In a market where clients have more options and less patience for complexity, a good product or a sharp price will only take you so far.

What makes clients stay — and come back, and tell others — is how simple it feels to work with you: from the first enquiry through to payment, delivery and after-sales support.

A recent Capitec BizTalk explored how businesses can turn client experience into a competitive edge — watch the recording of the event below.

BizTalk is a business-focused platform launched by Capitec in partnership with Business Day and Arena Events. It brings together entrepreneurs, business leaders and financial experts for meaningful interactions that offer fresh perspectives and actionable insights to help South African businesses thrive.

A practical conversation for business owners

Real-world lessons from experienced entrepreneurs and financial experts

A slow response. A process with too many steps. Having to explain the same problem to three different people.

Each one feels like a minor inconvenience. But repeated across every client interaction, they quietly shape how people experience your whole business — and send them looking for someone easier to deal with.

The good news? You don’t have to fix everything at once. Often, the biggest gains come from finding one frustrating step and removing it. That’s where providing a better client experience becomes a genuine business strategy.

At the recent BizTalk event, Capitec’s Basani Maluleke, group executive for Personal Banking, and Riaan Klopper, executive head of Business Banking and the bank’s Business Support Centre, unpacked what it takes to turn everyday client interactions into a real competitive advantage.

This wasn’t a lecture on theory. It was a practical conversation about how to spot the friction in your business, simplify how you operate and use both people and technology to create experiences that keep clients coming back.

What you’ll gain from watching the recording of this Capitec BizTalk:

• How to spot the friction points that could be costing your business clients and revenue.
• How to turn client feedback into practical improvements.
• How to use simplicity and speed to set your business apart.
• How to build trust through consistent, effortless experiences.
• How better client experiences lead to loyalty, advocacy and sustainable growth.

Watch the recording above.

Why you should attend the next Capitec BizTalk

Each insight-driven BizTalk event is designed to help you navigate the challenges and opportunities of building and growing a sustainable business — and leave you with practical ideas you can act on immediately.

As an added bonus, one lucky business owner attending the event stands a chance to win an advertising package^* valued at R50,000, redeemable across leading Arena Holdings titles, including Business Day, Sunday Times or TimesLIVE.

As part of the prize, the winner will also be profiled in Business Day’s ‘Entrepreneurs with an edge’ series, helping to put their business in front of a wider audience.

Visit the Capitec BizTalk hub to catch up on highlights and key takeaways from previous events, and stay updated on upcoming events.

This article was sponsored by Capitec.

^{*Ts and Cs apply.}

In a market where clients have more options and less patience for complexity, a good product or a sharp price will only take you so far.

What makes clients stay — and come back, and tell others — is how simple it feels to work with you: from the first enquiry through to payment, delivery and after-sales support.

A recent Capitec BizTalk explored how businesses can turn client experience into a competitive edge — watch the recording of the event below.

BizTalk is a business-focused platform launched by Capitec in partnership with Business Day and Arena Events. It brings together entrepreneurs, business leaders and financial experts for meaningful interactions that offer fresh perspectives and actionable insights to help South African businesses thrive.

A practical conversation for business owners

Real-world lessons from experienced entrepreneurs and financial experts

A slow response. A process with too many steps. Having to explain the same problem to three different people.

Each one feels like a minor inconvenience. But repeated across every client interaction, they quietly shape how people experience your whole business — and send them looking for someone easier to deal with.

The good news? You don’t have to fix everything at once. Often, the biggest gains come from finding one frustrating step and removing it. That’s where providing a better client experience becomes a genuine business strategy.

At the recent BizTalk event, Capitec’s Basani Maluleke, group executive for Personal Banking, and Riaan Klopper, executive head of Business Banking and the bank’s Business Support Centre, unpacked what it takes to turn everyday client interactions into a real competitive advantage.

This wasn’t a lecture on theory. It was a practical conversation about how to spot the friction in your business, simplify how you operate and use both people and technology to create experiences that keep clients coming back.

What you’ll gain from watching the recording of this Capitec BizTalk:

• How to spot the friction points that could be costing your business clients and revenue.
• How to turn client feedback into practical improvements.
• How to use simplicity and speed to set your business apart.
• How to build trust through consistent, effortless experiences.
• How better client experiences lead to loyalty, advocacy and sustainable growth.

Watch the recording above.

Why you should attend the next Capitec BizTalk

Each insight-driven BizTalk event is designed to help you navigate the challenges and opportunities of building and growing a sustainable business — and leave you with practical ideas you can act on immediately.

As an added bonus, one lucky business owner attending the event stands a chance to win an advertising package^* valued at R50,000, redeemable across leading Arena Holdings titles, including Business Day, Sunday Times or TimesLIVE.

As part of the prize, the winner will also be profiled in Business Day’s ‘Entrepreneurs with an edge’ series, helping to put their business in front of a wider audience.

Visit the Capitec BizTalk hub to catch up on highlights and key takeaways from previous events, and stay updated on upcoming events.

This article was sponsored by Capitec.

^{*Ts and Cs apply.}

Join The Political Arena’s election series as it, in partnership with Wits University, facilitates a public dialogue that will bring together political parties and voters for a conversation about the CoJ’s future.

TimesLIVE

The regulator said on Thursday that the withdrawal would allow it to address “administrative and procedural matters” and ensure better regulatory alignment.

Icasa said the telecommunications affordability inquiry notice would be republished together with a draft questionnaire for public comment. Stakeholders who have already submitted comments will be able to resubmit or supplement them once the revised notice is published.

The OTT inquiry notice will also be republished at a later date, with the revised version expected to provide greater context and clearer guidance on public participation.

Icasa did not indicate when either of the revised notices would be published.

The decision comes only weeks after the regulator gazetted the two inquiries, which were aimed at examining the affordability of telecommunications services and the growing impact of OTT platforms on traditional broadcasting and telecommunications sectors.

The affordability inquiry was intended to investigate the cost of telecommunications services and explore possible regulatory or market interventions. In its original notice, Icasa said affordable access to telecommunications services was critical for digital inclusion, economic participation, education and service delivery.

The regulator highlighted ongoing concerns about the affordability of voice and broadband services, particularly for low-income households, rural communities, young people and informal sector workers.

The OTT inquiry was expected to examine the impact of internet-based services, including streaming, messaging and calling platforms such as Netflix and WhatsApp, on local broadcasters and network operators.

Icasa said OTT services had disrupted the broadcasting landscape, forcing regulated linear broadcasters to compete for audiences and advertising revenue. The regulator also argued that the growing adoption of OTT platforms was changing how conventional broadcasting infrastructure and networks are used.

In a statement announcing the withdrawal, Icasa said stakeholders would be informed of the republication of the notices through its normal communication channels to ensure they are given a full opportunity to participate in the inquiries.

TimesLIVE

He faces charges of rape and sexual assault for allegedly raping an 18-year-old teenager and sexually grooming a 16-year-old girl. He is being held at the Kgosi Mampuru prison.

Video courtesy of SABC

TimesLIVE

WATCH ALL EPISODES

Click here to find previous episodes of Spotlight with all the movie news you need, and follow the show on Facebook for all the latest news and giveaways.

There is something for everyone this week with Spotlight, from complicated love and deadly secrets to the wildest corners of Africa and all the action from Comic Con Africa 2026.

Love collides with real life in the romantic drama Charlie Harper, now at cinemas. A young couple tries to hold onto their relationship as ambition, identity and growing apart begin to pull them in different directions. Directed by Mac Eldridge and Tom Dean, the film stars Emilia Jones and Nick Robinson. With Charlie Harper asking big questions about love and relationships, Spotlight decided to ask a few questions of our own.

Secrets turn deadly in Verity, the psychological thriller adapted from Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel. A struggling writer moves into the home of a famous author to complete her books, only to discover a hidden manuscript filled with disturbing confessions. As she digs deeper, she quickly realises that nothing is quite what it seems. Directed by Michael Showalter, known for The Big Sick and Hello, My Name Is Doris, Verity stars Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett and Anne Hathaway. This film marks Hathaway’s fifth release of 2026. The closer you look, the less you know. Verity is showing at cinemas nationwide.

From dark secrets to the wildest corners of our continent, National Geographic takes us deep into the African wilderness in Africa Earth’s Wild Home. The new series explores some of Africa’s most remote landscapes, revealing extraordinary animals and even creatures new to science. Premiering on National Geographic, DStv channel 181 and Disney+ on October 3 and 4. One expedition heads deep into the forests of Gabon in search of the elusive dwarf crocodile. Spotlight caught up with crocodile conservationist Matt Shirley to learn more about these fascinating reptiles and the work being done to protect them.

Johannesburg came alive as Comic Con Africa 2026 brought four days of pop culture, gaming and fandom to life. Fans of all ages came out for gaming, cosplay, food and plenty more, with this year’s local and international lineup including Jazzara Jaslyn, Alexander Maniatis, Richard T Jones and Spencer Grammer. Spotlight was there to meet the stars, catch up with fans and jump straight into the action. Catch what went down at Comic Con Africa 2026.

For full interviews, breaking news, trailers and clips, visit our Spotlight Facebook page. See you at the movies.

Presenter Collette Prince is styled and dressed by Claris by Gerrit Pienaar when attending premieres and special events.

Facebook @Claris by Gerrit Pienaar/Instagram: gerritpienaardesigns.

Competitions and giveaways

Uncover the secrets beneath the pages and stand a chance to win a Verity movie merchandise hamper.

For full competition details and the question, go to the Spotlight SA Facebook page and DM your answers and contact details by October 9 2026.

Terms and conditions apply.

Winners will be drawn randomly and notified by SMS after the competition has closed. Entrants’ personal details will not be retained for marketing purposes. Winners have to provide proof of age (ID/driving licence) and cover their own travel and accommodation expenses. By entering, participants agree to have their names published on TimesLIVE, SowetanLIVE and Spotlight SA on Facebook. Employees of Arena Holdings and their family members are not eligible to enter.

TimesLIVE

Every year, Checkers launches a special mince and wors from their annual Championship Boerewors competition. The live event includes professional chefs and braai masters who assist the hopefuls to cook it perfectly and present it to judges. This year’s panel included content creator Nick Hammond, professional chef Nti Ramaboa, Springbok alumnus Courtnall Skosan among others.

De Sousa took the trophy for the competition’s 34th anniversary, a feat earned thanks to watching his master butcher father enter the competition in his younger years.

“You’d be sitting outside Checkers at six years old with a cold truck playing music and there’s the Oros man giving you juice or chips or sweets. Of course, you’d be tasting all the boerewors,” he said.

Far from a helicopter parent, De Sousa said his dad’s wisdom was imparted supportively. With 40 years of experience, De Sousa was raised for the big win even though he is a numbers guy with a nine-to-five as an investment portfolio manager.

After studying actuarial science and working in the space for two years, he moved on to investment, where his day involves market research, handling clients’ financials and making sure they have the right mix of assets and securities.

“Internally our guys joked about how it’s not too far from how you have to arrive at the perfect boerewors. You have to get the right mix of meats and blend of spices to get the optimum product. It’s making sure you get the numbers right. The ratio and what 10% fat vs 20% fat will do. It all helped.”

What has also struck a chord with De Sousa is how the competition makes celebrities out of its winners. He doesn’t only have bragging rights in his personal and professional circles but recognition from those who knew little about Championship Boerwewors. Ultimately it’s all been about heritage and how South Africans view the culture of a braai and the must-have wors that goes with it.

Italy has pizza and Japan has sushi, and De Sousa sees wors as truly authentic to Mzansi. Two factors come to mind for him, and one of them lies in the taste.

“If you’ve had a beef banger or a pork sausage, they’re very tightly packed in certain instances. You can’t quite taste the texture of the meat or the juiciness of the fat,” he said. “You get that salt, pepper and coriander blend, with coriander one of the key spices.”

The second important factor for De Sousa is how we make it worth every bite. Not many places in the world see it as a staple, and it has been key to bringing people together at celebrations and weekend gatherings.

TimesLIVE

Celebrate the day with something sweet.

ESPRESSO WALNUT CUPCAKES

Ingredients

Makes about 24 cupcakes

• 200g flour. Additional flour is needed to coat the walnuts
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 200g sugar
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 100g soft butter
• 3 eggs
• 150ml milk
• 1 cup brewed, and cooled Jacobs Roast and Ground coffee
• 100g walnuts

For the topping

• 200g of powdered sugar
• 100g soft butter
• 1tsp of vanilla extract

Methods and steps

1. Preheat the oven to 180° C. Sift flour and baking powder into a bowl.
2. Add sugar, salt and butter. Mix everything to a crumbly mixture. Mix the eggs with the milk in a second bowl.
3. Pour the egg milk mixture and half of the coffee into the crumbly mixture while stirring. Stir until a smooth dough has formed.
4. Chop the nuts roughly and mix in a bowl with some flour, then fold under the dough.
5. Line the muffin trays with paper cups and fill them to half the height with dough.
6. Bake in a hot oven for 20 to 25 minutes until the cupcakes spring back to the touch of a finger.
7. Remove and allow to cool completely.
8. For the icing, mix the icing sugar, butter, vanilla extract and the remaining coffee until creamy. Add the icing on to the cupcakes.
9. Put half a walnut on each cupcake for decoration.

TimesLIVE

Story audio is generated using AI

Suspended deputy national police commissioner Lt-Gen Shadrack Sibiya’s lawyer says they “acted out of caution” when they wrote to the National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP) amid speculation that Sibiya could face criminal charges.

Sibiya’s attorney, Rashad Moosa, made the remarks during cross-examination at Sibiya’s bail application in the Randburg magistrate’s court on Thursday.

Well, it’s quite clear — Mr Sibiya is entitled to his freedom.

Sibiya’s attorney, Rashad Moosa,

Moosa told the court that the correspondence with the NDPP was initially an inquiry aimed at establishing whether there were criminal investigations involving Sibiya and protecting his rights.

“We acted out of caution,” said Moosa.

He said the letter was “an inquiry, firstly”, but the legal team also wanted to enforce and preserve Sibiya’s rights and avoid circumstances that could adversely affect him.

Prosecutor Velile Makasana questioned which specific rights the legal team believed needed protection at the time, particularly as Moosa had testified that there had been speculation on social media.

“At that stage you say that there was speculation on social media about things, and yet you’re talking about approaching the NDPP, you’re talking about enforcing the rights. He’s an ordinary citizen at that stage. I’m interested to know which rights you were specifically referring to that you wanted to enforce at that particular point in time,” said Makasana.

Moosa responded, “Well, it’s quite clear — Mr Sibiya is entitled to his freedom.”

Makasana then put it to Moosa that the correspondence appeared to have been precautionary rather than prompted by a specific right being under threat.

“So you acted out of caution. Okay, so we can put it aside and say we can agree that there was no right at stake at that point in time, but we’re just being cautious because of the speculation that was taking place in social media,” Makasana said.

Moosa maintained that Sibiya’s rights remained relevant, saying, “Rights are entrenched, and rights can be taken away.”

The court proceedings come as Sibiya faces further legal and disciplinary challenges. An additional charge of negligent handling of a firearm was added to his charges on Thursday.

Two additional South African Police Service (SAPS) disciplinary notices have also been served on him while he remains in custody.

At that stage you say that there was speculation on social media about things, and yet you’re talking about approaching the NDPP, you’re talking about enforcing the rights. He’s an ordinary citizen at that stage. I’m interested to know which rights you were specifically referring to that you wanted to enforce at that particular point in time.

Prosecutor Velile Makasana

Moosa told the court that Sibiya had been served with an expedited SAPS disciplinary notice during his previous court appearance. His legal team said its original mandate related to the disciplinary proceedings, but there had subsequently been an overlap with the criminal matter.

Sibiya remains detained at Kgosi Mampuru II Correctional Centre while his bail application continues.

Proceedings were temporarily adjourned on Thursday after the court experienced a technical problem with its recording equipment.

TimesLIVE

Ruch is a senior economist in the World Bank’s economic policy division and previously at the Prospects Group. His appointment brings the membership of the bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) to seven.

His arrival at the Sarb and the MPC comes as the central bank navigates a tough time of elevated inflation levels triggered by geopolitical tensions globally, trade fragmentation and stubborn energy costs.

“As part of his appointment, Ruch becomes the seventh member of the Sarb’s MPC. A seasoned economist, Ruch brings his vast monetary policy expertise to the position,” the central bank said.

It said Ruch joins the bank from the World Bank, where he served as a senior economist leading research and technical analysis and writing for publications.

“Before the World Bank, Ruch worked in the Sarb’s economic research department, where he developed and operated economic models and contributed to the monetary policy review.”

Ruch has a PhD from the University of Stellenbosch and a Master’s degree from Oxford University.

He also helped compile the “Global Economic Prospects” report released in June. The report said the impact of the conflict in the Middle East has led to downward revisions, especially in Nigeria and South Africa, where structural constraints continue to limit growth.

“Non-resource-rich economies are expected to see growth slow from 6.4% in 2025 to 5.7% in 2026, and then average 6.2% over 2027–28, though still outpacing commodity exporters. Ethiopia’s growth is expected to be driven by reforms in monetary policy and the financial sector, despite external challenges.”

The report said growth forecasts have been lowered for Uganda as a result of oil project delays, for Senegal amid revelations of hidden debt and the subsequent freezing of funding from the International Monetary Fund, and for Côte d’Ivoire on account of falling cocoa prices.

TimesLIVE

In a video shown before the commission, Sibanyoni can be heard telling Ramaphosa and mineral & petroleum resources minister Gwede Mantashe that business organisations wanted a 30% stake in Putco’s business operation in KwaNdebele.

“Putco has been operating here for 43 years. Please assist us. When you find someone wanting to interfere with the Putco business, you must know it is us,” Sibanyoni can be heard saying in the video.

A year later, in January 2025, 51 buses were burnt at three Putco depots leaving a trail of costly damage in Nkangala district, Mpumalanga. The bus company transports about 20,000 commuters in the district.

During cross-examination, Sibanyoni said he meant “engaging” with Putco when he said “interfere” in the conversation with Ramaphosa.

He said he was in talks with Putco on behalf of Gauteng Central Bus Services (GCBS), an organisation that wanted to work with Putco.

“I have mentioned that I was speaking on behalf of the community. There you see the community burning buses; it’s not me. You see the video; it is not me. Can we not personalise this matter?” Sibanyoni said, referring to the video of buses burning.

He denied any involvement in the burning of buses.

Evidence before the Madlanga commission suggests that a month after Putco buses were reduced to ashes, Taxi Choice, the business wing of the South African National Taxi Council headed by Sibanyoni, made an unsolicited offer to Putco to buy their entire business operation in KwaNdebele.

“Two days after the buses had been burnt, you are in communication with Mr [Oupa] Sindane about buying buses and a month later Taxi Choice makes an unsolicited offer to purchase the whole fleet,” evidence leader Matthew Chaskalson said to Sibanyoni.

He added that the “interfere” speech Sibanyoni made to Ramaphosa and the unsolicited offer “seem to me to point to a single process where Putco is being placed under pressure to sell … to Taxi Choice”.

Sibanyoni is listed as a chair of Taxi Choice and James Chapman as MD.

Sibanyoni denied being responsible for the attack on Putco.

While Sibanyoni told the commission that before making the unsolicited offer to Putco he and Putco MD Franco Pisapia had engaged about the proposed deal, Chaskalson said Putco denied there were ever such talks.

