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A president and a PM, at home and abroad

ANTHONY BUTLER: Ramaphosa excels as president but prime ministerial duties are lacking

While shining at UN General Assembly, at home he fails to address stagnant economy, failing municipalities and dodgy police leaders

First published in Business Day

26 September 2025

An SA president has to be both a president and a prime minister, because the country’s modified parliamentary system merges the roles of head of government and head of state into a single office.

As prime minister Cyril Ramaphosa is the head of the executive branch of government, chosen by and accountable to parliament and required to maintain the “confidence” of the legislature to remain in office. He sits at the apex of a centralised administrative system, controlling cabinet appointments, influencing budget allocations and wielding authority within the governing coalition. He also has to win elections on his party’s ticket.

Simultaneously he is the head of state, a role that in most parliamentary systems is held by a separate, often ceremonial, figure such as a monarch or a figurehead president. As head of state he has to rise above daily partisan politics to represent and speak for the entire nation.

These two roles sit uneasily together. The partisan and inherently divisive nature of a prime minister’s job repeatedly conflicts with the inclusive, unifying responsibilities of a president. A successful leader must navigate these tensions, but no postapartheid president has fully succeeded in this task.

Nelson Mandela was a president but not a prime minister, excelling at the symbolic, unifying presidential role but showing little interest in the administrative machinery of state, delegating those prime ministerial duties to his deputy, Thabo Mbeki.

Mbeki was the opposite: a prime minister but not a president. He expertly managed the state apparatus and policy process, but his political style was divisive and factional, and he failed to provide the unifying presidential leadership the country needed.

Jacob Zuma used his prime ministerial power to appoint cabinet members as a tool for patronage, disrupting the state for personal and factional goals. His presidential leadership was limited, appealing mainly to his provincial base and traditional leaders rather than the whole nation.

Ramaphosa has done his best to combine these roles with some dignity, rebuilding state institutions undermined by his predecessors and keeping his party together while also looking to provide unifying and symbolic leadership during crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

However, the tensions in SA’s political system become extreme when overlaid by a second challenge: a president has to lead overseas but also address crises at home. As Ramaphosa addressed the 80th UN General Assembly this week he cut a strikingly presidential figure, laying out his priorities for SA’s foreign policy: global justice, peace, trade, and UN reform.

He strongly condemned what he described as violations of international law in Gaza, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, voiced concern over genocide findings, called for an end to a vindictive embargo on Cuba, and reiterated support for rights to self-determination.

He reminded listeners that climate change is an existential threat, highlighting how Africa, despite contributing little to the causes of climate change, suffers disproportionately from its effects. He sounded the alarm over cutbacks in international development assistance; collapsing health programmes; and weakened maternal, child and adolescent health indicators; and proclaimed that the world must “fight poverty, not wars”.

The strain between foreign commitments and domestic politics troubles leaders in almost all countries. Look at UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who can claim some remarkable achievements abroad — re-establishing relations with European partners and keeping the Trump administration onside — while confidence in his leadership has collapsed at home and his party is already scrabbling round to identify a new leader.

As president Ramaphosa was eloquent in New York. Back at home though, there was no prime minister to talk to the nation about a stagnant economy, municipalities that can no longer provide water and a police service leadership in whom the public has lost almost all residual trust.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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A new iteration of BEE is possible

ANTHONY BUTLER: Consensus about BEE policy needs to emerge

First published in Business Day

12 September 2025


The contentious debate about broad-based BEE (BBBEE) has been a real problem for the country. If coalition government between constitutionalist parties is to survive the next decade, some rudimentary consensus about the policy needs to emerge.

