The Common Sense

Making South Africa make sense.

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

We are excited to announce the launch of the new and improved The Common Sense website. After analyzing feedback from our readers, we've crafted a platform that provides the best news, analysis, and insights on South Africa.

Our mission remains simple: We Make South Africa Make Sense. With data at the heart of everything we do, we aim to explain what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what will happen next.

➡️https://t.co/l3OBMG4zvO

#NewWebsite #SouthAfrica #DataDriven #Polling #Insights

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

Patriotic Alliance leader Gayton McKenzie rebukes Liam Jacobs, who redefected to the DA, after being in the PA.

https://t.co/9xculVwGOD

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

@Nkule182791 You are the one who started swearing in your first tweet. And don't be a child, nobody cares who started it, act like an adult

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

American officials have told Ambassador Roelf Meyer that Washington’s conditions for a trade and investment pact with South Africa remain firmly in place.

https://t.co/tzu8XNrMEE

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

@Nkule182791 No need for this

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

@leonfre24792858 @Nkule182791 No need for language like that here

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

A new piece in The Common Sense walks through the seven reforms now under way at Correctional Services to fix South Africa's parole system.

Electronic monitoring of parolees. Dedicated tracing teams to hunt down absconders. Parole denied to anyone assessed as a medium or high risk of reoffending. Independent specialists - psychiatrists, psychologists, criminologists - on parole boards. A stronger voice for victims and their families in parole hearings.

The reforms are being driven by Correctional Services Minister Pieter Groenewald. They follow an amaBhungane investigation that found officials could not account for just under 30,000 parolees released since 1991. The reforms can all be measured. The question is whether they will hold.

https://t.co/s0SfnlPlDv

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

Over 50 shacks burnt in Mossel Bay over the past few days. Some reportedly set alight with people still inside. Five Mozambicans dead. Around 800 have fled. The Common Sense warned last week this was coming. The three warning signs that triggered unrest in 2008, 2015, and 2021 are all back.

This is the start of winter, not the end of it.

https://t.co/QcSJ8dTG30

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

Will the ANC hold the Eastern Cape metros in November? The Common Sense looked at every election result in Nelson Mandela Bay and Buffalo City since 2014 to work out what's coming. One metro is in trouble. The other isn't ... yet.

https://t.co/bgjNkmP8h1

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

Parents paying for elite South African schools often trust the school must have their child's best interests at heart. Many of them are wrong.

A new piece in The Common Sense argues that something has shifted inside many elite SA schools. They have stopped teaching children how to think and started training them what to think. Education has been replaced by indoctrination, usually dressed up in the language of inclusion, equity, and transformation.

The cost falls on the children: one burdened with inherited guilt, another with inherited grievance, both denied the dignity of moral freedom.

https://t.co/DAxas0umVf

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

The South African government's instinct has been to formalise the informal economy. A new UASA Employment Report suggests that's the wrong instinct.

41% of South African workers are now in non-contracted employment. Formal employment has stagnated for five years. And researchers at the Bureau of Market Research argue the informal economy is doing real work for real households, and may not be possible to formalise under current conditions anyway.

The deeper finding: South Africa's labour market problem is not a skills shortage. Skills have improved without employment following. The real issue is structural, not enough labour demand, not enough employment creation.

https://t.co/cEB9IURVfY

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

Martin van Staden writes on the debate about “race law” between Hermann Pretorius and Christo van der Rheede.

https://t.co/j1O48Db4lT

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

Iran and the United States remain on track for a deal that could extend the current ceasefire by 60 days, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and create the basis for further talks on Iran stepping back from its nuclear ambitions.

https://t.co/qtzrJk1I15

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

Why do Afrikaners vote en masse for the DA and not the FF+? The reason is largely counterintuitive. Afrikaners are moderate and centrist, and their driving political motivation is inclusion, not exclusion. They want to be part of South Africa and play a positive role there in the broad cosmopolitan sense of the thing. The FF+, however, positions itself as offering a narrow, nationalist-based offer of a future. Its new slogan, “Dit is ons tyd” [“It is our time”], is the ultimate case in point. This is the FF+’s great strategic failure.

The Common Sense’s weekly diary explores what is happening in South African politics. Read this week’s edition below.

https://t.co/uCGPYudhl5

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

Hugo Broos has had an illustrious career as he takes Bafana to their first World Cup in nearly twenty years.

https://t.co/kolEVSpIwD

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

Constitutional law academic Koos Malan asks whether the Constitutional Court is beginning to shift its approach to the ANC's transformation project.

The recent Phala Phala ruling against President Ramaphosa is politically significant, but ideologically untouched. It mirrors the Nkandla judgment of 2016.

Far more interesting is the 18 May ruling striking down the National Health Act's certificate-of-need scheme. Malan argues the court is here ruling against the results of the dominant ideological project, even while leaving the project itself intact.

Two reasons for the shift. The ANC is no longer the hegemonic force it was, so the court runs less institutional risk in ruling against it. And after three decades, the damage of cadre control, hollowed-out institutions, and youth unemployment has become undeniable, even in official records.

The court may not rule against the ideology directly. But it appears increasingly willing to curtail its excesses. Sharp civil-society legal action may now find more purchase than was thought possible.

https://t.co/N34qm5ekRw

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

Parents at South Africa’s elite schools face a growing challenge in ensuring that ideological and political activists don’t turn their kids into narrowed, anxious, rehearsed children whose minds have been captured and stunted before ever being allowed to grow.

https://t.co/d4k0vwqqsf

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

The latest crime stats show slight improvement but still lay bare scale of South Africa’s violence.

https://t.co/rJwmNF0Br6

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

What is wrong with Geordin Hill-Lewis and Ryan Coetzee? Fresh off the DA’s township ward-winning success in Emfuleni, the pair engaged in the most childish and scurrilous squabble on X with Correctional Services Minister Pieter Groenewald.

https://t.co/FlOq0SjFbP

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

Last week The Common Sense ran a set of worst-case economic, currency, and rates projections for South Africa over the next decade. This week it follows up on that with the best case, arguing that each extreme is a plausible scenario based on who follows Cyril Ramaphosa as ANC leader, what the DA does, and whether the GNU holds together.

https://t.co/X5a54vPVH1

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

Simon Lincoln Reader writes on the likely next UN secretary general, and what it means for that organisation.

https://t.co/Tf6v8vhAAI