Pisapia, in a scathing letter to Taxi Choice, said the company found the offer to be “calculated” as it was made a month after an attack on its business.

“The timing and content of your letter appear to be disturbingly calculated in light of the recent carefully orchestrated and heinous attacks on both Putco’s employees and fleet of buses. At the outset, Putco is not on the market,” the letter reads.

Sibanyoni said the offer made to Putco was not an isolated proposal. He said Taxi Choice had made similar proposals to other companies.

This included FlySafair for a stake in aviation, Traxtion Services for a stake in rail services, bus company Autopax for a stake in or the whole of Autopax as a going concern and North West Transport Investment (NTI) for a stake in or the whole of NTI as a going concern.

Sibanyoni, president of the South African Local and Long-Distance Taxi and Bus Organisation, is in court facing a criminal charge of extorting money from Tengane Thomas Ntuli, who owns a company that supplied aggregate stone to the R573 project of the South African National Roads Agency (Sanral) in Mpumalanga.

Sibanyoni, an alleged extortion cartel leader, in that case also raised the issue of the “30% local content” requirement.

On criminal infiltration of law enforcement, Sibanyoni told the commission he “knew” that suspended police deputy national commissioner Lt-Gen Shadrack Sibiya “reported” to his (Sibanyoni’s) former boss Jotham Msibi.

“We knew at the time that he was reporting at the farm. Whoever was reporting at the farm I take it they were carrying out Mr Msibi’s instructions,” he said.

He said if a senior police officer was reporting to Msibi it was “dangerous”.

Sibanyoni’s right-hand man, Oupa “Bafana” Sindane, has been subpoenaed to appear before the commission investigating allegations of criminal infiltration in law enforcement.

Sindane is expected to answer questions on his talks with police officers in facilitating police to escort Sibanyoni.

BusinessDay

When a bird lunges at a butterfly in mid-flight, it may see something that is not there — the insect’s wings flashing beneath may not be moving where they appear to be moving. By the time the predator realises the illusion, the butterfly already may have escaped.

Researchers studying this natural defence have found that contrasting wing patterns can work together with wing movements to create misleading motion signals, making it harder for predators to judge a butterfly’s speed and direction during flight.

“The patterns on butterfly wings combine with their wingbeats to create optical illusions, making it look like the butterfly is moving in a different direction to its actual course,” said Jolyon Troscianko, a professor at the University of Exeter in England and a leader of the study published in the journal Nature. “This is likely enough to save a butterfly from the split-second moment when a bird would try to catch it.”

The idea that stripes and other bold markings can create “motion dazzle” has long been proposed by scientists. But experiments involving animals including zebras, snakes and lizards have produced mixed evidence, and many studies did not account for the movements of wings or limbs.

“Butterfly wings are flexible surfaces that clap together and fling apart, and also pivot forwards and backwards in a figure-of-eight as they fly. This movement means that a stripe across the forewings can be visibly and slowly moving down on the down-stroke,” Troscianko said.

“But on the up-stroke, this stripe is rapidly folded away and twisted in line with upwards flight direction. Together these make the downwards motion of the butterfly much more visible than its upwards motion, even though it is flying up,” Troscianko added.

This increased ‘confusion’ effect would be almost impossible to overcome without evolving a fundamentally different visual system.

Jolyon Troscianko, professor at the University of Exeter

To investigate the idea, the researchers combined high-speed filming of real butterflies, computer modelling, simulated evolution and touchscreen experiments.

“Stripes are particularly good at interfering with the circuits that detect motion,” Troscianko said. “The barber pole illusion is a good example — stripes moving sideways can look like they’re moving up or down instead.”

The patterns also appear to increase uncertainty about a butterfly’s position during an attack.

“This increased ‘confusion’ effect would be almost impossible to overcome without evolving a fundamentally different visual system,” Troscianko said, suggesting it may have been pivotal to the success of the butterflies as a group.

Not all butterflies appear to use this strategy, however.

“The least motion-confusing butterflies are typically brown or red,” Troscianko said, suggesting that some species may rely more on camouflage or on warning colours that may signal to predators that the insect is toxic, poisonous or has a bad taste.

To test whether the effects could influence attacks, the researchers recruited 100 human volunteers and carried out 3,000 virtual butterfly-catching experiments. Participants watched videos and attempted to catch butterflies by tapping a screen. Butterflies that were predicted to produce stronger visual confusion caused people to aim farther behind them.

“Predation experiments with live birds and butterflies would have been ideal in many ways, but likely impossible and unethical in practice,” Troscianko said.

Because the neural circuits involved in motion vision are quite fundamental in vertebrates, Troscianko said, the researchers hope the findings can translate between different species.

Butterflies face multiple predators, and motion confusion may not fool them all equally.

“For now, we’ve only looked at bird vision,” Troscianko said. “In principle, similar effects could happen in predatory insects like dragonflies and robber flies. However, they have much faster vision than birds, so the illusions might not work for them. Indeed, dragonflies and robber flies do successfully hunt butterflies quite often.”

Beyond biology, the team’s motion-vision tools could have practical applications, from improving how movement is displayed in flight or combat simulators to developing patterning that protects personnel, vehicles, drones or robots in motion when being targeted visually.

“I’m most excited to explore how useful our models could be for improving road safety and reducing discomfort and stress in the built environment, where flashing, moving and striped objects can cause harm or danger,” Troscianko said.

Reuters

Story audio is generated using AI

In the era where prima donnas have an insatiable appetite for validation and exposure, South Africa’s Under-20 and U-23 coach Raymond Mdaka prefers to fly under the radar.

In recent years Mdaka has done commendable work by winning back-to-back Cosafa Under-20 titles and the 2025 U-20 Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) trophy, the first youth continental title lifted by a South African team.

He also coached South Africa at the 2025 Fifa U-20 World Cup in Chile last year where Amajita lost to Colombia in the last 16. Mdaka, just 56, is acknowledged as one of the best young coaches and coaches of youth in the country.

After lifting their second consecutive Cosafa U-20 Cup with their final win against hosts Mozambique in Maputo on Sunday, Amajita will travel to the Afcon in Ghana next year as defending champions where Mdaka and his current crop of players will be looking to make it two out of two in that competition too.

𝗪𝗛𝗔𝗧.𝗔.𝗚𝗢𝗔𝗟!!!

Emile Witbooi's goal for #Amajita in 4-2 win over Zambia. #CosafaU20 pic.twitter.com/81bf6v8uSw

— #UNPLAYABLE (@UnplayableZA) September 25, 2026

With all the good work he has done, there are those who feel Mdaka should be celebrated more in South African football. The coach, though, says he is happy to make a quiet contribution.

“If I am looking for people to be praising and saying things about me, I may lose focus,” he said as the U-23s prepared to face Algeria in two friendly matches on Thursday and Sunday in Bloemfontein, which serve as preparation for a 2027 U-23 Afcon qualifier in November.

“Sometimes you need to do what you can do best wherever you are in that particular moment. Life will always change, things will always come around, but if you are looking far ahead instead of doing good in what you have to for now, you might miss direction.”

To show his commitment to the course, Mdaka arrived back in the country from Cosafa with the U-20s on Monday and went straight into camp with the U-23s.

“It is a challenge [to be coaching two different teams] but it is something we knew about. It was in our programme that we will go to Cosafa U-20 and immediately come back and go to U-23.

🎥 | 𝗧𝗔𝗞𝗔𝗟𝗔𝗡𝗜 𝗠𝗔𝗭𝗛𝗔𝗠𝗕𝗔!!!

𝗛𝗢𝗪 𝗗𝗜𝗗 𝗛𝗘 𝗦𝗔𝗩𝗘 𝗧𝗛𝗔𝗧?! 😭🧤

YOOOOH, WATCH THAT SECOND SAVE!!! 😭😭

An absolutely SENSATIONAL double save from the Kaizer Chiefs youngster to keep Amajita ahead against Mozambique in the COSAFA U20 final!

HE HAD… pic.twitter.com/paeDiLt5Gg

— CHIEFS CENTRAL (@ChiefsCentralZA) September 27, 2026

“It’s only me and coach Karabo [Mogodi, Mdaka’s assistant] and the analyst who were in Mozambique with the U-20s. You go there and work for almost 14 days and then come back to work with another team.”

The current U-23 team is brimming with talented players who have made a mark at younger levels, including in the 2025 U-20 Afcon triumph and at the U-20 World Cup. These include the likes of Fletcher Smythe-Lowe, Asekho Tiwani, Neo Rapoo, Camren Dansin, Mfundo Vilakazi, Kutlwano Letlhaku, Emile Witbooi, Mpho Padime and Luke Baartman.

“People will always say it’s a good headache [to have this many talented players available] but it’s one of the difficult challenges we are facing. You have to do what we call squad composition and balance it.

“You will find that in one area, you have more than four players and you cannot take all of them on the basis that you want to balance the team. So we go deep into profiling and say, ‘Who can do best in that particular spot in terms of how we want to play?’

You will find that in one area, you have more than four players and you cannot take all of them on the basis that you want to balance the team.

Amajita coach Raymond Mdaka

“It is a good and bad challenge but it’s something we will always work on and get the best combination that will give us good results.”

For this camp and matches against Algeria, Mdaka wants his youngsters to spend time together and get more match minutes ahead of the Olympic qualifiers.

“Even now when we are in camp, we are already making proposals because honestly without preparation there is nothing that can happen. We can have the best players, but if we cannot be given the support it won’t work. We will put a proposal and we always remain positive that we will get something that will help us.”

Even if the U-23s beat a strong Algeria side, don’t expect to see Mdaka fighting for attention because he enjoys flying under the radar.

1977 — Club rugby is broadcast on South African TV for the first time, but the season-ending Grand Challenge contest between Maties and Villagers is marred by foul play with three players, including Springbok skipper Morne du Plessis, being ordered off the field. Maties forwards Schalk Burger and Flip van der Merwe were also given their marching orders by referee Mike Kessel. The Stellenbosch students were reduced to 13 players and Villagers 14, but Maties still won the match. All three players were suspended for two weeks, the bans kicking in at the start of the 1978 season. School headmaster Kessel, who had blown Currie Cup matches as well, retired after the match, although it was a decision he’d made months before.

1996 — Daryll Cullinan top-scores with 51 as the Proteas, bowled out for 169, falter against world champions Sri Lanka in a four-nations ODI tournament in Nairobi. Sanath Jayasuriya scored 45 off 30 balls to steer his team to victory by two wickets.

2007 — Jacques Kallis scores an unbeaten 118 on the opening day of the first Test against Pakistan in Karachi. He was out for 155 the next day.

2016 — Flyhalf Morne Steyn kicks four penalties and two drops to give the Springboks an 18-10 victory over Australia in a Rugby Championship match at Loftus Versfeld. The visitors scored the only try of the match through prop Scott Sio.

2016 — Johannesburg-born Jason Johannisen is awarded the Norm Smith medal for his role in the Western Bulldogs’ 89-67 victory over the Sydney Swans in the Aussie Rules grand final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, watched by a crowd of nearly 100,000. Johannisen emigrated to Australia with his family when he was eight.

2019 — Laura Wolvaardt and Tazmin Brits are the only batters to make double figures as the South African women are restricted to 89/7 to lose the fourth T20 against India in Surat by 51 runs.

2023 — The Springboks score seven tries as they beat Tonga 49-18 in their final World Cup group match in Marseille. Flyhalf Handré Pollard, making his return after a lengthy injury, converted the first four tries by Cobus Reinach, Canan Moodie, Deon Fourie and Jessie Kriel. Manie Libbok converted the last three tries by Willie le Roux, Marco van Staden and Kwagga Smith.

2023 — Marizanne Kapp scores 72 as the South African women, bowled out for 209, lose the third and final ODI against New Zealand at Kingsmead by six wickets.

2023 — Jaco Ahlers wins on the Asian Tour for the first time, carding a four-under-par 284 to take the Taiwan Masters by two shots.

Residents, business and civic organisations say they are sick and tired of breathing in coal dust and sludge which covers their homes, cars and yards, causes respiratory problems, and has ruined roads and highways.

They are determined to push port authorities and municipal managers to get trucks carrying cargo which create dust or cause environmental contamination off the roads and onto the railways.

TNPA’s acting port manager Winnie Mpanza recently issued a directive stopping coal-laden trucks from entering or exiting the Port of Richards Bay’s east gate via Medway Road, following numerous complaints regarding infrastructure damage and environmental pollution.

“In the interest of the surrounding community, neighbouring businesses and port users at large, immediate intervention had to be adopted to mitigate and alleviate the issues at hand,” Mpanza said.

“This decision prioritises the interest of the surrounding community and neighbouring businesses for a clean environment.”

The directive comes after a complaint to the municipality by the Richards Bay Clean Air Association (RBCAA), a non-profit which operates a real-time ambient monitoring network that measures various pollutants including particulate matter (dust). The data is collated into monthly and annual reports and reported against not only South African standards but also World Health Organization guidelines.

“RBCAA was established in 1997 as a direct result of air quality concerns. Our monitoring data is available to the regulatory authorities who are legally mandated to enforce compliance. The data is also used to guide industry in taking corrective actions and implementing of mitigation measures should ambient guidelines be exceeded,” said Sandy Camminga from RBCAA.

She said there are well-documented health effects from the community as a result of dust issues in Richards Bay, which are not only confined to coal dust. Coal dust complaints started around 2020 when the parastatal started handling coal.

“Black dust became an issue and started impacting on the community when Transnet Port Terminals started handling coal, and with that came the influx of trucks due to Transnet’s inability to handle the coal via rail. While the trucks have destroyed our roads and contribute significantly to the coal dust pollution there is a greater cumulative issue when it comes to the black dust, which includes Back-of-Port facilities handling coal in open stockpiles.”

The sludge along the roads is ankle deep and heavy metal toxins cover everything around us from the grass to the trees and inside our homes. I have to clean multiple times a day, and you should see our pools when the wind blows in a certain direction.

Teri Nel, Arboretum resident

Camminga said in addition to the significant health impacts, coal dust contributes to environmental degradation as it settles on vegetation and enters wetlands and water systems in addition to “tearing up” our road infrastructure.

“This has been allowed to continue with no corrective actions being taken by any party until recently when the RBCAA submitted a formal complaint. The action that has subsequently been taken with regards to the Medway cleanup and closure to dirty cargo trucks is a small step in the right direction. We need to see the same collaborative efforts to address the cumulative issues.”

Arboretum resident Teri Nel, who has lived in Richard’s Bay for over 30 years and who initiated a petition, said the medical impact of chronic exposure to airborne coal dust has been well known and felt by residents over the years.

“The sludge along the roads is ankle deep and heavy metal toxins cover everything around us from the grass to the trees and inside our homes. I have to clean multiple times a day, and you should see our pools when the wind blows in a certain direction. It’s not only Alton which is the immediate suburb next to the port, it’s in every suburb.”

Nel said concerned ratepayers and business met with the uMhlathuze municipality officials and port authorities over law enforcement in this matter in July and a follow-up meeting was scheduled.

“There are wash bays in the port for the trucks but they choose not to use them. This wasn’t a problem when coal was transported by rail, which was ideal. But now with the trucks it is will be an issue of logistics companies losing out on millions. That’s money from someone’s pocket and corruption in how this sector works, but we are determined to push for this.”

Sheldon Cramer, who is part of a residents’ action committee, said they are frustrated by the municipality’s inaction and their constant fight with Transnet over the coal dust issue.

“We are aware the fight to go back to the rail is not without challenges given the millions that would be lost by logistics companies who have capitalised on the sabotage to rail resulting in trucks being used in the first place.

“There are unscrupulous role players involved here, but if there is continued pressure from ratepayers and business, governance and monitoring from the various state departments in ensuring health and environmental compliance is priority, then there is a chance of winning this war.”

TNPA said it redirected the trucks following complaints and, through collaborative efforts with uMhlathuze, embarked on a clean-up intervention at the port.

The parastatal said as part of its integrated logistics strategy to move cargo from road to rail, it has approved infrastructure projects ― one in final stages of execution and the second in the design phase ― aimed at improving rail capacity and efficiency within the Bayvue Railyard.

uMhlathuze deputy mayor Muzi Mtshali said: “Law enforcement must play its role in holding accountable those who break the law, particularly truck operators who transport coal without covering their loads and who park illegally on public roads.”

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The Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) suggests that creating a Municipal Manager’s Professional Council of South Africa could help cities like Johannesburg reduce poor administration.

According to a report from the think tank, the council would assess people who want to become municipal managers and hold them accountable if they do something wrong.

“This statutory body will be responsible for registering, certifying and disciplining of municipal administrative executives and for vetting candidates for senior municipal positions, while retaining the formal appointment role of elected councils,” reads the report.

The report said for cities like Johannesburg, there should be a clearer division in the institution, distinguishing between council, the political executive and the municipal administration.

It recommends a more stringent process for the appointment of a city manager, which must be transparent and merit based.

“We recommend a stronger delegated authority for the city manager over staffing and administrative decisions, restrictions on political office-bearers issuing operational instructions to officials and renewed five-year terms for appropriately qualified boards of municipal entities.”

The report was commissioned by the CDE to inform its policy series, Johannesburg Matters: Fixing South Africa’s Growth Engine.

Johannesburg Matters is a series of reports from CDE that sets out to provide analysis and recommendations that a reformed Johannesburg administration could implement after the November 4 local government elections.

The report sets the scene, describing Johannesburg as in crisis. It details failing infrastructure, unreliable water and electricity supply, a mounting maintenance backlog, deteriorating financial controls, a swelling wage bill, unstable coalitions and rapid mayoral turnover which it says has altogether eroded public confidence in the city’s ability to perform even its most basic functions.

We recommend a stronger delegated authority for the city manager over staffing and administrative decisions, restrictions on political office-bearers issuing operational instructions to officials and renewed five-year terms for appropriately qualified boards of municipal entities.

Centre for Development and Enterprise report

Penned by Ivor Chipkin, the report refers to accounts of the state of the city, including the mayor’s own 2026 state of the city address, which, he says, detail and register these symptoms.

“This working paper argues that the conventional diagnosis — that Johannesburg’s crisis is simply one of poor governance and weak leadership — is insufficient.”

He argues that the actual deeper problem is institutional and legal.

“The Municipal Systems Act vests the power to appoint the municipal manager and senior managers in the council, rather than in the administration itself, and permits the council to instruct any political office-bearer, councillor or staff member to perform municipal duties.

“The effect is that a genuinely autonomous, professional municipal administration which is insulated from party political control has rarely been able to emerge in Johannesburg.”

He argues that where it has existed, its autonomy has been discretionary and performative, present only for as long as the governing party chooses to act as though it exists.

“Since the onset of coalition governments in 2016, this fragile arrangement has been steadily hollowed out. Municipal utilities and departments have become the spoils of coalition bargaining, driving high turnover among boards and executives, a marked decline in technical skills, and, directly, Johannesburg’s chronic billing failures and deepening fiscal distress.”

Chipkin believes that the crisis of the City of Johannesburg relates institutionally to the failure to allow the sphere of administration to emerge in its own right.

“This is both a legal and political issue, which itself speaks to how local government policymakers in the 1990s, like those developing the Public Service Act of 1994, were deeply suspicious of administrations inherited from the apartheid government, and how they deliberately blurred the lines between political and administrative roles.”