Until recently the polarisation has been deepening. BEE’s defenders insist it has created a black capitalist class, black managers and professionals who would otherwise have remained excluded. It has also brought changes in employment equity, skills development and enterprise support.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has always championed the framework he helped create and from which he benefited so handsomely. He has rebutted claims that BEE hinders growth, framing it as an investment in the economy, not a cost. He has strongly backed the Black Industrialists Programme and a proposed R100bn Transformation Fund to bolster black entrepreneurs. Last year he supported legislation to reinforce compliance through enhanced incentives and possible punitive measures such as fines and public “naming and shaming”.

The president’s only real accommodation of critics has been support for the Equity Equivalent Investment Programme, which allows multinationals to invest in skills, innovation and supplier development rather than transferring equity directly.

BEE has meanwhile faced intensifying criticism from opposition parties, businesses and civil society, who argue that the main beneficiaries have been a politically connected, ANC-linked elite rather than ordinary black citizens. It has been a mechanism for patronage, with state contracts channelled to politically connected business people under the guise of empowerment. BBBEE has also been weaponised to justify corrupt procurement practices.

The DA’s hostility has hardened. The party rejects race-based legislation and proposes instead a nonracial economic empowerment framework with a “social impact” approach to integrate sustainable development goals into procurement and other regulatory frameworks, and an “economic empowerment for the disadvantaged” model to target poverty rather than race. An empowerment index for companies would meanwhile measure their social and economic inclusivity to mobilise shareholder activists.

Civil society actors want to replace elite enrichment with broad-based, skills-driven, employment-generating empowerment, by prioritising employee share ownership schemes, community trusts and co-operatives over elite ownership deals, and linking state support and contracts to demonstrable worker and community benefits.

There has also been renewed interest in ordinary citizen investment in stock markets through their pension or investment policies, in carefully designed retirement schemes that encourage saving, in expanded home ownership, and in reducing the barriers to entry that shut out the small, medium and micro enterprises that are the most immediate mechanisms of economic empowerment for most people.

Some of the dwindling band of ANC intellectuals have been influenced by Malaysia’s recent rethink of indigenous empowerment. Its new road map for economic transformation for the bumiputera (sons of the soil) refocuses on upskilling and mentoring of particular individuals, helping smaller enterprises move up the value chain, and giving empowerment agencies dedicated roles as talent developers or “super-scalers” of businesses — with measurable outcome targets, rather than broad objectives or mere compliance metrics.

The ANC’s recently released discussion documents for December’s national general council (NGC) show a flickering — if not yet a significant uptick — of the liberation movement’s formerly flatlining cognitive functioning charts in this area. The NGC “base document” concedes that BEE has primarily incorporated an elite minority of black people, and a few women, into the existing capitalist structure.

It insists that empowerment policies must be “reoriented to benefit more than an just elite few”, and suggests employee ownership trusts and co-operatives, better support for small, black-owned businesses, a public venture capital fund or credit-guarantee scheme, and BEE incentives linked directly to actual job creation.

What is needed is a bit more academic research and an open mind on all sides about potential change. A broad consensus on the way forward might conceivably yet be forged. But don’t bet on it.

  • Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.
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Trump may just be the beginning

ANTHONY BUTLER: Maintaining US democracy amid threat of strongman rule

Rise of populism will induce other presidential candidates to embrace authoritarian aims

29 August 2025

First published in Business Day

South Africans like to complain about the feebleness of their president and his seeming inability to get anything done. Yet citizens of the world’s most advanced banana republic have a far worse problem: a leader running roughshod over democratic institutions. 

It is tempting to attribute this crisis to the personality of Donald Trump, to sinister corporate interests linked to the Republican Party, or to the vagaries of the historical moment. But a new book by William Howell and Terry Moe, Trajectory of Power, shows that the underlying drivers of strongman rule in the US will not abate at the end of Trump’s presidential term. 

The US constitution envisages a separation of powers between three branches of government, and a federal system that disperses agency. For much of the 20th century Republican and Democratic presidents alike pursued greater unilateral power. They shared a common motivation to establish legacies as great leaders and to achieve significant accomplishments, which led all presidents to embrace unilateral options to circumvent the normal policy process. 

