Canada), Lula (Brazil), Costa (EU), and Ruta (Kenya) have together penned a piece in the FT announcing a new middle power partnership.

Somadoda Fikeni speaking on “the political economy of inefficiency”. This speaks to how rooted corruption is within the state.

THE PROFESSOR: THE OPINION Yesterday I happened to sit down to catch up with the evidence of Professor Somadoda Fikeni before the Madlanga Commission. What I encountered was not merely another public servant appearing before another commission. It was something far more intellectually unsettling: an interrogation of the machinery through which the South African state has learned to produce the appearance of governance without necessarily producing the outcomes of governance. Fikeni, appearing in his capacity as Chairperson of the Public Service Commission, was unapologetic, intellectually forthright and devastatingly candid. His central proposition—that South Africa is a “cemetery of best policies” because policies are too often not implemented—should disturb anyone who still believes that our principal problem is simply the absence of another strategy, framework, task team or commission. But it was the phrase “political economy of inefficiency” that deserves to escape the confines of the Commission's transcript and enter our national vocabulary. Fikeni was not merely describing incompetence. He was inviting us to ask a much more uncomfortable question: what happens when inefficiency ceases to be an accident and becomes an ecosystem? If policies exist, implementation mechanisms exist and oversight institutions exist, yet implementation repeatedly stalls, the analysis must move beyond incompetence towards incentives, interests, political protection, institutional fragmentation and the beneficiaries of non-performance. That is where political economy begins. His observation about political leadership turnover is equally revealing. Fikeni indicated that during his more than five years at the PSC he had seen four ministers, noting how a minister may arrive with enthusiasm for reform only to leave before that reform takes root. State capacity requires institutional memory and continuity. Ministers may come and go; the machinery of the state cannot afford to continuously reset itself. Otherwise, government becomes an endless procession of beginnings—launches without completion, strategies without institutional memory, recommendations without implementation and reforms without sufficient time to mature. Fikeni also connected institutional vulnerability to inequality. Officials operating at the lower levels of the state can become more susceptible to inducement, while fear of losing employment can make public servants vulnerable to political pressure. This is not an argument that poverty excuses corruption. It is an argument about structural vulnerability. Professionalising the public service, protecting officials from improper interference, strengthening ethical safeguards and ensuring credible vetting are therefore not peripheral human-resources questions. They are instruments of institutional integrity. And here lies the great paradox of South African governance: we have accumulated an extraordinary architecture of policies, legislation, strategies, oversight mechanisms and recommendations, yet repeatedly struggle to convert architecture into performance. Two days before Fikeni appeared before the Commission, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the new Public Service Commission Act into law, strengthening the Commission's mandate and extending its reach to local government and public entities. The law also creates stronger mechanisms for requiring executive authorities to report on implementation of PSC decisions. The timing is almost poetic: the state has strengthened an institution responsible for monitoring implementation at precisely the moment its chairperson was telling the country how profoundly implementation has failed. That should be one of the central lessons of the Madlanga Commission. We do not need another beautiful report that gathers dust in a government archive. We need to break the cycle in which diagnosis becomes documentation, documentation becomes recommendation,

There is something almost unbearably symbolic about a political organisation that once presented itself as the great machinery of liberation now facing a court judgment over an unpaid bill for cleaning, hygiene and pest-control services at its own headquarters. The Johannesburg High Court has granted default judgment for R880,359.68, plus interest and legal costs. And let us be precise: the judgment does not mean the sheriff has already arrived to auction Luthuli House; it gives the creditor a legal basis to pursue enforcement if the debt remains unpaid. But the deeper issue is not the R880,000. It is institutional decay. When an organisation that aspires to govern a national economy cannot reliably discharge ordinary commercial obligations, one is entitled to ask what this reveals about financial management, organisational discipline and political accountability. The irony becomes even sharper when one remembers that ANC assets were previously pursued over a much larger debt in 2023. The lesson is not that political parties must never experience financial difficulty; the lesson is that financial credibility is itself a component of institutional credibility. You cannot preach developmental discipline to the country while repeatedly demonstrating organisational indiscipline within your own house. Perhaps Luthuli House needs more than pest control. It needs an audit of the political culture that allowed basic obligations to become matters for the courts. Because when a party cannot keep its own house financially clean, the metaphor writes itself.

