Unemployment concerns overshadowed by complacency over social grants
Your editorial opinion refers to “We need to defuse the unemployment time bomb” (May 15).
The cynic in me doesn’t see unemployment as a time bomb, let alone a ticking one.
Most of our unemployed youth come from unemployed households. Yet the voting responses of the youth (who don’t vote) as well as their unemployed parents (some of whom do vote, largely for the ANC) don’t indicate either urgency or much of a desire to change the status quo.
Instead, South Africans appear content with their social grants and confident that these will last forever. So, while I sure hear a ticking sound somewhere, it ain’t unemployment making the tick. It’s the tanking economy and collapsing tax take that will blow up the country when the social grants dry up.
But for now all appear blissfully unaware of this inevitability.
Stuart Meyer
Via Business Day online
Icasa defends transformation policies amid pushback from government
The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) deserves commendation for standing its ground to defend the statutory requirement about broad-based BEE ownership in the ICT sector against the narrow policy proposal of communications & digital technologies minister Solly Malatsi (“Starlink closer to entering SA market as Malatsi orders Icasa to change empowerment regulations”, December 12 2025).
Not only has Icasa rejected the proposal as invalid and a misfit for transformation in the sector, but it says Malatsi’s efforts to reinvent the wheel for expedient purposes are devoid of common sense.
Methinks privilege blinds Malatsi, so he cannot appreciate that there is a working model of equity equivalents whose investments are structured in lieu of the sale of equity across industries.
Such investments target socioeconomic development programmes to accelerate meaningful participation of black people with considerations for empowerment and sustainability in the long term.
A last-gasp attempt to bend the rules on a whim smacks of exceptionalism spearheaded from within the party walls. No wonder Malatsi signed off a shallow, logically misconceived AI draft policy fraught with lazy suppositions and wrongful assumptions that defiled our reform trajectory.
It’s a dearth of leadership that is indicative of trouble ahead. President Cyril Ramaphosa should rather move Malatsi to the vacant ministry of social development before his comedy of errors does more damage and scares off amiable investors and, consequently, stunts the overall objectives of BBBEE.
Morgan Phaahla
Ekurhuleni
Israel-Hamas conflict stirs debate over identity, history and security
To draw a distinction between the Jewishness he knew when growing up and the present reality of Israel’s actions in Gaza, David Lewis repeats “That was then” (“Jewish identity and dissent in the shadow of war”, May 12).
For him, a change has taken place, but what has not changed is the antisemitism the world has witnessed over two millennia. Christians, Nazis and Muslims have all had their day against the Jews: the European ghettos, the German concentration camps and the actions perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 2023.
Lewis asserts that Israeli politicians, armies and their supporters claim, while committing genocide against their neighbours the Gazans, that they are fighting for the safety of those Jews who have lived in peace with their neighbours in the rest of the world.
I doubt this: the actions of Israel that are seen as genocide arose due to the horror of the genocidal massacre of October 7, after which Hamas promised many more such actions. Israel is fighting for itself.
Another doubtful point: the threat of the elimination of Israel as heard in slogans, seen on maps and voiced in statements would, in Lewis’s view, “not be countenanced by ordinary Palestinians and Israelis on both sides of the divide”.
Hamas has been in power since 2007, has never held an election, has bombed Israel indiscriminately and took few measures to protect its citizens after October 7 (there are miles of tunnels in which women and children could have been sheltered after Israel’s warnings of an imminent attack).
Would citizens be equipped to stand up to a ruthless, militant organisation?
Lewis may well sing heartily at Passover, but would he sing the same were he in Israel?
Roger Graham
Meadowridge
Market failures challenge ESG efforts as policy gaps persist
Brian Benfield’s argument would be compelling if markets were already pricing externalities correctly (“The delusion of the triple bottom line”, May 15).
However, his own prescription — “If emissions are too high, price carbon” — concedes that they are not. In the absence of that policy infrastructure, a company maximising profit in today’s South African market is not optimising for social welfare; it is optimising for a structurally mispriced set of signals.
Properly understood, addressing environmental, social & governance (ESG) issues is not a rejection of the market mechanism but rather an attempt to correct for its current failures from within the investment process.
The question is not whether firms should pursue profit, but whether the market they are operating in is well enough structured to make that pursuit socially beneficial. In South Africa, it is not yet.
Sam Bovim
Via Business Day online
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