A factor enabling this expansion was the rise of the “administrative state”, which has provided presidents with vast resources, expertise and personnel to deploy. When public support for presidential activism increased, the Congress and courts delegated substantial discretion, leaving presidents opportunities for unilateral action — executive orders, memoranda and national security directives, but also discretion embedded in legal statutes and the appointment of activist agency leaders to enact change through rule making.

Leaders of both parties, meanwhile, expanded the “institutional presidency”, creating a centralised and politicised White House whose reach was extended by the Office of Management & Budget and the Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs. 

Where Republicans and Democrats have differed has been over fundamental objectives. Democrats have sought to regulate business, expand rights and mitigate inequality, poverty and discrimination, generally supporting the administrative state and viewing its agencies as partners in these “liberal” missions.

In contrast, Republican presidents have staunchly opposed much of the administrative state, seeing it as “progressive overreach”. From Ronald Reagan onward they have tried to control, retrench and generally sabotage federal agencies. This approach has been influenced by the unitary executive theory, a Republican legal framework that claims exclusive presidential authority over the entire executive branch, allowing presidents to ignore statutory constraints and aggressively reshape or cut administrative and regulatory interventions.

To maintain democracy, Howell and Moe argue, four steps need to be taken. First, the existential threat posed by the strongman presidency must no longer be denied. A demagogue with authoritarian aspirations really can use the vast unilateral powers vested in the presidency to subvert the basic features of democratic governance. The rise of populism and its support for strongman leadership is a continuing force that will induce other presidential candidates to embrace authoritarian aims. 

Second, the unitary executive theory must be countered because it makes a mockery of the separation of powers, allows presidents to ignore statutory constraints, and encourages them to interpret the constitutionality of statutes themselves. Clear legal boundaries for executive authority must be established and upheld by the courts — a consideration that applies in other countries to “revolutionary” doctrines that purportedly place parties above the state. 

Third, democracy dies when elites brazenly flout democratic norms, practices and rules. Such arrogance should never be accepted, even on the grounds that the leader is responding to crisis or making government more effective. 

Finally, the administrative state is foundational for a healthy democracy, for delivering services, and for solving any society’s problems. Attacks on the rule of law and the impersonal exercise of power by the state are direct threats to democracy.

The grinding work of rebuilding and protecting impersonal state institutions remains a fundamental tenet of benevolent national leadership. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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SA’s human rights crisis

ANTHONY BUTLER: Worsening human rights crisis a reality that cannot be ignored

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have joined the US in painting a depressing picture of SA

First published in Business Day

15 August 2025

A dispassionate assessment may be better than a “national dialogue” even if it is wrong. After all, its findings can be rationally accepted or contested. For example, the department of international relations & co-operation reacted negatively this week to the release of the US state department’s global report on human rights, describing its SA section as “inaccurate and deeply flawed”.

The congressionally mandated annual review has long been a staple reference work for international human rights advocates. This year’s delayed issue follows a shake-up at the department’s bureau for democracy, human rights & labour, which US secretary of state Marco Rubio previously lambasted as a platform for “left-wing activists”. 

The “reoriented” state department assessment cites the signing into law of the Expropriation Bill as a “substantially worrying step towards land expropriation of Afrikaners and further abuses against racial minorities in the country”, and highlights claimed “antisemitic rhetoric” at high levels of the government. These are tendentious claims and they can be contested.

SA is not the only country whose human rights environment has supposedly worsened in a manner convenient for US foreign policy. For example, this year’s report took aim at Brazilian courts for suppressing the speech of supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro.

Favourites of President Donald Trump, such as Israel and Russia, received implausibly positive assessments. The host of US migrant detention centres, El Salvador — castigated only a year ago for arbitrary killings, torture and harsh and life-threatening prison conditions — suddenly smells of roses. 