In the report, the CDE examines the legal foundations of what Chipkin calls a metropolitan patronage system.

“It shows how the Municipal Systems Act (MSA) gives municipal councils decisive influence over the appointment of the municipal manager and senior managers directly accountable to that office.

“The law, moreover, blurs the boundary between political authority and administrative execution by allowing councils to define roles, allocate responsibilities and instruct political office-bearers, councillors or staff members to perform municipal duties. The result is not the disappearance of administration as a legal category, but its weakening as a distinct sphere governed by professional norms.”

Chipkin explains that a defining feature of a civil service system is that appointments are governed by objective rules rather than by the discretionary authority of politicians or political parties.

“Where public employment, promotion and associated benefits are allocated through political or personal discretion, the administration is more accurately described as a patronage system.

“In such systems, access to office is mediated by actors such as legislatures, political parties, unions, or economic and social elites, rather than by merit-based procedures.”

The establishment of the CDE proposed Municipal Managers’ Professional Council of South Africa would be a statutory professional council with SAQA-recognised professional designations.

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The South African Rugby Union (Saru) is responsible for a group of men who have conquered the rugby universe and the Springboks are rightly revered around the world as the best in the business.

To many South Africans, the Siya Kolisi-captained and Rassie Erasmus-coached green and gold warriors are not only a symbol of success, they are a shining example and enforcers of a winning spirit that swells the pride of our troubled nation.

It is to Saru’s credit and the genius of Erasmus that the back-to-back world champions are 12 months away from attempting an unprecedented third successive World Cup crown in Australia next year.

But by not dealing with the André Esterhuizen elephant in the room with the diligence it deserves, Saru and Erasmus have dropped the ball big time.

By appointing Esterhuizen the 68th captain for last Saturday’s defeat to the Wallabies, Erasmus erred in that he overlooked an element of the player’s racist past that can neither be erased nor wished away. That incident was when Esterhuizen racially abused Potchefstroom Gymnasium coach Thabo Molete in 2012.

To plead ignorance of the incident is disingenuity and dishonesty by Saru. Not heeding the public outcry over the matter and treating the backlash as a mere irritation is a refusal to accept that tackling the demon of racism is an ongoing process to which we must remain alive across all aspects of our society.

Kicking this Esterhuizen matter into touch is poor form. Barring journalists from asking about the issue during the pre-match press conference in Perth is censorship that should not be tolerated in a democratic state.

His sympathisers argue that not only did the then 18-year-old apologise, he was also banned from rugby for a year, though half of that sentence was suspended.

An undeniable truth is that racism is a festering wound. It remains a lived reality decades after racist laws were repealed en route to a democratic dispensation.

They omit to mention that in 2017 he made a mockery of that apology when he denied using the racial slur against Molete.

There’s plenty of evidence of how Erasmus has contributed to help transform the Boks from an exclusive club of a select section of our population.

Confronting uncomfortable truths about our actions, past and present, should be part and parcel of the stronger together mantra embodied by all that embrace the Springboks, warts and all.

An undeniable truth is that racism is a festering wound. It remains a lived reality decades after racist laws were repealed en route to a democratic dispensation. Regrettably, there are some among us who still wear racism as a badge of honour and hanker for the days of white supremacy.

Sport in general and rugby in particular, has made a massive contribution to social cohesion. Where the Springbok emblem was once a source of hate, it is now a crest worn with pride in support of all Erasmus selects to represent the nation.

Accountability and transparency should be the cornerstones of our collective conscience. Though South Africa is bedevilled by a leadership crisis where those in authority get away with a myriad of misdemeanours and foul-mouthed tirades against the very public they purport to serve, we should never tire of holding people responsible for their actions.

From politicians to sportsmen, everyone must put in the work necessary to curb the scourge of racism whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head.

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A month after 51 Putco buses were torched at three depots in KwaNdebele, Mpumalanga taxi boss Joe “Ferrari” Sibanyoni approached the bus company with an unsolicited offer to buy its whole fleet.

The timing of the interest came under intense scrutiny at the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry on Wednesday, as Sibanyoni faced questions about his dealings with the taxi industry and Putco in the area.

Sibanyoni, who has been accused of extorting businesses operating in Kwaggafontein, denied any involvement in the attacks on Putco.

The commission heard that the torching of the buses on January 27 2025 came about a year after Sibanyoni had met President Cyril Ramaphosa and minerals and energy minister Gwede Mantashe. During that meeting in January 2024, Sibanyoni raised concerns about the red tape he said was preventing local businesses from getting opportunities to work with the bus company.

“When you find someone wanting to interfere with Putco business, you must know it is us. Don’t put red tapes [sic],” Sibanyoni told the meeting.

On Wednesday, he told the commission that at the time they were “engaging” Putco over a proposal that would see 30% of the work going to local businesses.

The 30% local procurement requirement formed part of the government’s preferential procurement framework aimed at creating opportunities for local and designated groups through subcontracting.

For nine months, the bus company operations in KwaNdebele came under sustained pressure.

The commission heard that Putco recorded more than 350 incidents between October 2024 and January 2025, in which its buses were allegedly blocked from operating by taxi operators. Bus drivers were subjected to constant intimidation.

Sibanyoni distanced himself from the attacks, pointing to the registration numbers of the taxis captured in video footage presented to the commission. He said the taxis in the footage were registered in Mpumalanga, while his taxis carried Gauteng and Limpopo registration numbers.

Then on January 27 2025, Putco suffered a major blow when 51 buses were torched at three of its KwaNdebele depots in one night.

A video flighted at the commission showed that it took the criminals less than 10 minutes to hold security guards at gunpoint at Putco’s Moloto depot in Mpumalanga and torch 16 buses.

One of the attackers is seen carrying a can of flammable liquid, which is then sprayed over the buses before they are set alight. The liquid was sprayed from about 11.38pm, with smoke becoming visible by 11.41pm. Seven minutes later, the CCTV camera was engulfed in smoke, obscuring the scene.

In the minutes that followed, several people were seen desperately pushing cars parked inside the depot towards the street in an effort to save them.

Again, Sibanyoni denied any involvement.

But just 36 hours after fire attacks, Sibanyoni sent a text message to his associate, Bafana Sindane, saying he wanted to purchase Putco buses via bank financing.

In his supplementary statement, Sibanyoni went further, suggesting that the possibility that Putco had torched its own buses should be investigated.

“It is a distinct possibility, and indeed, a matter that should be formally investigated and interrogated with serious precision,” he said.

Sibanyoni claimed there was a prevailing theory that Putco had torched its own buses in connection with labour and industry disputes at the time. But chief evidence leader Adv Matthew Chaskalson dismissed this suggestion, saying there was no recorded labour dispute prior to the incident.

A month after the fire attacks, Taxichoice, whose executives included Sibanyoni and directors of several taxi organisations, approached Putco with a written offer to buy the bus company. They also intended a buy-in into Putco contracts with other companies.

Sibanyoni was appointed as a director of Taxichoice in the same month of operators approaching Putco.

I differ with your findings, and if you understand it differently, it’s unfortunate.

Mpumalanga taxi boss Joe “Ferrari” Sibanyoni

Putco, however, raised concerns about the timing of the approach, telling the taxi operators that the company was not on the market.

However, it said any bona fide interested party would have to meet stringent financial conditions before any further discussions could take place. These included a non-refundable R100m deposit to Putco shareholders and a minimum R2bn cash guarantee from a reputable finance house accredited by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority.

Putco said only once these conditions had been met, would any further process be considered.

The chronology of events prompted Chaskalson to question whether the attacks on Putco had followed difficulties in securing the proposed 30% local stake and whether they were intended to pressure the company into selling.

Sibanyoni rejected the suggestion.

“I differ with your findings, and if you understand it differently, it’s unfortunate,” he said.

The sale never materialised.

The commission also heard about a separate exchange between Sibanyoni and his associate Sindane involving an internal SAPS report into the murder of Sgt MM Lekalakala near the Mabopane Putco depot.

Sibanyoni was questioned about why Sindane would have sent him the internal police report, which was headlined, “Organised crime investigation unit under Lekalakala”. He said he didn’t know why Sindane had done so, and that there were lots of messages being circulated among taxi operators.

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President Cyril Ramaphosa’s address on the murders of women has raised varied reactions from experts as they welcomed the address but also warned that government must now move beyond promises and show measurable action.

Women for Change founder and GBV activist Sabrina Walter said government needs to provide clear funding, timelines and measurable outcomes for the interventions announced by the president.

Walter welcomed the president’s acknowledgement that government had not done enough in recent years, but said women could not be protected by speeches alone.

She questioned why it has taken months for Ramaphosa to address the country with urgency on GBV after it was declared a national disaster in November 2025.

Walter also questioned whether measures such as cutting grass and repairing streetlights would protect women who face violence inside their own homes.

She said survivors need to be able to report domestic violence without being dismissed or turned away, while high-risk accused perpetrators should be subjected to proper risk assessments.

Walter also raised concerns about South Africa’s DNA backlog and called for government to publish current and detailed crime statistics relating to women and children.

“Without reliable data, where does the government’s response even begin?” she said.

She called for quarterly public reports showing arrests, prosecutions, convictions, forensic turnaround times and the number of stalled cases that had progressed.

Walter said prevention also needs to start much earlier, including education in schools about consent, equality and healthy relationships.

“Boys and men must be actively included in prevention programmes and harmful attitudes must be addressed before they escalate into violence,” she said.

Sonke Gender Justice welcomed Ramaphosa’s acknowledgement that measures taken over the past seven years had not been enough.

The organisation also welcomed his rejection of approaches that restrict women’s freedom or place responsibility for male violence on women.

Sonke Gender Justice said its response was one of cautious concern, as many of the issues raised by Ramaphosa were not new.

Investigating cases, processing forensic evidence and repairing unsafe public spaces are necessary, but they do not constitute a comprehensive prevention strategy.

Sonke Gender Justice

The organisation said the measures announced could make a difference if they were implemented urgently, properly resourced and backed by clear accountability.

But it warned that the response remained heavily focused on what happens after violence has already occurred.

“Investigating cases, processing forensic evidence and repairing unsafe public spaces are necessary, but they do not constitute a comprehensive prevention strategy,” the organisation said.

GBVF expert and media advocate Cameron Kasambala said the president’s address showed that government was considering a range of interventions, including strengthening the police response and dealing with cold cases.

However, she questioned how government would measure whether each intervention was working.

She said the scale of the GBV crisis meant government could not simply introduce several initiatives without ensuring that each one was properly implemented.

Kasambala said poor follow-through, a lack of analysis and inadequate auditing could contribute to backlogs and discrepancies.

She said government needed to show the public how it would track and analyse progress.

“So while the plan is great and the initiatives sound fantastic and we are hearing good things in words, how are we going to track and analyse it?” she asked.

Institute for Security Studies consultant Willem Els said reopening cold cases could lead to breakthroughs as police make use of improved forensic technology.

“Every case is unique and some cases you get an early break depending on the evidence gathered and the dynamics around the case,” he said.

Els also warned that an arrest should not be seen as the end of an investigation.

Els said the number of arrests should not be the only measure of police success. He raised concerns about suspects being released shortly after arrest because investigators lacked the capacity to build strong cases.

“A very big percentage of those people are walking free within 48 hours because the police just don’t have the capacity to successfully investigate it,” he said.

He said criminals and gangs watch how police operate and could take advantage of weaknesses.

Els said advances in forensic technology could give police another opportunity to examine evidence that was collected years ago.

“The technology that we have today in forensics are way, way, way better than the technology we had 10 or 15 years ago,” he said.

Els also called for experienced retired detectives to be brought back on contract to help current investigators. He said senior detectives should mentor and guide investigators dealing with complex cases.

The Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa (Denosa) National Gender Structure also welcomed Ramaphosa’s four-point plan and urged community members, including nurses, to participate in municipal safety audits within 60 days.

The organisation said the audits should identify unsafe areas, broken streetlights, unsafe routes and poorly secured parks and cemeteries.

It said prioritising forensic cases and removing bottlenecks could help speed up cases going to court.

Amnesty International South Africa executive director Shenilla Mohamed said women and communities were still dealing with a lack of trust in the police.

“Improving the quality and efficiency of investigations is crucial for ensuring successful prosecutions.”

Mohamed said police also need to treat survivors with respect and dignity when they report cases.

She called for adequate resources, investigator training, stronger forensic capacity and action to address the DNA backlog.

Mohamed said Amnesty had taken note of Ramaphosa’s announcement but believed the measures came too late.

“These are not new issues and as a country we have been talking about ways to tackle the high numbers of GBVF, especially since 2019 when women took to the streets to protest, and yet here we are again in the face of continued attacks against women,” she said.

She said the timelines announced by Ramaphosa would only matter if they resulted in action and consequences for those who failed to act.

Mohamed said municipal safety audits should be made public.

“Municipalities cannot be allowed to ignore their obligations to make public spaces safer for women, and there must be consequences where they fail to do so,” she said.

She also called for femicide to be recognised as a specific crime in South African law.

“Femicide constitutes the most extreme form of violence against women and the most violent manifestation of the discrimination and inequality women face,” Mohamed said.

She said criminalising femicide alone would not stop the killings, but could provide another tool to hold the state accountable.

Public finance expert Matshidiso Lencoasa said South Africa’s strong laws and policies on GBV meant little if government did not provide enough money to implement them.

“Some of these policies seem like promises to our country, but to the people and women in our country, they are set up to fail because they’re not invested in. There are no resources to back them,” Lencoasa said.

She said shelters for survivors were among the programmes being affected by funding constraints and called for GBV to be treated as a whole-of-government response, with departments such as health, justice and police receiving dedicated allocations.

Lencoasa said the upcoming medium-term budget would be an important test, with the public needing to see where the money was going and whether parliament and communities would be able to monitor how it was spent.

That confusion matters because it changes the function of a trade union federation. A federation exists to organise workers as workers: across party, workplace, sector, region and ideological difference. Once party loyalty becomes the implied measure of class authenticity, the union ceases to be a broad instrument of worker power and risks becoming an auxiliary of factional politics.

This is not academic hair-splitting. Cosatu was born in December 1985 out of difficult unity talks among anti-apartheid unions. Its founding principles — non-racialism, worker control, trade union democracy, industrial unionism, organisational independence and international solidarity — were practical answers to apartheid’s fragmentation of workers. Its organising slogan, “one union, one industry; one country, one federation”, was a strategy for unity, not a demand for ideological sameness.

Contemporary attempts to define the “real” worker by party preference should therefore be resisted. They do not sharpen class politics; they impoverish it. They move debate from material conditions to political belonging, from organisation to suspicion, and from persuasion to discipline.

The labour movement has always contained workers of different political persuasions. What unites them is not the colour of a party T-shirt, but a common condition: dependence on wages, exposure to exploitation and the need for collective power to defend dignity at work and in society.

What Cosatu’s founding tradition actually demands

The Cosatu constitution commits the federation to a unified, democratic South Africa free from oppression and economic exploitation. It speaks of a united working class — not a politically identical one, and not one belonging to a single party. The word is united.

That unity was forged against a system that divided workers by race, geography, skill, workplace and legal status. To reproduce division through ideological tests betrays the organisational wisdom that built the federation.

This does not mean Cosatu has been ideologically empty, far from it. The federation has carried a powerful socialist impulse, rooted in workers’ lived experience and in the struggle against capitalism and apartheid. But there is a difference between being influenced by socialist thought and constitutionally imposing Marxism-Leninism as a membership test.

A trade union federation must be broad enough to organise every worker who is exploited, underpaid, casualised, retrenched, victimised or denied a voice at work. If it is reduced to those who accept a particular ideological label, collective bargaining weakens, workplace unity fractures, and employers receive the greatest gift of all: divided workers.

Class is not a ballot paper

Class is not a ballot paper or a party card. It refers to a person’s relationship to production, ownership and labour. Workers are workers because they sell their labour power and depend on wages for survival. Their location in the economy does not change with each election cycle.

A teacher who supports the ANC remains a worker. A mineworker who supports the SACP remains a worker. A nurse, farmworker, security guard or municipal employee who votes for another formation remains a worker. Wages, debts, school fees, working conditions and exposure to exploitation do not disappear because of an electoral choice.

Cosatu has every right to take political positions. A federation that refuses to speak about power, unemployment, austerity, public services, industrialisation and the political direction of the country would be failing workers. Neutrality in the face of exploitation is not independence; it is surrender.

Of course, workers can make choices that do not advance their long-term interests. That is precisely why political education matters. But there is a difference between analysing political choices and declaring workers outside the class because they disagree with a preferred party line. The first is education. The second is intimidation.

No serious union leader should accept this. Our task is not to declassify workers who disagree with us politically. It is to organise, educate, persuade and unite them around shared material interests.

Political education must persuade, not police

Political education is one of the labour movement’s finest traditions. At its best, it helps workers understand power, exploitation, history and the economy. It gives language to what workers already experience at work and in their communities. But it must persuade; it must not police.

Marx’s famous call was not “workers of my faction, unite”. It was “workers of all countries, unite”. Its enduring power lies precisely in its breadth. It appeals to workers as a class, not as members of a particular political organisation.

This distinction is vital. Serious political education connects lived experience to the economy, the state, capital accumulation and public policy. It asks why wages stagnate, why public services deteriorate, why municipalities collapse, why unemployment remains high and why workers carry the burden of fiscal and economic failure. It does not begin by demanding party loyalty.

A union leader must therefore resist the temptation to use ideology as a stick. The task is to build disciplined, democratic and class-conscious organisations that can bargain, mobilise, defend rights and shape public policy. That requires political clarity, but also patience, democratic debate and respect for the agency of workers.

The South African tradition was always broad

Socialist currents, national liberation struggles, community struggles, civic movements, churches, student organisations and workplace battles shaped the South African labour movement. It was never a narrow procession of ideologically identical people marching behind a single text. Its strength came from its ability to unite diverse social forces around a common struggle against apartheid, exploitation and oppression.

Joe Slovo understood this danger. His reflections on socialism, democracy and dogmatism did not shrink the working class into a sect. They insisted that socialist politics must be rooted in democratic practice, mass participation and broad popular organisation.

That lesson matters now. When worker unity is reduced to party loyalty, socialism is not strengthened; its organising base is weakened. Employers do not ask which party a worker supports before retrenching them. Inflation does not require a membership card before eroding wages. A collapsing municipality does not distinguish between ANC, SACP, or non-aligned workers when services fail, transport breaks down and households struggle to survive.

Cosatu’s alliance politics must not become membership exclusion

Cosatu has every right to take political positions. A federation that refuses to speak about power, unemployment, austerity, public services, industrialisation and the political direction of the country would be failing workers. Neutrality in the face of exploitation is not independence; it is surrender.

But a political position is not a membership filter. The alliance tradition, at its best, requires debate, contestation and principled engagement. It should not become an instruction that workers must think, vote and speak alike before their class identity is recognised. Such a move would weaken Cosatu’s organisational independence and its credibility among workers who experience exploitation directly, even when they express their politics differently.

The real test is whether we can organise the whole class

The future of organised labour will not be secured by ideological gatekeeping. It will depend on whether unions can organise precarious workers, defend public services, rebuild workplace democracy, protect collective bargaining, confront unemployment, resist corruption and insist that economic policy serve the many rather than the few. These are the conditions for restoring labour’s social weight in a fragmented economy.

