Our domestic worker arrived at work yesterday visibly shaken. The day before she went to withdraw R4,000 from an ATM in the Joburg CBD. Three tsotsis followed her. They pulled a gun and took everything. She is alive, but traumatised.
Try telling her that South Africans are “too pessimistic” about crime. Try telling her that speaking honestly about daily violence “undermines the perception of progress”. That’s the sermon Discovery’s Adrian Gore delivered to a room of business leaders last week. Don’t scare the investors, he pleaded. Don’t mention the hijackings or assassinations. Just visualise progress.
Gore said we should let the data do the talking. So here it is. According to the Stats SA Victims of Crime release for 2024/25, page 32, most forms of crime have increased since 2021, with up to 65% of South Africans reporting that they don’t feel safe enough to walk alone at night in their own communities.
About 268,000 households experienced assault during the past five years, up from 125,000 in 2020. About 514,000 households experienced home robbery during the past five years, from 312,000 in 2020. The experience of home robbery increased by 12% from the previous year.
Housebreaking is the most prevalent household crime, occurring about five times more often than the next common crime, home robbery. We can’t be celebrating the fact that households that experienced housebreaking decreased by 1% in the last year, from 1.13-million to 1.12-million. Especially given the low incidence of reporting.
It’s the optimism police in action, selling mindfulness while the country bleeds from every pore.
But Gore’s sermon is only the mask. The real disease is ideological: the ANC’s adherence to the national democratic revolution (NDR). This revolutionary fever dream insists the party must control every lever of power in society. That’s why corruption is not a bug in the system. It is the system.
Two weeks ago I mistakenly called the National Anti-Corruption Advisory Council (Nacac) a “sliver of light”. But Accountability Now’s Paul Hoffman set me straight. Nacac is “informed by the values of the NDR, not the constitution”.
The Constitutional Court, in the Glenister cases, gave a binding instruction: SA needs a single, independent anticorruption body outside executive control and built to “Stirs” standards: specialised, trained, independent, resourced and secure in tenure.
But Nacac, in its 800-page report, pirouettes around this. Instead, it proposes an office of public integrity that would still act on presidential proclamations. One can’t call a watchdog “independent” while keeping its leash tied to the president’s desk.
And it’s not accidental, because to the NDR genuine independence is treason. Real corruption busting would mean real accountability, and accountability threatens the revolution’s spoils.
Kader Asmal saw it. In 2010 he refused to vote for the demise of the Scorpions and called for the scrapping of the NDR itself. He understood that a governing project built on “hegemonic control” was fundamentally at odds with constitutional democracy. Asmal quit parliament rather than be complicit. The Scorpions were killed anyway. They had already shown what was possible, with Jackie Selebi, Tony Yengeni and Schabir Shaik all brought to book.
Even Jacob Zuma’s case rests on the Scorpions’ work. But they lacked secure tenure, which made them politically vulnerable. At Polokwane in 2007 the ANC sealed their fate. The Hawks, declawed by design, were born. State capture galloped in through the gates.
Asmal’s ghost should haunt every Nacac report. His warning was simply that until the NDR is buried, corruption will reign. Even the ANC’s own national executive committee briefly stumbled towards the truth in 2020. It resolved that the cabinet should urgently implement the Glenister rulings and establish a standalone, independent anti-corruption body. Draft legislation was drawn up. But once the comrades realised what true independence would mean — the end of control — the idea was buried.
The Breytenbach bills now before parliament resurrect that idea: a chapter 9 anti-corruption commission. Constitutionally compliant. Outside executive control. Armed with Stirs teeth. That is the only real path forward.
And yet it’s not true that business has always been passive in the face of decay. There is precedent for collective action, even courage. Business Leadership SA (BLSA) under Bobby Godsell and Bonang Mohale became increasingly vocal during Zuma’s second term. It mobilised to defend the Treasury when Pravin Gordhan was under attack. Business Unity SA (Busa), the official apex federation, was often divided but tried to give the government a “united business” partner.
The CEO Initiative (2015–17) was the closest thing to the forerunner of Business For SA (B4SA). Born out of Nenegate — when Zuma axed Nhlanhla Nene — top CEOs such as Maria Ramos, Jabu Mabuza, Sim Tshabalala and Gore himself realised they had to step in. They worked with the Treasury, engaged ratings agencies, launched the Youth Employment Service and helped stave off junk status. It lost momentum after Gordhan’s axing, but for a time it showed business could steady the ship.
As state capture peaked, many business leaders joined Save SA and Council for the Advancement of the SA Constitution marches, statements and litigation support. This all laid the groundwork for B4SA, born in 2020 out of the Covid crisis. It became the closest thing to a war cabinet of business, bringing CEOs and sector leaders into daily co-ordination, not only on the pandemic response but on stabilising a country in chaos.
The lesson? When business pulls together it matters. But too often these efforts have been episodic, ad hoc or fatally divided between large corporates and the broader economy. So here we stand, knee deep in sewage with the optimism police telling us to breathe deeply and “focus on progress”. But history tells us two things. First, the NDR is fundamentally incompatible with the constitution. It produces corruption by design. Second, when business mobilises collectively, as it did during Nenegate and again in Covid, it can shift the balance.
That is the challenge now. Not to paper over the cracks with optimism sermons, but to use the full weight of organised business, once again, to force political alignment behind a chapter 9 anti-corruption commission and demand the burial of the NDR. Until then, ordinary citizens will keep living under siege and SA will remain guarded by 600,000 private security officers while 150,000 police limp along in the shadows.
• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV’s ‘Business Watch’. Contact him at michael@fmr.co.za.
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