However, other assessments of the human rights situation in SA also paint a depressing picture of the country, most notably the annual country reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Amnesty points to a worsening situation in several areas: high levels of gender-based violence, with perpetrators enjoying impunity; the judicial system failing to process cases; a high murder rate accompanied by a decline in police capacity to respond; nationwide water shortages attributed to vandalism and ageing infrastructure and a white paper that threatens to erode refugee rights. 

HRW points to anti-immigration rhetoric and xenophobia, increasing violence against women and girls, and a growing scourge of severe child malnutrition, with severe food poverty among 23% of children. It also details unlawful arrests and deportations of asylum seekers. Both reports note excessive force in criminal justice, increasing deaths from police action, and violence against human rights defenders — including killings linked to their work by state actors. 

It is reasonable to question the veracity of the products of the Trump administration, but no doubt we should also read the publications of do-gooder international organisations with a sceptical eye. Such reports exhibit political and cultural biases, the influence of their funders, and often fail to capture the situation on the ground accurately. But when they all suggest there is a deteriorating human rights environment, it is important to sit up and listen: to go beyond reflex rebuttals and take seriously the evidence upon which these claims are based. 

SA is fortunate to have a state president who has viewed human rights not just as legal principles but as core values that should guide governance, promote equality and ensure dignity for all, driven by his understanding of constitutionalism and a belief in inherent human worth. Indeed, Amnesty had a pivotal influence on Cyril Ramaphosa’s life, campaigning for his release during his first detention, funding his family’s legal expenses, and subsequently offering support to make his life after detention more tolerable.

What differentiates the assessments of external organisations from a domestic “national dialogue” is that they allow us to compare change over time and across countries. They are grounded in factual claims that can be contested or accepted. In contrast, the national dialogue will only generate further indeterminacy and ambiguity. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Beware the ageing strongmen that presidential systems bring

ANTHONY BUTLER: How SA’s parliamentary system turned the tide on political zombies

Citizens should reflect on the strengths of our constitution when it comes to ageing leaders who cling to power

01 August 2025

First published in Business Day

The increasing number of SA citizens who want direct presidential elections and a “strongman” leader should revisit the series Game of Thrones.

In one memorable scene the warrior Sandor Clegane fights his monstrous and zombified brother during the sacking of King’s Landing. The brother, Gregor (“The Mountain”), has been rendered almost unkillable by the enigmatic Qyburn, a master of unnatural anatomical research who has turned him into a towering, silent, undead version of his former self.

Gregor now has superhuman strength and refuses to die, even when stabbed repeatedly through the chest and throat. Exhausted and bleeding, Sandor realises that his brother is no longer really mortal. He yells something like “firkin die!” as he stabs his brother in the eye with a dagger — but to no effect. In a final act of desperation, he wrestles the Mountain through a crumbling wall, sending both of them plunging into the all-consuming fire below. 

In today’s world modern medical science has replaced Qyburn’s alchemy, providing leaders in their seventies and eighties with preventive cardiology, advanced neurological monitoring and pharmaceutical regimes that mitigate the visible signs of ageing. Improvements in managing Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s allow medical teams to mask or manage symptoms that would previously have ended a political career. Discreet surgeries, hormone treatments and cosmetic procedures meanwhile maintain the strongman image. 

Access to absolute power provides access to the best care, while perceived good health allows leaders to extend their grip on power. The state controls public information about a leader’s health and longevity, bolstering an illusion of immortality or invincibility, which supports the myth of the irreplaceable strongman. 

As a result, much of the world is now dominated by zombies. Cameroon’s Paul Biya was born in 1933. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has ruled Equatorial Guinea since 1979. Yoweri Museveni of Uganda came to power in 1986 and is close to 80, while Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, is 86 this year.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who has held the presidency or prime ministership since 1999, and Xi Jinping of China, who continues as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and president of the country, are both in their seventies.  All of these leaders have rigged their political systems to prolong their rule and suppress opposition.