That work demands a Cosatu that is politically conscious but organisationally broad; principled but democratic; historically grounded but not confined by factional certainties. It requires a federation able to argue for its politics with confidence while embracing workers at different points of political development, including those who make different electoral choices.

A union movement worthy of its history must be confident enough to debate workers, not fear their views. It must trust that workers can be persuaded through struggle, evidence and experience. It must never tell ordinary members that their pain is real only if their vote is correct.

Cosatu’s historic mission is to unite workers in their diversity. Teachers, nurses, mineworkers, municipal employees, security guards, farmworkers, retail workers and all wage earners need a federation that recognises their common condition and builds their collective power. They do not need a federation that first asks them to pass a partisan examination.

Cosatu’s enduring test is whether it can remain the broad house of labour in an era of political volatility, social fragmentation and economic insecurity. Its task is not to narrow that house through partisan suspicion. It is to keep its doors open, its politics honest, its democracy alive and its unity anchored in the lived realities of workers. That is not political weakness. It is the condition for rebuilding working-class power.

Dr Mugwena Maluleke is the president of Education International and the general secretary of Sadtu

Story audio is generated using AI

After years of progress in reducing HIV among farm workers in Hoedspruit, health workers are raising concerns about the number of young jobseekers testing positive for the virus during the agricultural recruitment season.

The concerns come as South Africa continues to carry the world’s largest HIV burden. UNAIDS estimates that about 7.8-million people were living with HIV in South Africa in 2024, with about 6-million receiving antiretroviral treatment.

Despite the scale of the epidemic, the country has made significant progress. The Human Sciences Research Council’s latest national household HIV survey found that HIV prevalence across all ages declined from 14% in 2017 to 12.7% in 2022. However, the survey estimated that about 232,400 people acquired HIV in 2022, showing that transmission remains a major public health challenge.

At Hlokomela Clinic, which serves farm workers, seasonal labourers and surrounding communities in the Limpopo farming town, staff say some of the new HIV diagnoses are among young people aged between 20 and 35 who arrive looking for seasonal work, including workers travelling from neighbouring Mpumalanga.

Speaking to the Sunday Times during a visit to the clinic on Wednesday, Hlokomela operations manager Antoinette Ngwenya said the trend was particularly noticeable when farms began recruiting hundreds of seasonal workers.

“Towards the end of October, the farmers start telling us that they need us to do medical pre-employment examinations for the new employees who are coming in. Most of them are young people between the ages of 20 and 35,” Ngwenya said.

She said many of the young people testing positive came from Mpumalanga.

“During the farming season, you find that with the pre-employment [screening] of 200 or 300 people, by the end of the week you find that 15 are HIV-positive. So it feels like we are going back to what was happening 20 years ago,” she said.

Ngwenya said unemployment, alcohol and substance abuse were among the social factors the organisation believed could increase vulnerability among some young people.

The concern comes despite significant progress in reducing the burden of HIV among farm workers in the area.

During the farming season, you find that with the pre-employment [screening] of 200 or 300 people, by the end of the week you find that 15 are HIV-positive. So it feels like we are going back to what was happening 20 years ago.

Hlokomela operations manager Antoinette Ngwenya

Hlokomela was established in 2005 in response to research highlighting a critical need for healthcare among farm workers and other vulnerable communities in the Hoedspruit area. It started with four employees and about 50 patients living with HIV.

Research conducted in Hoedspruit in 2008 found an HIV prevalence of 29% among farm workers. A subsequent evaluation conducted in 2018 found prevalence had fallen to 6.3%. Hlokomela says the earlier research also identified young farm workers, particularly unmarried women, as especially vulnerable to HIV infection.

Today, the clinic conducts about 1,700 HIV tests a month and provides treatment to about 2,000 people living with HIV, according to Ngwenya.

She said the situation was vastly different when Hlokomela began its work two decades ago, when HIV prevalence among farm workers was high and many people did not know their status.

“Back then farm workers had multiple partners. We discovered that supervisors were hiring people through transactional sex. Most of them passed on as they were HIV-positive and in denial,” Ngwenya said.

Hlokomela subsequently introduced HIV education, testing, prevention and treatment programmes aimed at farm workers and other vulnerable communities.

The concerns about young workers arriving from Mpumalanga are significant against the backdrop of the province’s HIV burden.

The Human Sciences Research Council’s Sixth South African HIV Prevalence, Incidence and Behaviour Survey found that Mpumalanga had the highest provincial HIV prevalence in the country in 2022, at 17.4%, representing an estimated 890,000 people living with HIV.

Among young people aged 15 to 24 in Mpumalanga, prevalence was 7.8%. In an unusual pattern, prevalence among young men in this age group was 9.8%, compared with 6.3% among young women. Among adults aged 25 to 49, prevalence stood at 26.4%.

The survey also found HIV prevalence of 21.1% among people living in rural formal or farm areas in Mpumalanga, compared with 18.4% in rural informal areas and 15.5% in urban areas, although the HSRC said the differences by locality were not statistically significant.

While Mpumalanga has made progress in treatment —antiretroviral therapy (ART) coverage increased from 65.4% in 2017 to 81.8% in 2022 — younger people continued to lag behind. ART use among people living with HIV aged 15 to 24 stood at 56.4%, compared with 83.9% among those aged 25 to 49.

Kgopotso Manamela, one of Hlokomela’s managers, said another challenge was getting some migrant workers diagnosed with HIV to start or remain on treatment.

She said staff sometimes encountered resistance from people from neighbouring countries, including Zimbabwe and Zambia.

“Some will tell you to go open a case against them, but they won’t take any HIV treatment,” Manamela said.

She said religious and cultural beliefs could also become barriers to treatment.

“Another challenge is people hiding behind their religion or beliefs when they don’t want to take HIV medication,” she said.

The supercar was in the process of being sold by Special Investigating Unit (SIU)-appointed curator Jacobus Gideon Louw van Wyk, who was granted an order by the Special Tribunal last month to sell the car. The vehicle formed part of properties attached in the probe into the alleged looting of Tembisa Hospital.

Now Maumela has approached the high court in Pretoria in an urgent application to stop the sale from going ahead.

In his founding affidavit, Maumela, in his capacity as a trustee of the MHR Maumela Family Trust, argued that the curator was in process of selling the vehicle, ignoring the trust’s leave to appeal the Special Tribunal’s August ruling.

“It was after the Notice of Appeal had been lodged and served that the applicant’s [trust] attorneys were, for the first time, informed by the first respondent’s [curator’s] attorneys on 18 August 2026 at 17h03 that the vehicle had already been sold ... for R9.6m,” Maumela stated.

He is appealing to the high court to slam the brakes on the sale and the process to transfer the blue supercar.

Maumela also stated that he had immediately indicated his intention to appeal the tribunal’s decision which allowed the sale “before the ink could dry” on the order.

Maumela accused the curator of having acted in bad faith “by giving an undertaking” to sell the vehicle while the appeal was still pending.

The matter was orally argued on Tuesday and the court was expected to make its decision soon.

The Ferrari was bought for R11.1m in April 2022 but has lost more than R1m in value.

The Special Tribunal in Johannesburg authorised the curator to sell the vehicle for no less than R9.5m. The proceeds must be kept in a trust account and may be used only with the approval of the SIU.

Judge Bernard Ngoepe of the Special Tribunal had ruled the sale was justified because the vehicle was incurring significant insurance, storage and maintenance costs while continuing to depreciate.

“There’s no question of the vehicle appreciating to sufficiently cover insurance and storage costs,” the August judgment said, noting that insurance costs were about R100,000 a year and storage was R5,000 a month. The vehicle would also require the reinstatement of its warranty at a cost of about R408,000.

The tribunal had also noted that two valuations had been obtained, placing the Ferrari’s value at R10.2m and R10.15m respectively. There was also already a R10.9m offer from a Gauteng motor dealership to buy the car.

The Ferrari is among a fleet of high-value vehicles attached as part of the SIU’s investigation into alleged corruption and the looting of about R2bn at Tembisa Hospital.

Maumela is an alleged mastermind and chief beneficiary in the tender scam that saw the hospital looted through tender fraud.

Other supercars attached in the investigation include:

• a Lamborghini Huracan STO, valued at about R8.1m;
• a Lamborghini Aventador SVJ, worth about R8.8m;
• a Lamborghini Urus, valued at about R5m; and
• a Lamborghini Aventador Ultimae Coupé, worth about R9m.

Several Aston Martins, Ferraris and a Bentley are also subject to the preservation order, which was granted in October last year.

The SIU has also attached eight properties with a combined estimated value of around R175m.

Business Day reported in August that the South African Revenue Service had slapped Maumela’s mother, Mboneni Benedicta Maumela, with R39.9m in new assessments, including penalties and interest, regarding the 2017 to 2023 tax years.

We can confirm that we demarched Ambassador Bozell. The third demarche since he started his duties nine months ago

Dirco Official

“We can confirm that we demarched ambassador Bozell — the third demarche since he started his duties nine months ago,” a senior official at the department of international relations and co-operation (Dirco) said late on Tuesday.

A demarche is a formal diplomatic protest from one government to another.

A state department spokesperson told Reuters that Bozell went to Dirco to discuss bilateral ties.

“We are not interested in diplomatic manoeuvring, procedural delays or dialogue for dialogue’s sake,” the spokesperson added.

Relations between the two countries have been strained by US President Donald Trump’s repeated false claims that white South Africans face systemic persecution.

White South Africans are, on average, wealthier and more likely to be employed than black South Africans. The government policies criticised by Trump are intended to address inequalities that persist from the apartheid era.

Bozell, a conservative activist and writer who arrived in Pretoria as Trump’s envoy in February, was first called in within weeks of taking up the post over remarks that Dirco said undermined South Africa’s judiciary and historical context.

The issues related to the bilateral relations between the two countries are a subject of ongoing discussions. There is commitment from both sides to resolve the outstanding matters.

A senior official at the department of international relations and co-operation.

In recent interviews with local media, the ambassador has adopted a firmer and impatient tone, saying that Pretoria had not adequately addressed Washington’s concerns and that further pressure could follow.

Two weeks ago the US unveiled visa restrictions on some South Africans.

South Africa has maintained a willingness to engage in talks but says its sovereignty must be respected and it will not compromise on domestic priorities like addressing historical injustices.

“The issues related to the bilateral relations between the two countries are a subject of ongoing discussions. There is commitment from both sides to resolve the outstanding matters,” the Dirco official said.

The state department spokesperson said: “The ball is now squarely in the government of South Africa’s court to outline the relationship it wants with the United States.”

Update: September 30 2026

This article has been updated with the state department’s response.

Reuters

TimesLIVE

She jumped from bed, scrambling in the darkness of a blackout to top off a bucketful before the tap went dry. It was the first time her building had seen water in two months.

This scenario plays out in neighbourhoods across Cuba’s capital of Havana daily, where power outages exacerbated by a US oil blockade have crippled the already crumbling infrastructure that supplies water to the city’s nearly 2-million people. Many regularly go without running water for days or weeks.

Hygiene is among the first casualties of the situation, explains Hechavarria, a healthcare worker, who for weeks had been forced to buy water from street vendors or scavenge it from nearby broken pipes.

Diarrhoea has run rampant throughout her building, she says, as tenants struggle to keep even tiny apartments clean.

“There’s no one in this building who hasn’t gotten sick,” said Hechavarria, adding that she too was recovering from a recent bout of fever and diarrhoea.

Officials in both the US and Cuba have begun to sound the alarm.

Health authorities in Cuba have warned in recent days of the spread of viruses, including a strain of viral hepatitis, as power and water increasingly fail. And a US health alert earlier this month warned travellers and residents of a “significant increase in diarrhoeal illness across Cuba, associated ​with the continuing degradation of the water and energy infrastructure.”

There’s no one in this building who hasn’t gotten sick

Havana resident Yuamilka Hechavarria

Since the US imposed a fuel blockade in January, blackouts across Havana now regularly surpass 24 hours, hampering refrigeration and further crippling antiquated water infrastructure, of which nearly 90% depends on electric-powered pumps, according to Cuba’s National Institute of Hydraulic Resources.

About 3.5-million people, or just under half the island’s population, now suffer from water shortages, the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs has said.

No escape from the new reality

Hechavarria’s home — a poorly ventilated, one-room hovel she shares with her seven-year-old son and husband — would make any doctor cringe, despite her best efforts to maintain order and hygiene.

Thirty families live in similarly cramped quarters in the same small two-storey building.

A recent power surge damaged her refrigerator, leaving her without a way to conserve food. She uses it instead to store medicine, beans, and rice.

Plates litter her kitchen counter and sink. She reuses dirty dishwater to clean the floor or flush the toilet. She uses soap only when she can afford it.

Her husband, meanwhile, is responsible for pushing a homemade handcart fitted with two large barrels at least once weekly to a pipe that juts from the wall of a local school.

If classes are in session and there is power, the school fires an electric pump that allows water to flow from the pipe into an alleyway.

On a recent weekday morning, neighbour Andres Jimenez, a 76-year-old retired metal worker, had arrived at the spot just as the power went out. Only a trickle of water remained.

“If there’s no power, they don’t run the pump,” he said.

Concerns over hygiene would have to wait, he added.

Nurse Maria Elena Parlado, who lives nearby and works in a clinic in the neighbourhood, said there is no escaping the new reality.

“Look around us,” she said, pointing to a roadside trash heap beside a small stream of sewage running along the sidewalk.

Even the clinic where she treats local residents for fast-spreading viral outbreaks is without water, she said.

“Between one patient and another I should be washing my hands, but sometimes I can’t.”

Reuters

In Southern Africa, 95% to 98% of existing account owners already use digital financial products. Yet adoption alone does not create a digital economy.

Lasting digital growth depends on payment systems that can move money securely and at scale, connecting consumers, businesses and institutions without friction.

What digital-first really means for payments

Digital-first finance is not simply a digital wrapper on a traditional process; it reflects a fundamental shift in how people expect access to, and use, money.

Customers sign up digitally, manage their finances, limits, security toggles and subscriptions all in one place from a mobile device.

For users, the experience feels simple and intuitive. This is the standard Gen Z and younger millennials already expect and increasingly demand from financial services.

Mastercard’s role is deliberately specific. They are not the bank. They power the payment network behind digital experience.

Across South Africa, digitally enabled banks demonstrate what becomes possible when modern customer experiences are built on resilient payment infrastructure

Gabriël Swanepoel, Mastercard division president in Africa

By connecting issuers, acquirers, fintechs, merchants and consumers through trusted infrastructure, Mastercard enables, in collaboration with banks and other ecosystem participants, secure transactions, real-time authorisation, broad acceptance and efficient settlement.

This allows faster, more seamless and more personal payment experiences to reach people and businesses every day.

Across South Africa, digitally enabled banks demonstrate what becomes possible when modern customer journeys are built on resilient payment infrastructure.

Customers can open accounts remotely, in many cases receive approval quickly, and when supported by the issuing bank, begin transacting immediately.

To the end user, the experience feels simple because the complexity, from authorisation to security and acceptance, is handled behind the scenes.

Building the foundational rails to support this is essential. Mastercard grew its acceptance network across Africa by 45% in 2025, bringing millions more consumers and small businesses into the digital economy.

In South Africa, card payments were projected to reach R2.9 trillion last year, driven by demand for faster, more secure and more convenient transactions.

However, smooth payment experiences require both sides of the transaction to be supported. While consumers may be ready to transact instantly via mobile, businesses also need reliable and efficient ways to receive and manage those payments.

The real engine of growth: on-soil investment

Sustainable digital banking growth takes more than technology. It takes investment on the ground – infrastructure, talent and local innovation ecosystems that turn ideas into real and relevant products.

Secure data centres, interoperable payment platforms and collaboration with banks, governments and fintech companies ensure digital solutions become tools people actually use.

Mastercard continues to play a crucial role in powering the South African digital economy, from tap-and-go payments to one-click e-commerce and artificial intelligence-powered cybersecurity tools that can calculate risk and find fraud in real time, protecting billions of transactions across their network each year.

Small businesses and consumers rely on timely access to funds. Faster settlement allows merchants to restock, pay employees and keep the digital economy moving as money flows efficiently across the ecosystem.

In supported markets, Mastercard’s real-time clearing and more frequent settlement cycles enable acquiring banks to process merchant card payments as they happen.

Inclusive growth for all

Despite this progress, the cash-to-digital transition remains incomplete. According to World Bank data, only 20% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa paid merchants digitally in 2024, and a $5.7 trillion small, medium and micro enterprises finance gap in developing countries continues to constrain small business growth.

Digital-first banking, underpinned by strong payment networks and local investment, helps address both challenges by enabling faster access to funds and broader participation in the digital economy.

Africa’s digital banking opportunity is enormous, but realising it requires continued investment in local infrastructure, trust, talent and technology.

The next wave will be seamless: instant mobile sign-up, frictionless card issuance and full account management in one app, powered by resilient technological infrastructure and connected by interoperable, real-time platforms.

At Mastercard, the vision is simple: everyone, everywhere should have the access they need to thrive in the digital economy.

This article was sponsored by Mastercard.

Joburg Underground Film Festival

The Joburg Underground Film Festival is showing experimental, radical and unorthodox cinema from across the world, spanning Super 8mm and found archival photographs to GTA gameplay captures, printed digital stills annotated by hand and stop-motion animation.

• Dates: October 4, 10 and 11
• Venue: The Bioscope, 44 Stanley Avenue, Johannesburg
• Tickets: R104.50
• thebioscope.co.za/joburg-underground/

Art

Collation 5 | Between Ghosts and Shadows

The Centre for the Less Good Idea presents a new programme this month, Between Ghosts & Shadows. The three-day mini-festival features exhibitions, installations, a pop-up market and performances in which artists and collaborators explore new short forms, and the idea of a perpetual performance conceptualised through filmed, projected shadows.

• Dates: October 15 to 17
• Venue: The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Maboneng, Johannesburg
• Tickets: To be confirmed
• lessgoodidea.com

Don’t miss:

• Karel Nel’s Translucent Worlds exhibition at Everard Read in Johannesburg until November 19.
• Hylton Nel’s This Plate Is What I Have To Say solo show at Stevenson in Cape Town until October 3.
• Mikhael Subotzky’s A Johannesburg Landscape (or Thirteen Tons Settled to Brick) at Goodman Gallery in Joburg until October 31.
• What We Do Not See at Wits Art Museum until October 24 and featuring works by David Goldblatt, Gulshan Khan, Jabulani Dhlamini, Jo Ractliffe, Jodi Bieber, Mark Lewis, Lindokuhle Sobekwa, Madoda Mkhobeni, Sabelo Mlangeni and Tshepiso Mazibuko.
• Thirza Schaap’s After The Tide solo show at Berman Contemporary in Cape Town until November 28.
• Reverse Futures at JCAF in Joburg (by appointment only) until December 5 and featuring Etel Adnan, Cave_bureau, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Paula Gaetano Adi, Kamil Adam Hassim, Traci Kwaai, Ernest Mancoba, Georgia Munnik and Yinka Shonibare.

Theatre

The Agents

In this outrageously funny satire, Venter, Linda and Brenda are a trio of devious estate agents who will do anything for a sale. Taking aim at everyone from slick property influencers to clueless home buyers and neighbourhood watch groups, the production casts a baleful eye on the cut-throat world of property development, gentrification, luxury estate living and the capitalist dream itself.

