Political infighting, market fears leave SA adrift as crises mount
Attempting to impeach the president over Phala Phala remains a Sisyphean task (“ANC rallies behind Ramaphosa as impeachment proceedings take shape”, May 15). Our political elite has become expert in using legal fairness to frustrate conclusions.
Ramaphosa said he would be different, but, as ever, crises change his mind. The only way forward is a vote of no confidence. In this the DA is being pressured by “business” to support Ramaphosa as a safe pair of hands who can maintain market stability.
This is illusory. Ramaphosa’s only achievement has been to sink the ship of state on an even keel, whereas EFF or MK input might have meant bow- or stern-down chaos. Citizens remain in the rising warm water rather than jumping out. But unemployment rates now show water lapping at the gunnels, and fuel prices forecast the approach of a Middle East hurricane.
The House of Assembly doesn’t have the luxury of time to debate the intricacies of Phala Phala. If the country sticks with Ramaphosa, the government of national unity may as well spend its time arranging a deck orchestra to play Nearer, My God, to Thee, as the hurricane’s waves complete what 30 years of ANC governance have striven mightily to achieve.
As for the cry “Who could replace Ramaphosa?”, approaching disaster has a habit of concentrating the collective mind. When an unprepared British parliament faced the overwhelming might of Nazi Germany in May 1940, it ditched the appeasing but well-connected Neville Chamberlain in favour of a bankrupt alcoholic who miraculously turned that ship into the storm’s eye, repaired sufficient pumps to increase freeboard, and promised nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
History says, “Cometh the hour, cometh the man.” The assembly’s urgent task is to find that individual within its ranks and, regardless of pigment irrelevancies, place them where they now must be.
James Cunningham
Camps Bay
Decent government unlikely in the foreseeable future
Your editorial opinion “Ailing SABS can’t be left to rot” (May 21) refers.
All state-owned enterprises are a mix of corruption, cadre deployment and incompetence and are subject to South Africa’s discriminatory labour legislation, ensuring few competent employees are ever likely to work for them.
As there is no sustainable governance, they all follow the same path of demise into complete failure and ultimately become unsalvageable. It’s an ANC, and ultimately an undiscerning voter, thing.
The private sector just has to work around this mess to survive, which is not ideal, but it is what it is until a halfway decent government appears — which does not appear likely in the foreseeable future. The limitations of democracy, South Africa-style, unfortunately.
It’s small comfort that South Africa is not the only country suffering from an utterly useless, corrupt and parasitic state. Ours is just the worst of a bad bunch.
Ian Ferguson
Via Business Day online
Joburg residents seek action amid worsening services and debt
The state of the city address by Joburg executive mayor Dada Morero comes while residents are experiencing deep frustration over deteriorating basic services and mounting municipal debt (“Joburg seeks probe into city finances amid R5.3bn Eskom debt crisis”, May 20).
While the address outlined commitments to stabilise governance and restore service delivery, the reality on the ground tells a different story. Many communities continue to face unreliable water supply, electricity disruptions, pothole-ridden roads, failing infrastructure and inconsistent waste collection. These are not luxuries — they are basic services that residents pay for through rates and taxes.
Equally concerning is the city’s growing debt burden, particularly the ongoing financial obligations to Eskom, alongside other service providers.
Debt to Eskom threatens energy security and places the city at risk of further instability. A municipality that cannot manage its financial obligations cannot sustainably deliver services.
The people of Joburg do not need more assurances; they need measurable timelines, transparent reporting and consequence management for financial mismanagement.
The city must implement strict financial controls, strengthen revenue collection systems and ensure that expenditure is aligned with service delivery priorities.
The state of the city address should mark a turning point — not another chapter of unfulfilled commitments.
Residents deserve a credible recovery plan that addresses debt, restores service reliability and rebuilds trust in local government.
Joburg is the economic engine of South Africa. Its governance must reflect that responsibility.
Tsepo Mhlongo
Orlando East
Public frustration intensifies over contentious city name changes
Unsurprisingly, many thousands of South Africans have objected to the ludicrous and totally unnecessary town and city name changes agreed to by the South African Geographical Names Council (SAGNC) (“38,000 object to city and town name changes”, May 19).
Why, they justifiably ask, are these names being changed? Who (if anyone at all) benefits from such name changes? Is the existence of the SAGNC warranted in an environment characterised by a heavily bloated state bureaucracy? Surely the ANC cadres populating this irrelevant institution could be misallocated elsewhere?
Credible answers (if such are ever forthcoming) to these pointed inquiries would be welcomed by all thinking South Africans.
John Spira
Johannesburg
Cachalia’s claims about UK anti-Semitism statistically indefensible
A concept is gaining traction in philosophy and critical theory called “epistemic injustice” — the idea that certain groups are systematically denied credibility as knowledge holders and witnesses of their own experience.
We are familiar with this in the context of racism, where the pain of black victims has historically been minimised, sanitised or simply disbelieved. The denial is not only physical or economic; it operates at the level of testimony itself.
Jews are increasingly subject to an analogous phenomenon — epistemic anti-Semitism. It manifests not in overt slurs but in the subtle, persistent delegitimisation of Jewish accounts of anti-Semitism.
Jewish people who name their own persecution are recast as exaggerating, instrumentalising victimhood, or conflating legitimate political criticism with hatred. Their ability to identify and communicate experiences of prejudice itself is made suspect. The effect is a form of double injury: first the hatred, then the invalidation of the claim that hatred occurred.
However unintentional the statistical framing in Ghaleb Cachalia’s article may have been, it performed exactly this function, taking data that, when correctly interpreted, reveals Jewish people to be the most disproportionately targeted religious group in England and Wales and inverts it into evidence that anti-Semitism is a lesser problem (“Anti-Semitism response risks undermining UK legal principles”, May 6).
His opinion piece thus contains a statistical error serious enough to undermine his central argument — and serious enough, I would suggest, to illustrate the very phenomenon it inadvertently enacts.
He implies that anti-Semitic attacks are less alarming because they are fewer in absolute number than anti-Muslim attacks. This is the base-rate fallacy in its most elementary form. Raw counts are meaningless without accounting for population size.
Britain’s Jewish community numbers about 292,000 people — about 0.5% of the population. Britain’s Muslim community numbers about 3.9-million — 13 times larger. Comparing absolute incident totals between groups of such radically different sizes tells us nothing about relative risk or the intensity of targeting.
The correct measure should be hate crimes per capita. Cachalia’s claim, as a basis for arguing that anti-Semitism deserves less urgent legal or institutional attention, is statistically indefensible.
The per capita data, drawn from official UK Home Office statistics, tells a starkly different story. In the year ending March 2025, Jewish people experienced about 106 hate crimes per 10,000 people. Muslims experienced about 12 per 10,000. Jewish people were therefore victimised at a rate about nine times higher.
The argument that anti-Semitism warrants less urgency because the absolute numbers are lower is not just wrong — it represents a dangerous inversion. I want to name what this kind of error does by calling it “epistemic anti-Semitism”, because it is not merely a statistical mistake.
The numbers are not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether Jewish testimony about Jewish suffering will be received with the same epistemic good faith extended to others.
It should be. And the statistics, properly read, demand it.
David Robert Lewis
Via email
JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businessday.co.za. Letters of more than 200 words may be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.