In the US Donald Trump, having returned to the presidency in 2025, is 79. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in and out of office since the 1990s, is 75. 

Age reduces adaptability, responsiveness to younger generations and openness to reform. Elderly strongmen erode institutional checks, weakening legislatures, courts and electoral commissions while building up personal networks of loyalty. This undermines state capacity and bureaucratic professionalism, as decisions are filtered through sycophantic inner circles. 

While age must not be equated with incapacity (especially when it comes to newspaper columnists), cognitive decline, deteriorating health and reliance on unelected aides are perilous. Advanced years can lead to erratic decision-making, policy paralysis or dangerous adventurism, especially in regimes with nuclear capabilities. 

Ageing strongmen pursue repressive foreign policies as they seek to insulate themselves from international accountability. They may feel they have little to lose, and pursue high-risk strategies to avoid post-retirement prosecution. 

By clinging to power these leaders prevent the emergence of new political generations. This has long-term consequences: it discourages ambitious younger politicians from entering public service and hollows out political parties, which become passive vehicles for patronage. The lack of meaningful renewal leads to stagnation, corruption and a fragile political culture. 

In the light of these global pathologies, citizens should reflect on the strengths of SA’s constitution. Our own political undead, such as former presidents Jacob Zuma and Thabo Mbeki, aspired to third or fourth terms, in person or by proxy. It was our parliamentary system that made it possible to turn back this potential tide of zombies. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Why we don’t get the leaders we need

ANTHONY BUTLER: Executive credentials would be a boon for presidential candidates

Endeavours of frontrunners Paul Mashatile and Fikile Mbalula have been disappointing

 First published in Business Day

18 July 2025

In his recent study of executive power in pre- and postapartheid SA, Super President, University of Johannesburg academic Bhaso Ndzendze highlights a striking institutional shift. None of the country’s democratic-era presidents has held a ministerial portfolio before assuming the highest office. While most served as deputy presidents, their exposure to the machinery of government was indirect and more ceremonial than substantive. 

As Ndzendze shows, the traits now essential to becoming president, such as media savvy and the ability to build patronage networks, have little to do with the technocratic or administrative demands of governing. This marks a sharp contrast with apartheid and colonial-era predecessors, who almost uniformly passed through cabinet roles, often retaining ministerial authority even while occupying the presidency or prime ministership.

Ndzendze’s claim that national governance would benefit if future presidents were required to hold ministerial posts concurrently will be strongly contested. But there is a strong case for electing a president who has demonstrated executive capability. 

Zweli Mkhize campaigned unsuccessfully for the ANC presidency in 2022. He had been a strikingly effective health minister from May 2019 to August 2021, steering the country through the Covid-19 crisis with a combination of steely efficiency and respect for science.

Few contenders to succeed President Cyril Ramaphosa can boast similar executive credentials. The endeavours of the two front-runners have been disappointing. Deputy president Paul Mashatile was a middling minister of arts & culture, whose main achievement was successful completion of a visit to sample cheese varieties in France. 

ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula travelled widely in 2010-17 as minister of recreational activities. Later and more demanding portfolios, dealing with policing and transport, exposed his inability to master complex policy challenges.

Some of Ramaphosa’s recent ministerial appointees have performed with distinction, but few are plausible candidates for the presidency. A few are in the wrong party. Others are demographically challenged by virtue of being white; or, if black, nonetheless too white. 

Candidates associated with KwaZulu-Natal are in demand, because only an anticipated collapse of the Jacob Zuma cult keeps alive the mirage of ANC renewal. National Assembly speaker Thoko Didiza, a superb former minister, would make an excellent president but her gender identity — and her honesty — are career limiting. 

This means Senzo Mchunu — an exceptional minister with strong support in the ANC — has been a frontrunner. He is ageing, but prominent global icons — one thinks of Noam Chomsky, Clint Eastwood, David Attenborough, Jane Fonda, Jürgen Habermas, Olusegun Obasanjo, the Dalai Lama and columnist Peter Bruce — have continued to perform at the highest level despite their advancing years. 