Written and performed by Kyla Davis, Lisa Derryn Overy and Roberto Pombo, The Agents is directed by physical theatre legend Toni Morkel.

• Dates: October 20 to 31
• Venue: Theatre on the Square, Sandton
• Tickets: R180-R220
• webtickets.co.za

Prima Facie

Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie, an Olivier- and Tony Award-winning play directed by Neil Coppen, stars Danica De La Rey Jones as Tessa, a brilliant young barrister forced to confront the patriarchal power of the law when her world is turned upside down.

• Dates: Until October 4
• Venue: The Market Theatre, Joburg
• Tickets: R140-R220
• webtickets.co.za

The Breasts of Tiresias

Michael is a trans man obsessed with the Greek prophet Tiresias, who is cursed by the gods to change sex every seven years. To Michael, this isn’t a curse: he prays for the same fate, but the gods won’t listen. The production, directed by Malcolm Purkey, stars Gerard Bester and Sandi Dlangalala, with live music created by Carlo Mombelli. Some of the performances form part of the Market Theatre’s inaugural Queer Festival (October 21 to 25).

• Dates: October 15 to 25
• Venue: The Market Theatre, Joburg
• Tickets: R110-R220
• webtickets.co.za

Dance

Carmen

Veronica Paeper’s staging of the ballet classic Carmen forms part of Joburg Ballet’s 25th anniversary season. Set to Georges Bizet’s unforgettable score, it follows the fiery, free-spirited Carmen and her dangerous descent into a world of obsession and betrayal.

• Dates: Until October 4
• Venue: Joburg Theatre
• Tickets: R250-R800
• webtickets.co.za

Fairs and festivals

Roedean Art Fair

The 2026 Roedean Art Fair presents emerging and established artists and new creative spaces alongside exceptional student work. At the booths and exhibitions, limited edition prints will be for sale by artists including Mary Sibande. Photography by Thero Mankepe will be on show and Maps Maponyane will do a collector’s art walk.

• Dates: October 1 to 3
• Venue: Roedean School, Joburg
• Tickets: From R50
• quicket.co.za

Glenshiel Christmas Fair

Held as always in the Glenshiel gardens, this year’s fair will have more than 90 booths selling fashion, jewellery, home décor and beauty products, and food vendors and lots of bubbly. Ticket sales support the Order of St John’s community work. Preview night on October 28.

• Dates: October 28 to November 1
• Venue: Glenshiel Estate, Westcliff, Joburg
• Tickets: From R150
• glenshiel.org.za/tickets/

Music

Biennale Musica 2026

The 70th International Festival of Contemporary Music is directed by Caterina Barbieri and features a fascinating collection of international soloists and ensembles.

• Dates: October 10 to 24
• Venues: Across Venice, Italy
• Tickets: To be confirmed
• labiennale.org/en/music/2026

Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees

The Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees 2026 offers something for every theatre lover, even those who prefer their performances in English. Among the English pieces on show are Brett Bailey’s reinterpretation of Goethe’s Faust II, Alan Committie’s retelling of An Iliad and a multi-role performance by Carlo Daniels in I, Lord Hamlet, which transports Shakespeare’s prince to the Cape Flats. Remember to check out the authors’ talks.

• Dates: October 3 to 11
• Venue: 37 Ryneveld Street, Stellenbosch
• Tickets: Various prices
• quicket.co.za / woordfees.co.za

Opera

Don Giovanni

Mozart’s Don Giovanni seduces and deceives women without conscience. But when one of his conquests results in a murder, a sinister force is unleashed. The production is staged by French-American director Talia Stern, with designs by Allegra Bernacchioni. The Opera UCT cast and chorus, joined by the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, are conducted by Peggy Wu and Jeremy Silver.

• Dates: October 22 to 25
• Venue: The Baxter, Cape Town
• Tickets: R180-R550
• webtickets.co.za

Wanted

Judy Blume: A Life by Mark Oppenheimer

An accomplished biographer, memoirist and cultural historian, Oppenheimer’s previous works include Knocking on Heaven’s Door (2003), Wisenheimer (2010), Squirrel Hill (2021) and The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia (2019). That makes him a good fit for his subject.

Judy Blume, with Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972), helped change children’s and young adult fiction by writing openly about bodies, sex, shame, friendship, divorce and adolescence in a way that was direct, realistic and respectful of young readers in the 1970s and 1980s.

Oppenheimer’s biography treats her as more than a beloved children’s writer. It shows her as a serious, ambitious author. Refusing to be held back by family life, relationships, censorship battles and a changing publishing world, Blume’s influence is easily underestimated because her approach became so widespread.

That is what gives the book its value. Oppenheimer does not only retell Blume’s life, but also places her in a larger literary history. For long-time readers, Judy Blume: A Life adds depth and context to her writing. For newer readers, Oppenheimer makes clear why Blume matters in modern popular literature for young people.

Scale Boy: An African Childhood by Patrice Nganang

Nganang has spent much of his career writing about Cameroon in novels such as Dog Days, Mount Pleasant (2016), When the Plums Are Ripe (2019) and A Trail of Crab Tracks (2022). In Scale Boy, he turns that same alert, expansive eye back on his own childhood.

As a boy in Yaoundé, Nganang carried a weighing scale through the city and charged to use it. That allowed him to move through streets, markets and homes, watching the people and systems that shaped the world around him. From there, the memoir opens into a larger portrait of childhood, labour, language and political life in Cameroon in the 1970s and 1980s.

The city matters as much as the family. So do the pressures of history, from the colonial past to the political climate of the time. That wider reach is what gives the memoir its weight. Nganang uses his own life and memories from childhood to build a much larger world.

A life after liberation

Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire by Simukai Chigudu

Chigudu is best known for The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe (2020), a serious work of political history and public health. In Chasing Freedom, he turns to memoir, but he brings the same intellectual discipline with him in a work that is determined to ask what freedom means in the long aftermath of empire.

His memoir starts with family history in Zimbabwe and tracks his journey to England, where Oxford becomes a key part of his story. Keeping private life and public history closely linked is one of his key strengths as a writer. Chigudu is not simply telling the story of a talented young man making his way through elite institutions. He is asking what those institutions continue to symbolise, and what happens when the promises of independence meet the realities of class, race, migration and power.

His involvement in Rhodes Must Fall, the student-led movement that began in March 2015 at the University of Cape Town and later extended to Oxford, gives the book an obvious contemporary edge. What makes the book interesting is not only its politics, but the tension running through it. Chigudu writes about ambition but also disappointment. He inherits the language of freedom, but also the strain and disillusionment that came after independence. The memoir keeps asking what freedom really means in practice, as opposed to a revolutionary ideal.

A mother who failed him

Homeschooled by Stefan Merrill Block

Block made his name as a novelist with The Story of Forgetting (2008), Oliver Loving (2018) and The Storm at the Door (2011) before turning to memoir. That’s evident in the control, structure and restraint of Homeschooled.

When Block was nine, his mother took him out of school because she believed conventional schooling was bad for him. Instead of giving him a better or freer education, she kept him cut off from ordinary life and trapped in a home environment driven by her own needs and fearful delusions.

The memoir traces that life, the damage done to him, and the fact that no-one stepped in to stop it. But Block seems more interested in the texture of that childhood. The book is not powerful only because parts of it are shocking. What matters just as much is the everyday experience of living through it, the boredom, the confusion and the way it slowly distorted his feelings and sense of reality.

As an adult, he had to work out how to describe what happened to him once he finally had enough distance and understanding to make sense of it. In trying to understand a childhood devoid of normality, he has produced a work that is serious about what memory can and cannot do.

The man and the myth

Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited by Tracy Daugherty

Daugherty has written several major biographies, including Hiding Man (2009) on Donald Barthelme, Just One Catch (2011) on Joseph Heller, The Last Love Song (2015) on Joan Didion, and Larry McMurtry: A Life (2023). With Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited, he takes on a writer whose public image had already hardened into myth by the time he died on June 13 2023.

Alongside Herman Melville and William Faulkner, McCarthy is often placed among America’s greatest writers. Among his most celebrated works are Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006). By the end of his life, McCarthy was known not only for his masterful novels but for his private, austere life and his close ties to the violence and harsh landscapes of his fiction.

Due in October, Daugherty’s book is a full-scale literary biography that traces McCarthy’s rise from poverty and obscurity to worldwide acclaim, while examining the toll that life took on his marriages, family relationships and friendships.

Business Day

Whether it’s yo-yo dieting causing metabolic damage or unhealthy habits, there’s a high likelihood that you will gain all the weight back.

That is why Newtricion Wellness dietician Omy Naidoo is suggesting a different approach this season. Instead of telling you what to cut out, Naidoo suggests what to add in. Here are five simple, accessible, and scientifically backed foods that can support your health, stabilise your energy and help you feel your best as the temperatures climb:

Rooibos-soaked oats

Start your day with a bowl of oats steeped in rooibos tea rather than water or milk. The antioxidants in rooibos, particularly aspalathin, have been shown to reduce oxidative stress and support balanced blood sugar levels.

Stable blood sugar means fewer cravings and more consistent energy. Oats provide soluble fibre that keeps you full until lunch. Naidoo explains that this combination is a game changer for sustainable weight management because it addresses hunger hormones without spiking insulin.

Spinach

South African soils produce some of the finest leafy greens in the world, yet we are not eating enough of them. Spinach is packed with iron, magnesium and plant-based nitrates that improve blood flow and oxygen delivery to muscles. This translates to better performance during those morning walks or evening runs.

Research published in the Journal of Nutrition found that people who ate a serving of leafy greens daily had lower levels of visceral fat, the dangerous fat stored around internal organs.

Citrus fruit

Navel oranges and naartjies are at their peak right now. They are rich in vitamin C and flavonoids that reduce inflammation and support immune function. But here is the kicker: the pectin in citrus peel and pith slows digestion and promotes a feeling of fullness.

Naidoo advises adding segments to salads or snacking on a naartjie before meals to naturally reduce portion sizes without feeling deprived.

Sardines

This is the unsung hero of the South African pantry. Canned sardines are affordable, sustainable and loaded with omega-3 fatty acids and calcium.

Omega-3s have been shown to improve insulin sensitivity and reduce fat storage, particularly around the midsection. A study from the University of Stellenbosch highlighted that regular consumption of oily fish was associated with lower body mass indexes in participants who paired it with a balanced diet. Mash sardines with lemon and fresh herbs for a quick lunch on whole wheat toast.

Fermented cabbage

Whether you call it sauerkraut or make your own at home, fermented cabbage introduces beneficial probiotics that support gut health.

Emerging science reveals a direct link between gut microbiome diversity and weight regulation. A healthy gut reduces systemic inflammation and improves nutrient absorption, meaning your body actually uses the food you eat more efficiently. A spoonful alongside your protein at dinner is all you need.

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That the South African batting order for the first Test against Australia is not set in stone should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed Shukri Conrad’s way of doing things.

The Proteas coach is still playing his cards close to his chest ahead of next Friday’s much-anticipated series opener at Kingsmead. “We have a few options,” Conrad cheekily replied to an inquiry.

“We have to look at our bowling attack first and depending on the balance of the side, that will go a long way towards determining what the batting line-up looks like.”

Determining the bowling depends on conditions — the notoriously fickle Durban weather; the pitch, which at Kingsmead in recent years has aided spinners; and, of course, the fitness of the fast bowlers, notably, Kagiso Rabada.

Three spinners were included in the preliminary 18-man squad named on Monday, and based on the troubles Australia have encountered in the two One-Day Internationals, starting both Keshav Maharaj and Simon Harmer will be strongly considered.

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Conrad will draw comfort from the fact that the majority of players he’s selected are in form.

After scoring more than 1,000 runs to help Durham achieve promotion to Division 1 in the County Championship in England, David Bedingham made two hundreds upon his return to Western Province.

Interestingly, they were made while he was batting at No 3, one spot higher than he batted for Durham. In his Proteas career, he has batted at 4, 5 and 6. “I’ve not insisted that he bat at 3. I see him as the type of player that could do that job, whether he ends up doing that job is an entirely different story,” said Conrad.

The pair had a lengthy conversation when Conrad travelled to England in June, but the coach didn’t believe those talks led to the change in position when he played for WP.

Bedingham’s naturally attacking style can put opposing bowlers under pressure and Conrad pointed to his contribution in both innings of last year’s World Test Championship final as the kind of batting he wants to see.

After arriving at the crease with South Africa 30/4 late on the first day, Bedingham’s two boundaries in the last over lifted the spirits. He top-scored with 45 in the first innings and was unbeaten on 21 when the winning runs were struck.

“On the first day we were tentative and sat and sat and as soon as we made a conscious decision not to just sit in, we were able to put them under pressure. David naturally bats that way,” said Conrad.

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Tristan Stubbs, Tony de Zorzi and Wiaan Mulder are the other options for the No 3 spot and the latter comes into the equation because he bowls too. Should Rabada not be fit, Mulder might form part of a three-man pace attack along with Marco Jansen and Anrich Nortje (or Dane Paterson), and the two spinners.

Where the No 3 spot was once revered in the Test format, a place that belonged to the best batters, Conrad takes a less rigid route with how he chooses who bats there.

He’s presided over 21 Tests and South Africa have used five different batters at No 3, with Stubbs and Mulder the most frequent occupants.

“It’s a global problem. If people are going to play a card, they tend to do it at No 3,” said Conrad.

“I’d be very surprised if Tristan Stubbs doesn’t make the starting line-up. Where does he bat, 3 or 5? I’d be very surprised if Bedingham doesn’t make the starting line-up, where does he bat, 3 or 5? Wiaan Mulder based on conditions and the type of attack we put out also gives us that option. It’s too early to tell.”

Marques Ackerman’s call-up was no surprise after his exploits for KwaZulu-Natal and, in the last 12 months, the South Africa A team. “He has to be picked at some stage. Marques has been knocking the door down.”

It means Dewald Brevis wasn’t considered. “I don’t think he is one of the best batters for us in Test cricket. There are others in the squad for South African conditions. He is probably more suited to getting into our Test squad in conditions that the sub-continent throws up.”

“One-Day cricket is a different story, he will play this summer.”

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President Cyril Ramaphosa has ordered a national recovery operation targeting unresolved murders, rapes and serious sexual offences involving women and children as he unveiled a series of urgent interventions to tackle gender-based violence and femicide.

Addressing the nation on Tuesday night, Ramaphosa said government had failed to do enough to protect women and that institutions and programmes meant little if they did not work when a woman needed them.

“What we have done has not been enough. We need to do much more than what we have done,” he said.

His announcement comes amid mounting concern about the discovery of the bodies of 11 women in Ekurhuleni since July.

People Opposing Women Abuse (POWA) executive director Fatima Shaik said the four immediate measures could make a difference if properly implemented, while warning that implementation, coordination and accountability remained key.

“The four immediate measures are important, and if properly implemented, they can make a difference. But South Africa’s problem has never been a shortage of plans or commitments. Our problem has always been implementation, coordination and accountability,” Shaik said.

She welcomed the focus on unresolved GBV cases, the forensic backlog, safer public spaces and stronger enforcement, as well as the timelines attached to the measures.

“These are practical interventions. And the fact that government has attached a 30, 60 and 90 day timeline gives us something concrete against which to measure progress,” she said.

Police and forensic interventions are critical, but we can’t only focus on those things. We also have to focus on women after they have been raped or murdered, and prevention and support for women who are still alive and trying to escape their situation.

Fatima Shaik, People Opposing Women Abuse executive director

“Women cannot continue to measure government’s response by announcements. We have to measure it by where the cases are moved, perpetrators are held accountable, dangerous spaces become safer and survivors can actually access services,” she said.

Shaik said she would have liked to hear more about strengthening and funding frontline services, including shelters, counselling, psychosocial support, legal assistance and community-based organisations.

“Police and forensic interventions are critical, but we can’t only focus on those things. We also have to focus on women after they have been raped or murdered, and prevention and support for women who are still alive and trying to escape their situation,” she said.

Commission for Gender Equality spokesperson Javu Baloyi said the commission was cautiously optimistic about the measures.

“Having listened to the president and read his speech, we are cautiously optimistic that these measures will work. As a commission, we will carry out our oversight role and monitor and evaluate their implementation,” Baloyi said.

Ramaphosa said the Ekurhuleni killings were receiving attention at the highest levels of government and law enforcement, with a specialised multidisciplinary investigation elevated to national level.

The investigation brings together detectives, crime intelligence, forensic specialists, investigative psychologists and digital investigators. Several arrests have already been made.

Police have identified people of interest and collected forensic material including DNA, blood samples, clothing, cellphones and cellphone records, while the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research is assisting with the digital forensic investigation.

Ramaphosa said police had not found evidence that the killings were the work of a single perpetrator.

“At present, the police have not found evidence establishing that these killings were committed by a single perpetrator. All possibilities remain under investigation,” he said.

Interventions

The interventions extended beyond the Ekurhuleni investigation.

The first is a national case recovery operation focused on unresolved murders, attempted murders, rapes and serious sexual offences involving women and children.

Within 60 days, the audit must establish:

• the number and age of unresolved cases;
• those awaiting forensic evidence;
• cases where suspects have been identified but not arrested; and
• cases where investigative or prosecutorial action has been delayed.

Within 90 days, individual recovery plans must be developed for:

• priority cases;
• identifying outstanding action;
• the official responsible; and
• a deadline.

The second intervention targets the country’s forensic backlog.

The police minister, national police commissioner and relevant forensic authorities must produce a funded plan within 60 days to reduce the backlog and establish turnaround standards for priority GBV and femicide cases.

Cases involving the rape or murder of women and children must be prioritised, with progress reported publicly every quarter.

The third intervention will put municipalities under pressure to identify and fix places where women are at risk.

Every municipality must conduct a women’s safety audit covering high-risk areas such as broken streetlights, overgrown public spaces, abandoned buildings, unsafe transport routes, poorly secured parks and cemeteries.

Within 60 days, these hazards must be identified. Within 90 days, the most urgent risks must either be fixed or included in a funded implementation plan with completion dates.

The results will be published so communities can see what has been identified, fixed and remains outstanding.

Ramaphosa also ordered provincial and municipal authorities to intensify enforcement of existing liquor laws and bylaws, particularly against outlets operating without licences or outside permitted trading hours.

His fourth intervention focuses on alcohol-related violence.

The trade, industry and competition minister, working with the health, social development, police and cooperative governance ministers, must submit a coordinated legislative and enforcement package to Cabinet within 60 days, he said.

Ramaphosa stressed that alcohol does not cause gender-based violence and cannot excuse it, but said harmful alcohol use was a significant aggravating factor in interpersonal violence.

The president said government was also strengthening the wider criminal justice and survivor-support system.

More resources

Resources have been allocated to the family violence, child protection and sexual offences units, while additional resources are expected in the medium-term budget policy statement.

Sexual offences courts are being expanded and more Thuthuzela Care Centres are to be built. The processing of DNA and other forensic evidence is also being strengthened.

The law has been tightened to make it harder for perpetrators of GBV and domestic abuse to obtain bail, while police stations have established victim-friendly services and GBV desks. Police training on gender-based violence will also be strengthened.

But Ramaphosa said the measures would ultimately be judged by whether they worked for women seeking help.

“A woman who summons the courage to report abuse must not be turned away from a police station,” he said.

