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A few months back, my leadership team and I found ourselves reflecting on the journey we have travelled together over the past three years. What began as an ordinary conversation about milestones, decisions, and achievements slowly became something far more personal....

In November, millions of young South Africans will exercise one of the defining acts of democratic adulthood by choosing who governs the places in which they live. However, labour-market figures released this week by Statistics South Africa reveal the economic reality...

It had been raining lightly all day in Franschhoek. A gentle winter drizzle softened the mountains and blurred the vineyards into muted shades of grey and green. A small group of industry colleagues had gathered for an informal day of conversation, wine tasting and...

Standfirst: South Africa has not simply become a country with more commissions, audits and investigations. It is undergoing a quieter institutional transformation in which mechanisms designed to correct government failure are increasingly becoming part of the way...

One of the quietest traps in leadership is the habit of waiting. We wait for the right leader to emerge, for a new strategy to provide clarity, for the organisation to become more supportive, or for circumstances to become more favourable before we act. We convince...

For much of democratic South Africa, politics could organise itself around recognisable adversaries. Apartheid, corruption, state capture, white monopoly capital and, more recently, illegal immigration each offered a simple explanation for complex problems. They gave...

I remember the chair long before I remember the storm. It sat opposite my desk, ordinary and unremarkable, bearing the accumulated weight of countless decisions, difficult conversations, strategic plans, and moments of quiet reflection. For years, it had been a place...

When the government can no longer credibly promise expanding opportunities, politics begins to change. Public debate shifts from how opportunities should be created to who should have access to those that remain. Arguments about growth and redistribution do not...

Wisdom is not simply the accumulation of knowledge but the gradual recognition that certainty is often an illusion. Mature judgment does not arrive when we finally discover the right answers, but when we learn to live with ambiguity, contradiction, and incomplete...

What will the South African Reserve Bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) decide about interest rates on May 28? When economies are hit by a large supply shock, such as the current global energy crisis, central banks face the dilemma of either temporarily overlooking...

In many South African municipalities, officials now spend more time reporting on collapse than preventing it. Water systems fail while compliance reports multiply. Infrastructure projects stall inside approval chains designed to improve accountability, but which...

South Africa’s labour market is not only producing unemployment. It is increasingly producing withdrawal. The latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) shows that employment declined by 345 000 in the first quarter of 2026, while labour force participation fell...

What is beginning to take shape in South Africa is not a single crisis that can be isolated, measured, and resolved, but a convergence of pressures aligned across economic life, political authority, and everyday experience. In recent weeks, this convergence has become...