Unfortunately, when the highest office beckons a leader such as Mchunu is subjected to unprecedented scrutiny from the media and the financial intelligence agencies. At the same time, they need to acquire resources for their bid. How do you build a campaign machine and secure the half-a-billion rand you need to compete, much of it in cash, when under such enhanced scrutiny? 

Some are business tycoons with magical cash dispensers in their sofas. Others try to divert state resources to pay for their campaign vibes. A few are sponsored by parastatal supply chain barons, or magnates who control illicit tobacco, alcohol, or construction mafias. Still others ingratiate themselves with international sponsors from countries that specialise in internet manipulation and are happy to stuff banknotes into their diplomatic bags. 

The crooks are specialists at covering their tracks, and they tend to succeed in this game. Capable ministers, who also need cash and a communications machine, find that acquiring these necessary campaign tools brings about their ruin. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Time for leadership turnover in the DA?

ANTHONY BUTLER: Whitfield debacle boosts DA activists who want leadership change

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

04 July 2025

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s calculated and clinical firing of DA-affiliated deputy trade minister Andrew Whitfield brought only a mild financial market reaction. 

No professional observer of coalition governments worldwide is surprised when tensions escalate as elections draw closer. Coalition partners prioritise their own party’s identity and voter base, adopting distinct or populist positions to differentiate themselves. They distance themselves from unpopular policies.

Moreover, pre-election periods are times of intensified disagreement over budgets, appointments and key reforms. Coalition manoeuvres are usually calculated moves that reflect the shift from co-operation to competition as parties prepare to face voters alone. 

However, key DA leaders responded to Whitfield’s sacking with heart palpitations and pointless bluster. Federal leader John Steenhuisen, in particular, launched an ill-considered rhetorical fusillade and upped the stakes with a 48-hour ultimatum. This all ended with the damp squib of withdrawal from a national dialogue that has not even started. 

Federal council chair Helen Zille made matters worse by denying that Whitfield’s private, party-sponsored mission required permission. Why then did Whitfield write to ask for permission, or apologise after the event for going without Ramaphosa’s agreement? After all, Whitfield was reportedly part of a DA delegation that engaged with senior US officials regarding SA-US relations.  

The Whitfield debacle will strengthen the hand of DA activists who believe the topmost leadership of the party needs to change at the DA’s elective federal congress, due to be held in April 2026. 

Steenhuisen was an excellent parliamentary leader and he has been a decent minister, but recent events have highlighted his limitations. Zille is enormously accomplished, but she is a polarising figure who antagonises not only her own activists but also potential coalition partners.

The pivotal position she holds as federal council chair surely requires a lower key figure in the mould of long-term former incumbent James Selfe. Many DA activists hope Zille will depart to contest the Johannesburg mayoral seat, where her rebarbative qualities could be more fruitfully employed. 

DA delegates might well face a choice between two candidates for the federal leadership in April: communication minister Solly Malatsi and Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis.  

Malatsi has been in the DA for 20 years, and in parliament for a decade. His messaging offers a welcome contrast to wordy and rambling leaders such as Steenhuisen, former federal leader Mmusi Maimane, or basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube. For his part, Hill-Lewis has accomplished much — and been a brilliant communicator — as mayor. 

Coalition politics is a long game. In the natural cycle of a coalition government it is likely that the existing coalition will dissolve under pressure as the demands of maintaining support, managing defections and preparing for future elections escalate. Disputes between parties are inevitable in a coalition. As time passes and the next election approaches, the incentive to emphasise difference over cohesion will only grow.  

We may even find the unity government dissolving. Confidence-and-supply agreements, in which smaller parties support the government on key votes and keep the president in office, are not impossible. A minority ANC government, backed by legislative agreements or informal pacts, in which parties work together to pass specific pieces of legislation, is also quite conceivable. 