“A woman seeking a protection order must not be sent from office to office.”

He said a protection order could not simply become “a piece of paper” while an abuser continued to threaten his victim.

“A forensic sample must not sit unprocessed while a perpetrator remains free,” he said.

The Interministerial Committee on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide and the National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide will monitor the measures, with a first consolidated progress report due within 90 days, followed by quarterly public reports.

“These directives are not just a statement of good intentions,” Ramaphosa said. “They establish responsibilities, deadlines, and a duty to submit reports on a regular basis to the nation.”

He also appealed to the public to report missing people immediately, stressing there was no requirement to wait 24 hours.

“Hours matter. Information matters. A photograph matters. A vehicle registration number matters,” he said.

Ramaphosa said government could not simply arrest its way out of the crisis.

“We cannot police our way out of gender-based violence alone. We cannot arrest our way out of this crisis alone,” he said. “And we cannot wait until a woman is murdered before the state intervenes.”

He said the focus had to shift towards preventing violence before it happened.

The morning started with the fatal shooting of Thembisa woman, Boitumelo Gift Mashita, 23, before 6am on Mapungubwe Street in Teanong, Midrand. The suspected attacker, her estranged husband, was found dead a short while later inside his vehicle in Midrand.

In KwaZulu-Natal Smangaliso Tembe, Mduduzi Myeza, Bongani Zulu, Wandile Nyawo and Sibusiso Sibisi made their first appearance in the Verulam magistrate’s court. They are accused of orchestrating the ambush and murders of crime intelligence officers Capt Louis Nel and his colleague Sgt Mandla Khuzwayo in April, linked to the robbery of R900,000 from a secret service account. A sixth accomplice was killed during a shoot-out with police on Friday.

In Gauteng attorney Muhammed Vally’s application for a postponement for his client, Gen Feroz Khan, drew a tongue-lashing from commission chair Mbuyiseni Madlanga for the no-show, and was dismissed. Evidence leader Adv Adila Hassim recommended Khan be referred for prosecution for his “defiance”, and commission secretary Dr Nolitha Vukuza is expected to lay a criminal charge against Khan for not honouring the subpoena.

Another no-show at the commission was Mpumalanga taxi boss Bafana Sindane, whose attempt at the Johannesburg high court to block the commission from hearing his testimony and evidence was thrown out of court. He failed to appear but WhatsApp chats from his cellphone showed he has a number of cops at his fingertips.

The messages revealed he was demanding R100,000 monthly payments in an alleged extortion scheme, paying the legal fees of convicted hitmen and allegedly having police officers at his disposal to offer him escorts whenever he wanted.

WhatsApp messages also came under the spotlight in the Gauteng high court in Pretoria, where former defence and military veterans minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula is facing 12 counts of corruption and one of money laundering stemming from her tenure as defence minister between 2016 and 2019.

The efforts of those trying to turn the tide, such as residents of Ekurhuleni and members of Abahlali baseMjondolo who marched to the Kempton Park police station on Monday with a memorandum, are to be commended.

She allegedly solicited R4.5m in bribes from South African National Defence Force (SANDF) logistics contractor Nombasa Ntsondwa-Ndhlovu. On Monday she disputed the authenticity of WhatsApp conversations presented by Ntsondwa-Ndhlovu of her allegedly discussing money requests and the promotion of Ntsondwa-Ndhlovu’s husband, retired deputy surgeon-general Noel Ndhlovu.

Then later in the day three suspected cash-in-transit robbers were shot dead and another suspect was arrested after a shoot-out with police on the R80 Mabopane highway in northern Pretoria. The men were intercepted with guns and ammunition allegedly en route to a CIT robbery.

The defiance of those in power, the brazen criminality and the disregard for law and life have become a daily way of life.

These six incidents are just a few examples of the depravity in our nation on any given day.

The efforts of those trying to turn the tide, such as residents of Ekurhuleni and members of Abahlali baseMjondolo who marched to the Kempton Park police station on Monday with a memorandum, are to be commended.

These are citizens who embrace civic responsibility, refuse to accept the erosion of our society and champion accountability and transparency.

The memorandum they presented with “heavy hearts and deep anger” lists their grievances following the murders of 11 women in Ekurhuleni since July and calls out police collusion, incompetence and inaction.

Also sickened by the total erosion of the moral fibre is the South African Council of Churches (SACC), who have called for a national day of mourning.

Horrified by the recent spate of mass killings ― 11 people were shot dead at a house party in KwaMakhutha, KwaZulu-Natal, on September 22, at least 18 people were killed and 14 wounded at a tavern in Wedela, Gauteng, on September 26, 10 people dies and 11 were wounded at an entertainment venue in Lwandle, Western Cape, on September 27 ― and countless other deaths, the SACC says we have grown desensitised to violence.

Rev Mzwandile Molo, the SACC’s general secretary, is spot on when he says these are no longer isolated tragedies but signs of a national crisis.

“When people decide that murder is the answer to whatever we are not happy about, and it is normalised with impunity, we are witnessing a debasement of our moral fibre and the brutalisation of our common humanity. This is not only a matter of law and order; it is the total erosion of our moral fibre as a nation.”

July was designated a “moral regeneration month” because it coincides with the birth month of Nelson Mandela, who championed a new constitutional dispensation with a focus on moral re-orientation.

But as we are painfully aware, we have deviated far from this vision and it is vital to find our way back.

While a national day of mourning will create awareness of the scope of our crisis, it is only the first step in challenging stereotypical societal constructs or reversing the actions of unethical leaders who have ushered in lawlessness through corruption, collusion and greed.

It’s amid this cocktail of moral decay that those punch-drunk on power have channelled funds meant to keep infrastructure in tiptop shape, into their pockets.

For South Africa to regain the moral high ground it is vital for the public to think seriously about the change they want to see in their leadership and who can effect positive transformation in their communities by culture and conduct.

This means South Africans need to choose wisely when they make their mark on November 4.

The episodic and habitual lies reared their head this year with a spirited venture for a national dialogue. But as is the case with our education, we are rushing for an exam before we can examine our lives. With five weeks to go, an El Niño looms. As Socrates defines them, merchant politicians will be breathing hot air as poster models on poles anchored in sewage.

They will use the who late unionist and activist Phumzile John Gomomo calls voting cattle and Socrates calls currency and merchandise politicians trade in, to achieve what Prof Somadoda Fikeni calls a political economy of inefficiency.

They will deploy their ever-moribund and tired tools ― their useless policies. The skeletal features of these lies are strewn across what Fikeni calls the cemetery of policy failure.

For far too long lived experience has been trapped in a policy comatose, a disregard for life and limb, nauseating opulence and amnesia. Over three decades, South Africa’s democratic project has relied on a comforting political illusion: that freedom is adequately measured by the frequency of elections, and that structural crises of poverty, inequality and unemployment can be tamed through macro-level rhetoric and aggregate national indicators.

Yet, as the ground-truth realities of townships like Soweto, dormitories like Mitchells Plain and historically neglected rural nodes starkly demonstrate, macroeconomic growth figures and abstract Gini coefficients do little to alter the daily indignity of structural exclusion.

Capital does not exploit or uplift in the abstract; it shapes the concrete, localised realities of human geography. I have looked through all the political manifestos and they remain hollow as a church bell.

I have been privileged, under the ANC government, to run the national numbers for 22 years and the insights I get from the numbers terrify. I have now decided to let the numbers speak and let there be light, and perhaps the merchant politician will use the lamppost to help deliver services instead of using it like a vantage point for posters.

To clean our political economy, we must empower citizens, accurately measure Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and move beyond speculative political forecasting. South Africa requires a radical shift.

As established in the Lehohla Ledger*, true democracy is not measured merely by the casting of a ballot, but by the convergence of economic participation with human dignity. By deploying the advanced Fisher-Bayes-Gauss-Kriging-Mohlomi (FBGK-Mohlomi) architecture — harnessing 2,752 diagnostic instruments across multi-decadal census meshes (1996, 2001, 2011 and 2022) — we possess the analytical machinery to transition from political guesswork to empirical statecraft.

1. Empowering citizens through spatial and statistical sovereignty

Empowerment cannot occur in a data vacuum. For decades, marginalised communities have been treated as passive recipients of municipal promises rather than active agents of spatial planning. The FBGK-Mohlomi framework restores structural sovereignty to citizens by decentralising data down to the Enumeration Area (EA) and placename level.

Electoral forecasting in South Africa has long relied on volatile polling data and superficial media narratives. However, voting behaviour is fundamentally tethered to spatial and economic evolution.

Through Martin Ravallion’s Small Area Estimation (SAE) and the Alkire-Foster multidimensional poverty method, citizens and local community cooperatives can map their exact deprivations across health, education and standard of living. When communities are equipped with statistics-based diagnostic instruments, they no longer need to rely on bureaucratic charity or political patronage. They are armed with the numerical truth — an unassailable evidentiary baseline that exposes why economic resources leak daily from dormitories into metropolitan cores and how localised economic models (such as community-owned enthalpy cooling cooperatives and decentralised agricultural meshes) can retain local value.

2. Calibrating true SDGs and overcoming audit detachment

Global and national SDG targets frequently suffer from “audit detachment” — numbers generated by technocrats that bear no relation to the lived survival strategies of ordinary citizens. Traditional monitoring frameworks use macro-aggregates that inadvertently mask severe sub-ward disparities.

By integrating Kriging spatial smoothing and Moran’s I spatial autocorrelation into SDG assessment, the FBGK-Mohlomi architecture eradicates ecological fallacies. It allows local authorities to track SDG 1 (poverty eradication), SDG 8 (decent work) and SDG 10 (reduced inequalities) not as sweeping national averages, but as granular, street-level realities.

If an infrastructure project or municipal investment fails to lift the multidimensional deprivation score of a specific Enumeration Area over a census cycle, the Ledger’s diagnostic matrix flags it instantly. This transforms SDG monitoring from a passive annual reporting exercise into an active, enforceable governance tool.

3. Predicting electoral outcomes through structural behaviour

Electoral forecasting in South Africa has long relied on volatile polling data and superficial media narratives. However, voting behaviour is fundamentally tethered to spatial and economic evolution.

The FBGK-Mohlomi architecture introduces predictive rigour to electoral dynamics by mapping the 1:1 ratio paradox — the critical structural tipping point where the number of non-economically active citizens statistically converges with or surpasses the employed population.

By evaluating longitudinal census mesh shifts alongside Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA), it is apparent how spatial alienation and the vulturous vortex of informal extortion economies drive voter apathy or political realignment. Electoral outcomes are thus understood not as sudden emotional swings, but as the predictable mathematical consequence of persistent spatial inequality and economic exclusion.

4. Cleaning the political economy: the sovereign audit

South Africa’s systemic audit failures — highlighted annually by billions in unrecovered irregular expenditure — cannot be resolved by treating oversight bodies merely as policing agents. As long as the state operates without valid metadata, corruption and mismanagement will hide behind procedural compliance.

Cleaning our political economy demands a sovereign audit. By combining Fisherian parameter estimation, Bayesian prior updating and Gaussian residual error minimisation, the Lehohla Ledger subjects public expenditure and policy execution to rigorous empirical stress tests.

Furthermore, by binding this quantitative engine to the ethical statecraft of Morena Mohlomi (Lenaka la Mohlomi), the framework enforces intergenerational accountability. Leaders are judged not by their stated intentions, but by whether their policies preserve social cohesion, eliminate structural leakage and generate lasting intergenerational value.

A new maths for a mature democracy

As South Africa reflects on more than three decades of democracy, the nation stands at a structural crossroads. Continuing to rely on outdated political rhetoric will only deepen the abyss of stagnation and social decay. What is required is not merely a new political vision, but a new maths — one that marries the rigorous quantitative precision of Fisher, Bayes, Gauss and Kriging with the timeless indigenous enlightenment of Mohlomi statecraft.

Through statistics-based diagnostic instruments, we possess the blueprint to empower citizens, enforce genuine SDG compliance, forecast political trajectories with scientific accuracy and permanently cleanse our political economy. It is time to replace political guesswork with the unyielding power of numerical truth. Let the numbers speak.

* The author’s experience in statistical applications of 65 years has consolidated in what has become 2,752 instruments of the Lehohla Ledger. It is an intellectual trove driven by over 3,500 articles that Dr Pali Lehohla has penned throughout his work life as a bureaucrat and as a member of the public

“In February, Google AI referred to me as ‘the late Kwanele Asante’ — almost like a premonition,” says Asante, who developed abdominal pain in her right side a few weeks later, and was urgently admitted for surgery to remove an inflamed appendix.

“Then all these other things started happening. When I was finally discharged 19 days later it was April, the month (she first says “anniversary”, then shakes her head and says, “no, no, that’s not the word”) of my diagnosis with breast cancer 20 years ago.”

Asante, who has always rejected the designation “breast cancer survivor”, talks about her health in an all-encompassing way, to make a larger point: people don’t necessarily experience the health system as a series of separate diseases and specialist programmes. We are the sum of our ailments, not defined by any one illness.

“I am in chronic treatment for chemotherapy-induced congestive heart failure, bipolar mood disorder [a mental health disorder that causes mood swings], anxiety and now functional neurological [brain] disorder, which means the brain software is not functioning properly. The cancer survivor label doesn’t quite cover it,” she says.

Even in name, Asante refuses to remain static. She was born Anne Molebatsi Pooe but called herself Molebatsi Anne Pooe at university, and later Molebatsi Pooe-Shongwe, before legally changing her name to Kwanele Asante-Shongwe in 2012 (although she mostly goes by Kwanele Asante in her professional life).

Every change has been a waymarker in a life that began like an unwritten Zakes Mda novel, in a TB sanatorium in Soweto.

“My mother and father met in Charles Hurwitz [TB hospital], probably in the canteen from that famous Ephraim Ngatane painting. I was reflecting the other day that my entire life has been defined by health care,” says Asante, who was born in Meadowlands in 1969.

Her father, Aaron Sonnyboy Pooe, and mother, Lerato Nokoane (born Dikeledi Lydia Nokoane), were divorced before Asante turned five. She and her younger brother Lesele never saw their father again.

Her tone changes when she begins talking about her mother.

“She was a very tenacious woman,” Asante says, chuckling.

“My father was her second husband, and she had six children before my brother and I. We were very poor, and to provide for us after our father left she took a job as a teacher at Batswana Teacher’s Training (BAT) College in Mafeking (now Mahikeng), later becoming a live-in boarding master to supplement her salary.”

It was a solution that held until the 1976 Soweto Uprising, which triggered student protests across the country.

“We were kicked out of our little room because the kids felt we were leeching off them,” recalls Asante, who was in Grade 1 at the time, at Diphetogo Primary School.

“It was a difficult time because mum was reinventing — she went away to Baviaanspoort [Zonderwater Prison and Training College near Tshwane] for six months to train as a prison officer, leaving us with a relative we only met the day before she left,” says Asante, who wasn’t coping at school.

“One particular teacher used to split the class into ‘smart ones’ and ‘donkeys’. I was in the donkey group. I was unhappy. Then I met a woman who saved my life.”

Dineo Mpofu, a teacher at Diphetogo, saw something in the struggling seven-year-old.

“She told me, ‘You are actually smart. Come to me during break and we will work on your cursive writing.’ She was by my side until standard four, by which time I was a very strong student,” says Asante, who moved across to the new middle school that had been established at BAT.

The Bantustans

It was the early 1980s and Mafeking had just been incorporated in the recently proclaimed Republic of Bophuthatswana. To combat liberation ideologies in the Bantustans, the South African Defence Force had started sending conscripts with university degrees and teaching diplomas to teach in certain Bantustan schools, including the new Batswana high and middle schools. And so Asante’s teachers were mostly white servicemen.

“They saw it as a way of winning hearts and minds. We saw it as a sneaky way of getting a kind of private school education,” Asante recalls.

There were some civilian teachers, too, and Asante remembers one man with particular fondness — Denzil Fincham, her Standard 5 English teacher, who would go on to become the headmaster of Kingswood College in Makhanda.

“He used to say, ‘Anne, stand up, give us an unprepared speech. You need to learn to speak properly because you’re going to be an important person one day.’ At first I thought, ‘Oh no! This man is really irritating me,’ but it was actually really formative,” says Asante, whose polished elocution saw her through door after door later in life.

Before her world cracked open, however, it was unusually cloistered.

“Mum took a job at Rooigrond Maximum Security Prison [now Rooigrond Maximum Correctional Centre], and here we lived for years, on this prison base in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by prisoners.”

White prison officers, says Asante, “stayed in their own quite opulent section, literally called ko makgoweng [the white side]” whereas black families stayed in a row of tiny houses on “the black side — ko Batswaneng”. She can’t quite recall when this changed but change it did, and by this time her mother was a senior officer at the prison, so the family moved across into one of the nice houses.

If Rooigrond embodied the racism that was coded into South African society at the time, it also provided object lessons in what Asante refers to as “the inequality of power”.

“There was a lot of saluting. Even when mum was in civilian clothes, the other officers would strek [stand to attention], whereas the prisoners would drop to their knees and take off their hats. For me, as a teenager, this was like, ‘Joh, weird’.”

The prison nevertheless provided a form of stability, which ended when her mother transferred to Odi prison in Mabopane, north of Pretoria (she was later reposted to Rooigrond, and appointed inspector of prisons for the Republic of Bophuthatswana).

“I had attended six schools by the time I reached matric. It was very destabilising,” says Asante, who was taken in hand by the principal of Pelotona Middle School in Mabopane, ZK Mogodiri.

“He was a pan-Africanist: a short man who would stand in front of us at morning assembly and say, ‘African child, we are not going to be door mats of other nations.’ He was strict but he took a liking to me, and when he realised that we were about to move again he drove a 100 kilometres to Motswedi in Zeerust to find me a place at the boarding school there, so that I would have some stability,” says Asante, who matriculated in 1987. The following Easter she met Isaac Shongwe, whose family paid lobola for Asante in 1989.

“I was a fast-moving girl,” she chuckles, adding, “I didn’t change my surname, which is the only thing I have from my father.”

Shongwe — today a prominent South African business personality — had just graduated from Wesleyan University in the United States, and suggested Asante might want to apply.

“I had been fascinated with America most of my life until then. I needed no urging. We moved abroad in August 1989.”

Like her husband before her, Asante received a full scholarship. She studied sociology and psychology, and felt very at home in Wesleyan’s vocal liberal arts culture.

“I was the only black African woman there at the time, so naturally I was the most oppressed person on campus,” she says, with a wink.

From Anne to Molebatsi

“People would ask, ‘You’re African, yet your name is Anne. How?’ and so I switched it around, and became Molebatsi Anne.”

Shongwe, by this time a Rhodes Scholar, was at Oxford, and so the two travelled between England and America, with a trip home in 1991 for the birth of their first child, Sibusiso Mandla Shongwe, today a well-known film director and multimedia artist (better known by his alias Sibs Shongwe-La Mer). Their second child, Mbali-Pfeiffer Shongwe (today a notable young mental health advocate and gender-based violence activist), was born in 1999.

After graduating in 1994 Asante returned to South Africa for good. Her memories of the job market at the time have her smiling before she speaks.

“It was that time when everybody was looking for a black. The moment you accepted a role others would be knocking, looking to poach!”