What a lovely and progressive statement. Congratulations @Unisa. You provide leadership to the sector.🙏🏾

Rubio, South Africa does not need Washington's permission to be a democracy, nor its certification to determine its own constitutional destiny. Let us begin with something simple: South Africa has serious problems, and we should have the intellectual courage to say so ourselves. Our government must confront violent crime, corruption, institutional decay, unemployment, inequality, weak state capacity and the failures of municipalities. We should scrutinise land reform. We should challenge racial rhetoric wherever it crosses into dehumanisation or incitement. We should protect every South African—black, white, coloured and Indian—with equal seriousness under the law. None of that requires an American foreign-policy official to discover these problems for us. What I reject, however, is the increasingly presumptuous Washington narrative that South Africa's profound economic and institutional difficulties can be reduced to an alleged governmental obsession with "racial grievance" against Afrikaners. That is an extraordinarily reductive interpretation of a country whose political economy was structurally deformed by centuries of colonial dispossession and apartheid, and whose contemporary failures also involve corruption, patronage, infrastructure deficiencies, policy uncertainty, weak administration, inadequate investment and political dysfunction. To compress all of this into an Afrikaner persecution narrative is not sophisticated analysis. It is geopolitical simplification. And we should be equally clear about the distinction between legitimate criticism and foreign tutelage. America has every sovereign right to determine who receives an American visa. That is its jurisdiction. But the existence of that sovereign power does not magically confer upon Washington the moral authority to pronounce itself the custodian of South Africa's racial settlement, land question or democratic legitimacy. Indeed, the language of moral authority becomes considerably more complicated when examined against America's own international conduct. Washington is lecturing South Africa about racial justice, violence, land and the rule of law while the United States continues to provide substantial military and diplomatic support to Israel despite the enormous civilian destruction and humanitarian catastrophe documented by United Nations bodies in Gaza. One does not need to be anti-American to notice the contradiction. One merely needs to apply the same moral standard consistently. And no, this is not an argument that "America is bad, therefore South Africa is good." That would be intellectually juvenile. South Africa's failures remain South Africa's failures. If our institutions are corrupt, we must confront corruption. If our leaders are incompetent, we must hold them accountable. If racial hatred is expressed, we must condemn it. If land reform is pursued, it must be constitutionally defensible, economically rational and administratively competent. We cannot outsource our own moral and institutional responsibilities to Washington—or hide behind Washington's hypocrisy when our own government fails. But neither should we accept the extraordinary proposition that America can selectively position itself as the judge of democratic civilisation while its own foreign-policy decisions remain beyond equivalent scrutiny. South Africa is not a colony waiting for an imperial capital to explain democracy to it. We are a sovereign constitutional republic with our own history, contradictions, institutions, electorate and developmental challenges. Our democracy may be imperfect; our government may be mediocre in important respects; our institutions may require profound reform. But the answer to those deficiencies is deeper South African democracy, stronger institutions, better governance and greater accountability—not external political tutelage.

AfSA STATEMENT ON US VISA RESTRICTIONS AGAINST SOUTH AFRICANS A serious escalation The new US visa restrictions escalate a dispute that has moved from criticism and aid cuts to now targeting individuals. The American embassy in South Africa issued the needlessly belligerent warning that the new directive is "the first step in a series of escalatory measures". This amounts to pressure to change South Africa's laws, court outcomes, and foreign policy. Some Afrikaner organisations have applauded the directive, but they don't speak for all Afrikaners – and on social media their stance has fuelled hostility toward the whole Afrikaner community. The actions of a few should not stigmatise an entire group. Our courts decide – not foreign governments South Africa is a constitutional democracy with an independent judiciary. The "Kill the Boer" chant is inflammatory and harmful to reconciliation. But our courts found it to be protected political expression rather than incitement – a conclusion the Constitutional Court left undisturbed. The ANC has banned the song at its own gatherings, but President Cyril Ramaphosa cannot overturn a judicial ruling just because a foreign president demands it. The Expropriation Act permits nil compensation only in narrow, just-and-equitable circumstances, with full recourse to the courts, and it's being challenged judicially right now. Constitutional disputes belong in court, not in foreign executive orders. Race-based laws – a debate for South Africans BEE’s effectiveness and vulnerability to abuse and elite enrichment must be debated. But it is constitutionally permitted and intended to address apartheid’s continuing economic consequences. That debate belongs to South Africans. There's no credible evidence South Africa has more race-based laws than any other country. The oft-cited index counts any law where race is legally relevant, regardless of purpose, including defunct pre-1994 statutes. Equating remedial measures with apartheid-era domination laws is misleading. Farm violence is part of a national crisis Attacks on farmers and rural communities are horrific, leaving families with grief and trauma that must never be dismissed. Victims deserve compassion and justice. But their pain shouldn't be exploited to push an unsupported narrative of state-sponsored racial persecution. Violence touches every community – its heaviest burden falls on poor, predominantly black areas where murder, robbery and gang violence are daily realities. Recognising the broader crisis does not minimise the horror of farm attacks; it places them within South Africa’s wider failure to protect its people, rather than a racially targeted campaign. Foreign-policy double standards Washington invokes property rights in South Africa while backing Israel despite documented displacement and seizure of Palestinian property. It demands distance from Iran while courting its own rivals when convenient. Non-alignment is not obedience. Engagement, not submission South Africa should stay open to engagement with the US. But our laws are tested in our courts, our disputes resolved democratically, and our foreign policy is set by South Africans – not by foreign governments.

