WATCH | Limpopo Police Commissioner Lt-General Jan Petrus Scheepers has issued a stern warning to corrupt police officers, saying: “If you are corrupt and you are wearing a blue uniform, we will change you to an orange one". This follow the arrest of five officers in Polokwane.
This is a leader protected by the ringleaders of a violent mob. They claim to be "protecting the people of South Africa and women" from foreign criminals.
I wrote to you a few days ago about a political shift. I said we were watching a move from policy failure to something deeper - a system discovering its own limits.
A week later, the picture is clearer.
What I am observing is not a realignment. It is not populism. It is not "the people rising" or "democracy holding."
It is fragmentation.
Not the loud kind. The quiet kind. The kind where three institutions do three different things in three different lanes with no connection between them.
The Court strikes down four sections of the Refugees Act. Technically flawless. Constitutionally sound. Home Affairs tries to implement it. The reception offices fill up in days. Durban and Soweto burn. Twenty-four vehicles. Foreign-owned shops looted. The directive is withdrawn two days later.
Not because the Court was wrong. Because the administrative machinery to execute a judgment does not exist at the scale the judgment requires.
At the same time, SARS is sending final demands for R5,000. Not because R5,000 matters. Because R600 billion in uncollected tax debt has them running a collection drive at the bottom of the pyramid while the sharks stay in deep water.
At the same time, 5,500 police recruits were not enlisted because a R360 million tender was corrupt and the medicals stopped.
At the same time, a R100 billion Free State investment is announced while GDP contracts.
At the same time, Navi Pillay wins the Nobel a reminder of what 50 years of functioning institutions can achieve - while the institutions she came from are operating in separate silos with no coordination.
This is not chaos. Chaos implies motion. What I am seeing is different.
It is a state that learned to run on extraction tenders, levies, penalties, directives discovering that extraction only works when there is capacity to extract from. When the tender fails, the recruits do not show. When the directive is issued, the offices collapse. When the tax debt hits R600 billion, the system starts chasing R5,000 from people who cannot pay.
That is not a policy error. That is a structural condition.
The political shift I am naming is this: we have moved from a politics of "who should govern" to a politics of "whether governing is still possible."
Every party is gesturing. Nobody is governing. The Court governs alone. SARS governs alone. The Hawks govern alone. The Director-General can withdraw a directive but cannot build the capacity to implement the next one.
This is not about ANC or DA or MK or EFF. They are symptoms. The fragmentation is underneath them.
4 November will not change this. It will just tell us which party intends to ride the wave versus which one intends to pretend the wave does not exist.
I got interesting question from the comment section : is this realignment or fragmentation.
The answer is fragmentation. And it is accelerating.
I graduated, passed my degree with an overall distinction and I was the top student ❤️🥇I also got employed at a very BIG COMPANY before I even graduated 🙏🏾 what a year 🥹❤️
@Ntjebe11@SABCNews Go ba mopedi ke maemo stlatla towe 😒 what’s stopping you from joining them or starting your own match in Limpopo le rata go latswa mazulu marago Shem
I was at Tops izolo standing in the que and a young chap was trying to get my attention. He said "Askies Timer". He repeated it until he tapped me on the shoulder. It did not occur to me AT ALL that he was actually speaking to me