From Pretoria Portland Cement, where Asante worked as an internal communications coordinator, she was employed by First National Bank as a group journalist, writing articles and booklets (including one on breast cancer) for the bank’s 36,000 employees, before being lured across to Anglovaal Minerals (since incorporated into African Rainbow Minerals) to oversee their internal communications.

“Women were only just being allowed underground at the time, and I remember I would get into my white things — boots, overalls, helmet — and at some point the men underground would see the curves and they would scream that the earth was gonna fall down,” says Asante, who witnessed firsthand the toll HIV was taking on mineworkers, and became frustrated with management’s apparent reluctance to “walk the talk” of safer sex practices in their own lives and professional spaces. (“There were no condoms in the head office or mining office bathrooms, even though it was well known that many of the metallurgists, geologists and mining engineers, 95% of whom were white men, practised unsafe sex!”). Faced with this hypocrisy, and seeing the sector’s stark social inequality on her daily commute to work, she felt increasingly conflicted about her high salary.

“I’m not sure that any of the corporations I worked for actually had a job for me, and that’s a heavy suspicion to live with, especially when you see things happening that you don’t agree with,” says Asante, who often complained to family friend (and former Constitutional Court judge) Edwin Cameron about her ethical conundrums.

“I think Edwin grew tired of hearing me complain, because one day he said, ‘Listen, when I first met you at 19, you said you wanted to become a lawyer. I think you’re a natural-born lawyer. I think you should go to law school.’”

Asante was 32 at the time. She thought about it, and remembered her mother’s uncle, the writer JB Leseyane (author of the classic Setswana novel Monageng), who lived in a village in Swartruggens. She, her brother and their cousins all called him Ntatemogolo [grandfather], and visited often.

“He would wash on the patio in the morning, and the rest of us ‘grandchildren’ would bathe in the same water in order of seniority. ‘It will make you smart like me,’ he used to say, and he was indeed a smart man. He would invite me to attend these kgotlas [traditional court sessions] under a distant tree, where people could come and report their issues — how somebody stole somebody else’s cow, or beat their wife, and so on — and I would be the only child at these things, but he kept taking me, until he was murdered when I was 10. Looking back, I realise this was my introduction to law.”

Asante decided to take Cameron’s advice, enrolling for an LLB at Wits University, and afterwards joining Deneys Reitz to do her articles.

“I hated it,” Asante bluntly says.

‘No health without mental health’

“Candidate attorneys were basically messengers, serving summonses and doing pagination. I was 35, from a campus activist background. I had worked three corporate jobs. I was like, ‘Guys, I’m not here to photocopy.’ I was a difficult candidate attorney, and in fact the experience just worsened from one rotation to the next.”

Asante had one champion during this lonely period, an institutional aviation law specialist called Pierre Naude, who treated her as a colleague, taking her out to crash sites and commending her written opinions. When she was not retained as an attorney after her two years’ candidature he walked across to her office.

“He closed the door, asked if he could sit, and said, ‘You are a very good lawyer — don’t let this make you forget that. I know that you love human rights, perhaps your future lies in this direction.’ He wrote me the most beautiful letter of recommendation as a lawyer and a thinker.”

Three months later, at 37, Asante was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“The lump had been in my breast for some time, and I knew from that booklet I wrote for FNB that it was more than likely a problem, but I was just hoping it would miraculously disappear.”

‘Kwanele, Baba. Asante.’

A breast biopsy confirmed breast cancer — Asante received the news on the way to fetch her daughter, then seven, from school.

“Suddenly, I was a very sick woman. I found my heart would be palpitating after chemo sessions, but when I reported this to my oncologist, he was dismissive.”

She read on the website of the American Society of Clinical Oncology that some of the chemotherapy medicines can cause heart damage, and immediately called her GP, who had a cardiologist meet her in a nearby emergency room.

“The cardiologist greeted me with, ‘I believe you are a Google self-diagnosed patient’, but the moment he listened to my heart he shouted, ‘Code Blue!’ and people descended on me.”

It was discovered that Asante had chemotherapy-induced cardiomyopathy, a disorder of the heart muscle. Three years later, during a routine check-up (and shortly after her divorce from Shongwe), her cardiologist told her she was at imminent risk of a fatal heart attack.

“He said I needed a machine implanted under my skin, called an implantable cardioverter defibrillator, which detects irregular heartbeats and gives an electric shock to restore it to normal. I had the procedure, and when the bill came to my apartment I saw how much it had cost, and I cried and cried. My medical aid had covered it. All I could think to say was, ‘Kwanele, Baba. Asante.’ Kwanele is isiZulu for ‘it is sufficient’. Asante is Kiswahili for ‘thank you’.”

In 2012, Asante formalised her gratitude by taking these words as her legal name, or what she calls her “healing name”. Her experience had left her with troubling questions, however.

A health rights approach to breast cancer

“In the Sandton Oncology Centre I was struck by how few black women there were in the waiting room — I only saw two the whole time, and they were from Botswana. I asked my cardiologist, ‘Am I the first black woman to have breast cancer?’ and he said, ‘No, there are many. Most go to Helen Joseph, Charlotte Maxeke and Chris Hani Baragwanath hospitals. Some come here, but they come at odd hours because they don’t want people to know.’”

Asante decided to find out for herself.

“I visited Chris Hani [Baragwanath Hospital], and there were about 30 women sitting in a little room, all half-naked from the waist up with decaying breasts. It was before they had the breast clinic, and there were no gowns. It was a mess.”

Asante confronted the surgeons, one of whom countered that the patients were all women (so why would they mind?).

“I said, ‘Would Gogo traditionally be sitting like this with a woman half her age?’ and he got it. The next week — because the clinic was only held on Wednesdays then — everyone had gowns. My friends in the northern suburbs and I pooled together to buy some things but that doctor bought the first 20 gowns himself.”

Out of this experience came BreastSens, the NGO Asante founded to promote health rights, human rights and breast cancer education among indigent black women in Soweto.

“It was nothing new, I simply copied Edwin and others’ work on treatment access for people living with HIV, and I transposed it to breast cancer,” says Asante.

While it is true that South Africa’s HIV response is rich in transferable lessons, they are lessons that advocates for NCDs such as cancer, diabetes and high blood pressure have struggled to take up and apply with similar success. In Soweto, Asante demonstrated it was possible to take a health rights approach to breast cancer.

Her legal training proved invaluable (Asante never did work as a lawyer) although she acknowledges that it, and her relative privilege, were also barriers that needed to be overcome.

“I was coming at it with the self-importance of an activist lawyer. The women who let me into their lives were my saving grace. I spent six years working in Soweto’s communities. I met the families, and came to know their realities. Three of the women I knew developed cardiotoxicity [when the heart or cardiovascular system is damaged during or after cancer treatment], like I had, and died. They didn’t get defibrillators, like I did. They died, and they were all remarkable, single mothers of young children. They all died at 35. At that time, I was 44.”

Off pink

Asante says she did join the “pink ribbons” for a time, meaning the established network of breast cancer advocacy organisations, “but very quickly got to understand what they were: the commodification of a woman’s disease by marketing companies. So I stopped wearing the pink outfits,” she says, demonstrating the (at times acerbic) contrarianism that has been a hallmark of her advocacy. (Another hallmark has been her vivacious style: an orange polo neck sweater today, with pearl drop earrings.)

Her community-based approach saw her nominated by Soweto communities to join the inaugural ministerial advisory committee on the prevention and control of cancer, which she was later elected deputy chairperson of. She then served a second term, chairing the committee. In parallel, she decided to study again.

“I was often the loudest ‘lived-experience’ person in the room at the conferences I was attending at home, on the continent and abroad, and cancer researchers and cancer doctors would say, ‘What’s this lawyer doing in medicine?’ A very dear and faithful mentor and friend [the retired academic and education champion Gillian Godsell] advised me to do a master’s degree with the word medicine in it, and after some scouting around I enrolled for an MSc in bioethics and health law, health and human rights at Wits’ Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics,” says Asante, who was asked to stay on and lecture upon graduating in 2016.

“I loved my students but only lasted one year because teaching is very exhausting, and little paid!”

Asante returned to patient advocacy, deepening her commitment to the African Organisation for Research and Training in Cancer, which she had been involved with for some years, eventually serving as the secretary general in 2020.

In the same year she became a member of the World Health Organization’s civil society working group on NCDs. With her well-honed sense for inequality in health care, Asante became a fierce critic of the global health advocacy system she had joined. In a 2025 BMJ article, for example, she and her co-authors argued that global NGOs and health organisations are often guilty of advocating for patients, families and communities in generic and potentially extractive ways, while remaining stubbornly headquartered in Europe or North America.

She travelled back and forth from Geneva, but at some point experienced a crisis of conviction.

“I found I was reacting to these white women doing their higher degrees in global health and development, who would come and say” — and here Asante affects an American accent with extraordinary disdain — ‘I’m here to talk on behalf of my community in Ndola, or Lusikisiki’ — and I’m sitting there thinking ‘your community?’ And after I had reacted that way three or four times over the years, I was like, ‘Actually, who appointed you [Kwanele Asante] a spokesperson for Black women? How well do you know your community?’ I was born in Soweto, but … hmm.”

It’s a fittingly self-aware and self-questioning ending to our conversation about her protean life — a life that I suspect (based on her grumbling about private medical aid billing practices, after her recent hospital stay) has strident activism in it yet.

This story was produced by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism. Sign up for the newsletter.

Story audio is generated using AI

In just 16 days 6,782 people called South Africa’s Gender-Based Violence Command Centre for help, an average of 424 calls every day.

That number should stop us in our tracks, not simply because it represents another grim set of statistics in a country already drowning in GBV figures, but because behind every call is a person somewhere in South Africa who has reached the point of needing the state, or someone acting on its behalf, to intervene.

On September 16 alone, the 24-hour centre received 589 calls, its highest daily figure for the period, while calls between September 1 and 16 were 21% higher than the average recorded during the same period in August.

Those numbers should worry us, but perhaps more importantly, they should force us to ask a much harder question: is the system actually listening to what those thousands of calls are telling us, and is it responding quickly enough to prevent the next woman from becoming another statistic?

Because a command centre can answer a call, a social worker can provide support, a police officer can open a case and a court can prosecute a perpetrator, and all of those things matter enormously, but none of them, on their own, changes the conditions that allow violence to keep reproducing itself in homes, relationships and communities.

South Africa is once again talking about gender-based violence and femicide, as we should, with renewed attention on the women whose lives have been violently taken, the survivors who continue to live with the consequences of abuse and the communities that are increasingly asking whether the institutions meant to protect them are capable of responding before another woman becomes a crime scene.

And this is where we need to widen the conversation.

We tend to talk about GBVF through the language of policing, criminal justice and survivor support, asking whether SAPS responded, whether a perpetrator was arrested, whether a case was properly investigated and whether the courts delivered justice, and while those questions are necessary, they are also questions that often arrive after the violence has already happened.

Perhaps we are asking them too late.

New research at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Development in Africa, asks us to look much further upstream by examining the stories of 10 men who had previously been incarcerated for rape and femicide, not to excuse their crimes or explain away the harm they caused, but to understand the social environments and experiences that shaped their understanding of themselves, relationships, masculinity and violence.

What emerges from those conversations is deeply uncomfortable because the stories are not simply about individual men making individual choices in isolation, they are stories that include absent or rejecting fathers, fractured families, childhood deprivation, poverty, exposure to death and violence, substance abuse, gangs, criminal socialisation and environments where violence against women could become normalised over time.

None of this excuses rape or femicide.

Poverty does not cause rape, trauma does not automatically produce violence and growing up in a difficult home does not determine that a child will one day become a perpetrator, because millions of South Africans have experienced poverty, family disruption, abuse and trauma without ever harming another person.

But the research does force us to confront something that is often missing from the national GBVF conversation: people do not grow up in isolation, and neither does violence.

When poverty, family disruption, untreated trauma, substance abuse, violent communities, weak social protection and harmful ideas about masculinity begin interacting with one another over many years, we have to ask what kind of environment we are creating for children who are growing up inside those systems, particularly in communities that have historically experienced deep social and economic exclusion.

The research describes men who encountered violence so early and so often that it became part of the landscape of their childhoods, while some entered gangs and began using substances at very young ages and others described learning from older men that women could be beaten, controlled and disciplined.

That is not to say that townships create perpetrators, nor is it an argument that poor communities are inherently violent; it is an argument that when violence becomes normalised, when children grow up surrounded by death and insecurity, when families are under enormous economic pressure and when institutions meant to provide support are weak or inaccessible, we cannot pretend that these conditions have nothing to do with the environments in which harmful behaviours are learned and reproduced.

This is why GBVF is also a social development issue.

And perhaps this is the conversation we keep avoiding because it requires us to think beyond the familiar response of arrest, prosecution and punishment, important as those responses are, and instead ask what we are doing years before a crime occurs, when a child is experiencing violence at home, when a teenager is being recruited into a gang, when a young man is carrying untreated trauma or when a girl is being taught that violence from men is simply something she must learn to survive.

If the department of social development is receiving thousands of GBV-related calls through the Command Centre, those calls should not simply become numbers in a media statement; they are thousands of signals coming from homes, relationships and communities across the country, telling us where people are afraid, where relationships are breaking down, where children may be witnessing violence, where survivors are looking for help and where communities are asking the state to intervene.

The question is what happens to that information once the phone is put down.

It also means government departments talking to one another rather than treating the life of a child as a collection of separate departmental responsibilities, because a child does not experience life as a department of social development issue on Monday, an education issue on Tuesday, a health issue on Wednesday and a policing issue on Thursday.

Does it feed into prevention programmes? Does it help identify communities that need more intensive social support? Does it inform trauma services, parenting programmes, youth interventions and community-based organisations? Does it help government understand patterns of violence before those patterns become another murder, another rape or another family standing outside a police station demanding answers?

Or do we simply record the call, provide a referral, close the case and wait for the next one?

This matters because the research from Alexandra township challenges the idea that rape and femicide can be understood simply by looking at the individual perpetrator, instead pointing towards the interconnected systems around people — families, communities, institutions and the wider social and economic environment in which people live.

That does not mean replacing criminal justice with social development, because a woman who is raped needs justice, a murderer must be held accountable and survivors need immediate protection, counselling and practical support, while police and courts remain essential parts of any serious response to GBVF.

But prevention cannot begin at the police station. It has to begin much earlier, in families, schools, clinics, communities and social protection systems, through interventions that take childhood trauma seriously before it becomes adult violence, support families before they completely fracture, confront violent ideas about masculinity before boys learn that domination is what makes them men, provide young people with alternatives to gangs and criminal networks, and make mental-health and social services accessible to communities that are already carrying enormous trauma.

It also means government departments talking to one another rather than treating the life of a child as a collection of separate departmental responsibilities, because a child does not experience life as a department of social development issue on Monday, an education issue on Tuesday, a health issue on Wednesday and a policing issue on Thursday.

It is one life. So perhaps the real test of South Africa’s response to GBVF is not simply how many calls the Command Centre answers, but whether those calls are being transformed into intelligence, prevention and action. And whether the information coming through that system is being used to intervene before violence reaches the point where another woman is dead.

The research is clear on one point: rape and femicide can never be justified by poverty, trauma, family dysfunction or any other social condition, but if we are serious about preventing the next generation of violence, we cannot afford to ignore the conditions in which violent behaviour is learned, normalised and reproduced.

So the question is no longer whether South Africans are talking about GBVF.

We clearly are. The harder question is whether our systems are listening and whether they are moving fast enough to do something with what they hear.

Because 6,782 calls in 16 days should not only tell us that people are asking for help.

They should tell us that somewhere, something is already going wrong and that we have a responsibility to listen before another woman has to die before the system hears her.

Oliver Meth is a strategic communications consultant at the Centre for Social Development in Africa, University of Johannesburg

Dr Nokukhanya Ndhlovu is a researcher at the Centre for Social Development in Africa, University of Johannesburg

According to Statistics South Africa (Stats SA), the country has seen a substantial decline in the geographical concentration of adult illiteracy since 1996, but parts of KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape remain persistent hot spots.

Stats SA compared Census 1996 and Census 2022 data to examine how adult illiteracy among people aged 20 and older was distributed across the country. Because the censuses do not directly measure literacy proficiency, Stats SA used educational attainment as a proxy for functional literacy.

People aged 20 and older with no formal education or whose highest educational attainment was below Grade 7 were classified as functionally illiterate, while those who completed Grade 7 or higher were regarded as functionally literate.

The analysis found that in 1996, the country’s most prominent hot spot was concentrated in KwaZulu-Natal particularly around Umkhanyakude in the north-east of the province “where clustering was significant at the 99% confidence level”.

“This represented the strongest concentration of adult illiteracy in the country,” said Stats SA.

Surrounding areas including Zululand, King Cetshwayo, Umzinyathi and parts of Harry Gwala and uMgungundlovu also recorded significant clustering creating what Stats SA described as a broad zone of elevated adult illiteracy across much of KwaZulu-Natal.

“In contrast, significant cold spots of low illiteracy were concentrated in Gauteng and adjoining districts,” said Stats SA.

These clusters extended into parts of North West, Limpopo and Mpumalanga while additional areas of low illiteracy were identified in the Western Cape.

Together with districts in eastern KwaZulu-Natal, these areas formed a corridor of higher illiteracy extending along sections of South Africa’s eastern seaboard.

By 2022, the geographical concentration of adult illiteracy had declined, though significant disparities remained.

Stats SA said Umkhanyakude continued to stand out as the country’s most persistent hot spot, but the size and intensity of the cluster had diminished.

“By 2022, this hot spot remained visible but had become smaller and less intense, with the strongest clustering occurring at the 95% confidence level,” said Stats SA.

Stats SA said this showed that while north-eastern KwaZulu-Natal remained the country’s main concentration of adult illiteracy, the geographical extent of the hot spot had “contracted considerably”.

The 2022 data also showed a more visible concentration of elevated illiteracy in parts of the Eastern Cape.

“Together with districts in eastern KwaZulu-Natal, these areas formed a corridor of higher illiteracy extending along sections of South Africa’s eastern seaboard,” said Stats SA.

At the other end of the spectrum, Gauteng and Western Cape continued to have the strongest clusters of relatively low adult illiteracy.

“The most extensive pattern was a series of cold spots of low illiteracy centred on Gauteng and the Western Cape. The strongest cold spots, significant at the 99% confidence level, were found within these provinces and extended into surrounding districts in North West, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and Free State,” Stats SA said.

Another significant change was an increase in areas that could no longer be classified as statistically significant hot spots or cold spots.

By 2022, substantial portions of Northern Cape, Free State, North West, Mpumalanga and Limpopo, as well as sections of KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape, fell into this category.

Stats SA said this indicated that adult illiteracy had become less geographically concentrated in many parts of the country.

“In 1996, stronger clustering patterns were evident across several regions. By 2022, many districts no longer formed statistically significant hot spots or cold spots, indicating a weakening of extreme spatial concentrations and a more dispersed distribution of literacy outcomes,” it said.

Despite the improvement, regional disparities remain evident more than two decades later.

“In summary, the comparison shows that the overall extent of high-illiteracy clustering declined substantially between 1996 and 2022. The north-eastern KwaZulu-Natal remained the country’s most persistent hot spot, while Gauteng and Western Cape continued to form the strongest cold spots of low illiteracy,” said Stats SA.