The Professor: The Opinion I actually disagree with the premise of this intervention. Johannesburg does not merely need a three-year rescue plan; it needs a three-year accountability plan. We have to stop treating municipal collapse as though it were an unfortunate natural disaster for which Treasury must periodically arrive with a financial umbrella. If leaders mismanage public resources, infrastructure is allowed to decay, procurement fails, revenue systems deteriorate and institutional capacity is hollowed out, then eventually Treasury arrives with money and technical expertise to stabilise the municipality. But where is the equivalent intervention for consequence management? Who accounts for the decisions that produced the crisis? Who carries the institutional, political and financial consequences of failure? This is the fundamental moral hazard: if political leaders can privatise competence while socialising failure, there is little incentive to govern differently. The municipality makes the decisions; residents suffer the consequences; businesses absorb the economic costs; and ultimately the national fiscus is expected to help clean up the mess. That cannot become the operating model of a developmental state. Treasury should certainly intervene where the national interest requires it. Johannesburg is too economically important to be allowed to collapse. But a bailout without accountability is not reform—it is an invitation to repeat the behaviour that made the bailout necessary. The intervention should therefore have teeth: forensic scrutiny of material failures, transparent tracking of every rand, consequence management for proven misconduct, professionalisation of administration, measurable service-delivery targets and public reporting against those targets. Political office should not become a shield against administrative consequences. And perhaps the most radical question is this: what if the next Johannesburg crisis cannot be rescued with another Treasury intervention because the people responsible for the previous failure were never made to account for it? We cannot keep putting the municipality under the carpet and the bill on the national fiscus. South Africa does not have a shortage of rescue packages. It has a shortage of consequences. And until failure becomes more expensive for those who produce it than for the citizens who endure it, no amount of Treasury intervention will produce durable institutional reform.

🔒ADEKEYE ADEBAJO | Xenophobia in South Africa’s ivory towers businessday.co.za/opinion/20…

Yesterday my daughter, who is studying in the United States, attended the Springboks versus All Blacks match in Baltimore. She spent five years of her life in that city before moving to Cleveland. At the stadium she bumped into an old school mate from Dainfern College who now lives in Florida. Two South Africans, far from home, finding each other in a crowd of more than 68,000. It was already an emotional moment. What neither of them expected was how deeply they would be moved by our national anthem. Standing there, thousands of kilometres from home, singing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. Pride in our roots. Pride in our diversity. Pride in excellence. And faith - watching the circle and the kneeling that followed the final whistle. That image stayed with me. There is a well known observation in India, popularised by Gurcharan Das, that “India grows at night while the government sleeps.” It captures a country whose people and enterprises often advance despite, rather than because of, the state. South Africa has that same untapped potential. We see it in the Springboks. World-class performance is not confined to the rugby field. It exists across our people, our businesses, our communities. We have what it takes. What we still need is simple, and it is hard: Create a genuinely business-friendly environment.
Confront crime with seriousness and consistency.
Appoint leaders in both the private and public sectors on merit. Those three interventions would allow this country to occupy the place it deserves among the winning nations of the world. We are a resilient people. Our character has been forged in difficulty. In a volatile world, that character is not a weakness. It is an advantage. The Springboks keep showing us what is possible when talent, discipline, purpose and belief come together. The rest of the country can do the same. We have the people. We have the potential. Now we must get our act together and grow during the day as well. #Springboks #RugbysGreatestRivalry #BetOnSouthAfrica #Leadership #Merit #SouthAfrica #ProudlySA

I have immense respect for Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Not only because they helped expose the machinery of violence behind militant Zionism, but because they were willing to look beyond tribe, identity, and inherited loyalties—and listen instead to conscience. That, to me, is profoundly moral. The prophetic instinct has always been to challenge the injustices of one’s own people, not merely condemn the wrongdoing of others. It is easy to see clearly when the perpetrator belongs to another tribe. The real test of conscience is whether we can recognize injustice when it is committed in our name, by our people, for a cause we were taught to defend. To stand against your own tribe when your moral compass demands it is rare. And while they may represent a small minority within Israel, they represent what I would like to think of as some of the highest Jewish values: justice, moral courage, compassion, and the willingness to stand against wrongdoing even when it comes from within one’s own community. That is deeply noble.