Category: SA Renewal

Daily Friend columnist Ivo Vegter takes aim at Daily Maverick CEO Styli Charalambous’s call for state funding to fix journalism’s “market failure”. Vegter counters that South Africa already has two data points on state-backed media: the SABC, reliant on repeated bailouts, and The New Age, which helped launder the Gupta family’s image while state entities…

Ramaphosa has noted the Madlanga Commission’s second interim report, which confirms earlier SAPS findings and refers Lt-Gen Shadrack Sibiya, Witness G, Sgt Fannie Nkosi and Brown Mogotsi for criminal investigation, as O’Sullivan’s testimony and critics question the pace of disclosure. BizNews Reporter President Cyril Ramaphosa has noted the recommendations and referrals in the second interim…

Johannesburg’s 4 November election could mark the ANC’s steepest local decline since 1994. The party has yet to announce a mayoral candidate, is campaigning on the slogan “Fixing Local Government,” an implicit admission of its own record, and faces a DA that has spent over a year building a “Believe in Joburg” campaign under Helen…

This article was first published by The Common Sense Polling by The Common Sense shows the ANC’s support has slipped to 39%, down from 46% in 2021. Even accounting for the party’s usual advantage in converting votes into seats — a quirk of South Africa’s mixed ward/proportional system that has historically boosted the ANC’s seat share…

A Free State High Court ruling has driven home a warning for South African WhatsApp users: forwarding a message can carry the same legal consequences as writing it yourself. ANC councillor Sibongile Tsoleli was ordered to pay R50,000 in damages after sharing messages containing unproven corruption and adultery claims against a fellow councillor, alongside discriminatory…

This article was first published by The Common Sense In this analysis The Common Sense tracked three decades of South African Police Service (SAPS), South African National Defence Force (SANDF), and Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority (PSiRA) staffing data, together with 27 years of Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) polling on trust in the police. The…

The Economist’s article republished below asks who counts as capable of evil, tracking a global trend of lawmakers lowering the age of criminal responsibility in response to shocking child-perpetrated crimes. South Africa has its own case in point: a radicalised 15-year-old planted a viable bomb in a packed Ballito mall food court, glorifying Columbine on…

An anti-immigration movement set 30 June 2026 as its deadline for undocumented foreigners to leave South Africa, triggering the largest such mobilisation since 2008. More than 900 arrests, 120 marches and roughly 25,000 departures followed. But against a foreign population of 2.4 million, the exodus was a tremor, not a resolution. Pretoria answered with enforcement,…

Two years after South Africa’s landmark 2024 election, independent researcher Masixole Njengele says the IEC’s own data doesn’t reconcile. Using the Commission’s published station-level results across all three ballot types, Njengele calculates a “floor” deficit of 468,273 ballots that cannot be explained under the IEC’s rules — rising to 929,801 once out-of-district voting is factored…

For months, South African farmers argued they were being locked out of the fight against foot-and-mouth disease, forced to watch while red tape slowed vaccination to a crawl. This week, that changed. Free State Agriculture, SAAI and Sakeliga settled their court case with the state, opening a regulated private route for farmers to import and…