To the unsuspecting scroller, the global online retailer’s dress appeared to be a vision of pure opulence. The listing showcased a show-stopping garment with flawless draping, an idealised fit, a premium sheen and a prominent, logo-style “Satin” badge. An official-looking “S-Verified” quality mark sat right above it, adding an authentic, luxurious feel going for an absolute steal.

But the vision shattered fast when the package arrived. Instead of a liquid-gold satin dream, the real-life garment turned out to be 93% polyester and 7% elastane.

Disappointed consumers uploaded review photos revealing a stark contrast: the fabric was significantly less lustrous, the drape was heavy, and the overall look was undeniably cheap synthetic rather than premium satin.

Believing she had been duped, one vigilant consumer lodged a complaint with the Advertising Regulatory Board (ARB), pointing to the vast chasm between Shein’s polished, potentially AI-enhanced imagery and the textile reality.

Shein pushed back, arguing that they are not official ARB members, that fit naturally varies from person to person, and that if shoppers had just scrolled past the headline imagery, deep down into the fine print, the exact polyester composition was technically disclosed.

The ARB directorate, however, did not cave and refused to allow the fine print to be used to smooth over a misleading first impression. In their ruling, they declared that an advertiser cannot clarify an initially misleading impression in the small print of an advertisement.

While the ARB noted that AI-assisted imagery is not inherently against the rules, using it to idealise fabric texture — while slapping on authoritative “S-Verified” badges — creates a materially inaccurate representation.

Because Shein sits outside the ARB’s direct jurisdiction, the board issued a binding citation instructing its members not to accept or publish any advertising from Shein that uses stylised quality indicators like “Satin” or “S-Verified” if the fabric is actually polyester.

The 59-year-old Sibiya appeared at the Randburg magistrate’s court on Tuesday to apply for bail on charges of sexual offences.

The state alleges that he sexually groomed a 16-year-old girl and also allegedly raped an 18-year-old, 41 years his junior.

Sibiya, however, said the charges are unfounded, stating that he and the 18-year-old had consensual sex.

Reacting to this statements, advocacy groups said while legally an 18-year-old is considered an adult, 18-year-old girls are the most vulnerable.

Sarah Lekale, chairperson of the Free State GBV Forum, said: “Government needs to change the age of consent because what we see is that 18-year-old [girls] are the most vulnerable; this is based on what we have observed here at our shelter.

“They are vulnerable because at this age they want to experiment and [they] make the wrong decisions because they are told that they are now adults, and they are not.”

Lentswe Laka Foundation founder Bridget Ramokone said Sibiya’s statements raise serious questions about power, influence and coercion.

“Because here we are speaking about a senior police officer. Taking teens to strip clubs and hotels and providing them with alcohol and then engaging in sex cannot be brushed off as consensual. The court must fully examine [this case],” she said.

Ramokone said they stand firm with the victims.

Managing director of Khulisa Social Science, Lesley van Selm, said Sibiya’s statement is reprehensible. “Of a man who held such a senior position, it is inexcusable for the man of his maturity and age to apply for bail on that basis, I think it makes a mockery of the justice system.”

In Sibiya’s affidavit, which was read out by his legal representative Adv Estelle Kilian SC, he disputed the state’s version of events surrounding the alleged rape of the teenage girl at a Sandton hotel in May.

“When we arrived in the hotel room and other ladies left the room, MC [complainant] and myself were left in the room. We proceeded to have consensual intercourse,” Sibiya said in his affidavit.

Sibiya said he stayed in contact with the teenager afterwards and she expressed an interest in meeting him again, though another meeting did not take place.

The state alleges Sibiya took the teenager and her friends to a strip club in Sandton and later raped her at a hotel after she became heavily intoxicated.

His lawyer argued exceptional circumstances existed to justify his release on bail. “It will be submitted on my behalf that the cumulative effect of the facts contained in this affidavit constitutes exceptional circumstances,” he said.

He also complained about the way his arrest was carried out.

“My arrest was a well-orchestrated, diabolical plan aimed at incarcerating me based on false and trumped-up allegations. I was arrested on 21 September at 17h44 at The Grand Club in Rivonia. My person was searched and all requested personal items found upon me seized, including my licensed 9mm Uzi self-loading carbine and ammunition,” he said.

He said he was willing to pay R20,000 bail and that he does not intend to evade trial or interfere with the investigations.

He strongly argued that his continued incarceration would affect not only him but his family and his legal preparation for the disciplinary hearing.

The bail application was postponed to Thursday to allow the state to apply its mind on the evidence that Sibiya presented during bail. The state is opposing Sibiya’s bail application.

Meanwhile, it has also emerged that Sibiya will face a disciplinary hearing on Monday over corruption allegations that have emerged from the Madlanga commission of inquiry.

At the commission, Sibiya is accused of having improper relationships with alleged underworld figures such as Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala. It is alleged that Matlala gave Sibiya 20 impalas and money; the real reason for the gifts has not yet been established.

Speaking outside court, police spokesperson Brig Athlenda Mathe told reporters Sibiya was served on Tuesday morning.

“He was served in the holding cells to attend [a] disciplinary hearing on October 5. So we will be guided by court, but if he is still in custody, we will then organise with correctional services for the hearing to sit at Kgosi Mampuru [prison],” she said.

Dr Zamambo Mkhize, a social scientist at UCT, says in an affidavit filed in the Western Cape high court that she believes the continued investigation into the November 2025 incident is unwarranted.

Mkhize says she never lodged a complaint, has nothing further to add after being questioned by investigators and would regard further questioning as harassment. She also believes continuing the investigation would misuse university resources.

“I am not and have never been a complainant in this matter. I have never lodged a complaint with the UCT ombud or anyone else about this matter,” she says.

“As an advocate for female autonomy, I object to having my voice silenced and disregarded by people in ostensible authority. I find this deeply offensive.”

The Forest Hill incident is one of the most contentious issues in Moshabela’s legal challenge against the UCT council.

Moshabela, who was appointed vice-chancellor for a five-year term in 2024, has approached the high court to review and set aside four resolutions adopted by council on May 30. The resolutions followed an investigation into 34 complaints about his conduct. Council decided not to institute disciplinary proceedings over those complaints but authorised a separate investigation into the Forest Hill incident.

Mkhize, cited as the 35th respondent, says she would ordinarily not become involved in litigation but felt compelled to provide her account because she feared that remaining silent could contribute to a miscarriage of justice.

The incident occurred at UCT’s Forest Hill staff residence on November 13 2025.

Mkhize says she had fallen seriously ill several days earlier and was taking strong medication that caused her to sleep for extended periods. On the evening of November 13, she left her cellphone charging on silent in the dining room and went to bed before 8pm.

She later woke to knocking and heard a man announce himself three times before entering her bedroom. The man identified himself as Grant de Monk and said he worked for Moshabela.

According to Mkhize, De Monk explained that Moshabela had sent him to check on her after her mother became concerned when repeated calls to her cellphone went unanswered.

Mkhize had previously met De Monk in January 2025 when she visited Moshabela following the publication of her first book.

She explained that she had been ill and that her phone was charging on silent in another room. De Monk offered to call an ambulance, but she declined because she was already receiving treatment. He asked her to contact her mother and said he would return the next morning, which he did.

The conduct of this investigation and its aftermath has denied my agency, my dignity and my privacy.

Dr Zamambo Mkhize, UCT social scientist

“I thanked him for the wellness check before he left,” Mkhize says.

Her mother later confirmed that she had contacted Moshabela because she knew her daughter lived in university-controlled accommodation and believed he could arrange for someone to check on her.

Moshabela has given a similar account, saying he was out of town when Mkhize’s mother contacted him. He says he instructed De Monk, a Campus Protection Services officer who also served as his driver, to check on her welfare.

Nearly four months later, on March 2, Mkhize received a call from a woman identifying herself as an attorney from Fairbridges Attorneys, requesting a meeting. She was subsequently told Fairbridges had been appointed by UCT council to investigate a matter concerning Moshabela.

At the March 4 meeting, Mkhize says she was repeatedly asked to recount what happened on November 13. Investigators asked whether De Monk had announced himself three times before entering her bedroom, which she confirmed.

She was also asked to draw a layout of her flat, say whether anything had been stolen and provide evidence including messages and call logs.

But Mkhize says her central question remained unanswered: why was a wellness check she had never complained about being investigated?

She alleges that one panel member became “visibly agitated” when she repeatedly gave the same account and declined to characterise the incident differently.

Mkhize says she respected the investigation’s confidentiality and expected the same protection for her privacy. She later learnt from Moshabela’s founding affidavit that the Forest Hill matter had become the subject of further correspondence and investigation.

According to Moshabela’s court papers, the Forest Hill matter was not put to him during his April interview in the original investigation, though investigators had already interviewed De Monk and obtained an account implicating him before council authorised a further investigation.

Mkhize says she later discovered that details of the “incident at Forest Hill residence” appeared in correspondence sent to Moshabela and copied to his attorney. She argues that important parts of her account were omitted, including that she had already been interviewed.

She says she remains disturbed that what she regarded as a private wellness check, and about which she never complained, ultimately entered court proceedings and media reports.

“The conduct of this investigation and its aftermath has denied my agency, my dignity and my privacy,” she says.

UCT council has since suspended implementation of the four resolutions challenged by Moshabela pending the outcome of his judicial review application. Council chairperson Norman Arendse SC previously said council had received independent legal advice and would follow court processes before deciding whether to oppose the application. Council has also indicated its willingness to participate in mediation.

The Forest Hill dispute comes amid broader questions about the investigation into Moshabela.

Former UCT staff member Wina Venter, who worked at the university for 18 years, separately said she discovered that her name had allegedly been recorded as the source of a misconduct complaint against Moshabela, which she says she never made.

Venter said she was approached by Fairbridges Attorneys in March and later learnt she had been listed as the source of a complaint.

“There is one thing I know with complete certainty, because only I could know it: I made no complaint,” Venter said in August.

She said she had never complained about Moshabela to the ombud, UCT or anyone else, directly or indirectly, nor authorised anyone to complain on her behalf.

Her account and Mkhize’s affidavit raise separate but related questions about how matters involving UCT staff came to be incorporated into the vice-chancellor’s investigation and how the individuals concerned were identified.

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The waves have come crashing down on popular Durban eatery Surf Riders Cafe after eThekwini municipality cancelled its lease.

The restaurant run by well-known local chef Samantha Small-Shaw, whose eclectic menu offers a range of meals from pizzas, pastas and burgers to seafood, crab curry and poke bowls, received a notice to vacate from the director of the municipality’s property valuation and management department on September 1.

Established in 2012, the lease expired in March 21 2019, and the owner, Jason Caradas, continued operating on a month-to-month basis.

However, in the letter, the owner was given a month’s written notice to leave the premises in South Beach, with a threat to face legal action if it was not returned to the municipality in good condition.

Caradas declined to comment.

In a notice of the closure on its social media page on Tuesday, the restaurant said: “We have had to close our Surf Riders South Beach restaurant. Not all is lost; we are still trading well in both our Cabana Beach resort restaurant and our Umhlanga Boulevard store. Looking forward to seeing you all there, enjoying our hospitality and great food.”

Small-Shaw said while it was “very sad” the South Beach restaurant had closed, all the staff had been moved to the branch at the Cabana’s hotel in Umhlanga which opened with much fanfare in June 2025 with an updated menu.

She said the original restaurant was very popular among locals and tourists and particularly dog lovers as it was pet friendly.

“We have expanded the kitchen and there are more people employed now. So in a way some good has come from a bad thing,” she said.

In 2023, the municipality gave notice to vacate to several beachfront restaurants and entertainment businesses as part of a business development strategy.

At the time, the head of the city’s real estate unit, Thapelo Mmusinyane, said 25 properties were advertised between May 2021 and last November.

“Ten awards were made to new lessees. All 10 awards were made to companies that are 100% owned by historically disadvantaged individuals,” he said.

The city said the strategy, adopted in September 2021, enables the municipality to be proactive in alienating surplus land, helping the city to achieve its developmental objectives, stimulate economic activity and BEE, as well as promote economic transformation in the property sector.

The city didn’t respond immediately to queries.

Patrons, however, were appalled by the news of the restaurant’s closure, saying it didn’t bode well for tourism on the Durban promenade, and criticised the municipality.

One social media user posted: “Very sad news, Durban’s loss for sure. I don’t know how I’m going to tell my daughter who absolutely loves Surf Riders South Beach, and we have had many a birthday party there and many breakfasts. The staff is always so friendly. Lifetime family memories. We will continue to support wherever we can.”

“They keep doing this to white-owned businesses leasing municipal properties. They close them down with big promises to outdo the current operation and then nothing happens and the properties are unused and become derelict. It’s obvious what’s happening and no one stands up to them about this,” said another user.

“eThekwini Municipality sometimes feels like the Seven Deadly Sins brought to life — pride without accountability, greed with public money, lust for power, contracts and public businesses, envy driving political infighting, gluttony consuming resources, wrath from frustrated residents, and sloth when it comes to maintaining the city’s infrastructure and delivering services,” said one patron.

Sibanyoni, president of the South African Local and Long-Distance Taxi and Bus Organisation, faces criminal charges of extorting Tengane Thomas Ntuli, who owns a company that supplied aggregate stone to the South African National Roads Agency’s (Sanral’s) R573 project.

Sibanyoni, who is alleged to be an extortion cartel leader, on Tuesday during cross-examination told the commission he had entered into a partnership with Ntuli because Ntuli needed to meet a “30% local content” requirement to get the tender in Mpumalanga from Sanral’s main contractor.

He contended that without him, as a resident of Kwaggafontein, Ntuli would not have won the tender. However, he could not point the commission to a specific regulation that stipulates the 30% requirement.

Commissioner Sesi Baloyi put it to Sibanyoni that the 30% local content seemed to require locals in an area to provide services and get paid.

Sibanyoni accepted that he received R100,000 a month for merely entering into a “partnership” with Ntuli without providing any service to the company.

Bathabile Ntuli, the director of the mining company, in an affidavit said payments made to Sibanyoni “were made under duress as we were fearing for our lives, taking into account the bad operation history of Mr Joe Sibanyoni in Kwaggafontein.”

Bathabile said it was a normal practice that “if you do not cooperate with his [Sibanyoni] demands, your life will be in danger.”

While Sibanyoni was adamant that Ntuli could not get the tender without entering into a partnership with him, there was no paper trail to prove his deal with Ntuli.

“I want to put to you that if the local share was a requirement of this contract either under regulation or under the terms of the tender with Sanral, there would have to be some documentary evidence of your interest in Tengane Ntuli,” chief evidence leader Matthew Chaskalson put it to Sibanyoni.

Sibanyoni said Ntuli had the responsibility to ensure such paper evidence to Sanral, not him.

Sibanyoni’s right-hand man, Oupa “Bafana” Sindane made threats to stop Ntuli’s company’s operations when Ntuli did not pay. But Sibanyoni said such was not done on his “instruction”.

“At no point was Mr Ntuli’s operation stopped. Me and Mr Ntuli had a very good relationship; at no point did I make threatening messages,” he said.

He described Sindane’s threat as “interference” in his partnership with Ntuli.

Protection-fee syndicates have been growing in South Africa with business organisations constantly appealing to the police to intervene and protect entrepreneurs from dangerous groups demanding a share of project profits.

On evidence of his involvement in payment of R250,000 in legal fees for a man convicted of a taxi violence murder, Sibanyoni told the commission he did not personally make the payments.

Evidence before the commission showed advocate Hartley Ngoato sent a message to Sibanyoni complaining about “nonpayment” after defending Jabu Gwabu Mahlangu, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2025 for a taxi violence-related killing.

The chats suggest Ngoato also represented Tshegofatso Richmond “Morwa” Makofane, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2023 for violent taxi shootings and the murder of people in the taxi industry.

Sibanyoni told the commission Makofane used to be one of his taxi drivers but did not facilitate the payment of his legal fees.

Sibanyoni said he was only involved in facilitating payment of legal fees for Mahlangu, which were paid for by a taxi association that Mahlangu’s dad used to operate under.

“After the [Mahlangu] family came to me, the association did assist to a particular extent. I said they should make sure Gwabo’s fees are paid.”

The message sent by Ngoato to him referred to both Makofane and Mahlangu, with the lawyer saying it was work that Sibanyoni had “originally allocated” for him. Sibanyoni denied facilitating legal fee payments for his former driver.

The commission will continue with its public hearings on Wednesday.

1995 — Doctor Khumalo scores with three minutes of regulation time remaining as Bafana Bafana fight back to beat Mozambique 3-2 in a friendly at FNB Stadium. Augustine Makalakalane netted in the second half to make it 1-1 and Daniel Mudau equalised with South Africa’s second goal in the 70th minute.

1999 — Bafana Bafana play to a goalless draw against Saudi Arabia in the second leg of the Afro-Asian Cup in Riyadh to win the trophy on a 1-0 aggregate.

1999 — The Proteas beat Kenya by 24 runs in a four-nations ODI tournament in Nairobi. South Africa scored 220/7, aided by Jonty Rhodes’ 45 and Jacques Kallis’ 39. Steve Tikolo (67) and Thomas Odoyo (41) kept the hosts in the match until the latter stages of their innings.

2000 — Hestrie Cloete takes the high-jump silver at the Sydney Games, losing out on the gold on countback. Both she and Russian winner Yelena Yelesina achieved season bests, clearing 2.01m, but the South African’s only failure, at 1.96, cost her. Both of them needed two shots at 2.01, and neither could clear 2.03.

2001 — Neil McKenzie scores an unbeaten 69 to guide the Proteas to a six-wicket victory over Zimbabwe in the third and final ODI in Harare and a 3-0 series triumph. South Africa reached the 185 winning target in 41 overs.

2007 — Wing Bryan Habana and centre Jaque Fourie score two tries each as a full-strength Springbok outfit hammers the USA 64-15 in a World Cup group match in Montpellier. South Africa ran in nine tries in all.

2008 — Bernard Parker scores twice and Daine Klate once as Bafana Bafana beat Malawi 3-0 in a friendly at Germiston Stadium.

2011 — Bryan Habana scores South Africa’s only try to help the Springboks beat Samoa 13-5 in a World Cup group match at North Harbour Stadium.

2012 — Robin Peterson strikes 32 from 19 balls to push the Proteas to 146/5 in their World T20 match against Australia, but it’s too little too late as South Africa lose the match in Colombo by eight wickets.

2012 — Dane van Niekerk scores 29 and Shabnim Ismail 16 in an otherwise dismal innings of 70/8 as the South African women lose their T20 World Cup qualifier contest against the West Indies in Galle by 10 wickets.

2016 — Opener Quinton de Kock hammers 178 from 113 balls as the Proteas beat Australia by six wickets in the first ODI at Centurion. Chasing 295 to win, South Africa got off to a great start with De Kock and Rilee Rossouw (63 from 45 balls) putting on 145 for the opening wicket.

2017 — Flyhalf Elton Jantjies misses a late, angled penalty attempt as the Springboks draw their Rugby Championship match against Australia 27-27 in Bloemfontein. The two sides had drawn in their previous contest three weeks earlier.

2018 — Lungi Ngidi takes 3/19 as the Proteas bowl out Zimbabwe for 117 to set up a five-wicket victory in the first ODI in Kimberley. Heinrich Klaasen top-scored for South Africa with a run-a-ball 44.