In such circumstances party leaders need cool heads. Moreover, parties such as the DA have strong reason to avoid the alienation of potential future partners, and to strive to retain the trust of their activists and voters. All of this would be easier without the baggage — and the temperamental shortcomings — Steenhuisen and Zille bring to coalition politics. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Commissions of Inquiry Predictably Impede Prosecutions

ANTHONY BUTLER: Zuma likely to share blame for collapse of state capture prosecutions

Rather than chiding the NPA’s head, the focus should be on former president’s decision about the timing of commission of inquiry

First published in Business Day and BUsinessLive

20 June 2025

SA citizens like to blame the national director of public prosecutions for the collapse of state capture prosecutions. They should rather take on the politicians who deliberately brought about this predictable outcome. 

Critics stridently insist National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) head Shamila Batohi must stop making excuses and immediately prosecute potential miscreants flagged by the Zondo state capture commission. On Tuesday she even had to listen to demands for her resignation from an MK MP, Sibonelo Nomvalo, who called her “incompetent” at a parliamentary justice committee meeting. 

This comes on top of a Centre for Development & Enterprise (CDE) report last week that called for a new NPA appointment mechanism. The CDE’s executive director, Ann Bernstein, pointedly observed that “without the right appointment process … the country risks repeating past mistakes”. 

But rather than castigating the NPA’s head it might be more instructive to focus, as the British media have done this week, on political leaders’ decisions about the timing of statutory commissions of inquiry.

Immediately after scandals involving “grooming gangs” — groups of men who targeted vulnerable children for sexual abuse in Rotherham and other English towns a decade ago — there was a circumscribed independent inquiry (the Alexis Jay Report).

Authorities were concerned that a judicial inquiry would interfere with outstanding or possible prosecutions. Only this week did Prime Minister Keir Starmer — himself a former prosecuting agency head — institute a full public inquiry into the scandal. 

In contrast, former president Jacob Zuma set up a commission to proceed in parallel with ongoing investigations, in full knowledge that statutory inquiries have legal powers that sit uncomfortably with criminal law. Zondo witnesses often received “Section 3(4)” undertakings under the Commissions Act, meaning they could claim privilege against self-incrimination during their testimony. Their compelled answers were generally inadmissible against them in a later criminal trial. 

Zondo’s final report predictably created headaches for prosecutors around what lawyers call derivative use of evidence and tainted investigations. Defence lawyers can argue that prosecutors only discovered evidence because the accused was compelled to testify, which can be challenged as a violation of the constitutional right to a fair trial.

They can also argue that evidence was gathered in a process that would not have satisfied the requirements for criminal investigations, potentially opening the door to constitutional challenges. The Constitutional Court has not yet had an opportunity to clarify when derivative use of inquiry evidence is permissible and under what conditions compelled evidence contaminates a criminal case.

Judicial inquiries can certainly run alongside criminal investigations in a well-resourced justice system. Police and prosecution teams can be embedded alongside commissions, actively involved in separating out evidence safe to use in court. But the NPA had no resources or capacity to do this. 

This means the NPA has to reconstruct criminal cases. Gathering fresh evidence independently of the commission’s work depends on new witness interviews, independent forensic audits, fresh financial records, and lawfully obtained search and seizure material, all of which requires human and financial resources the NPA still lacks.

This all illustrates a well-known “sequencing” finding from comparative law and politics: public inquiries, without strong prosecutorial institutions working in parallel from the start, make successful criminal prosecution harder rather than easier. This is why countries typically avoid running full public inquiries in parallel with criminal investigations.

When Zuma appointed the Zondo commission — albeit under heavy legal and political constraints over its terms of reference — we can assume he was fully aware how events would unfold. After all, he had the best possible legal advice — we were paying for it.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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The property rates dilemma

ANTHONY BUTLER: DA has to beware of progressive taxes on real estate wealth

Once ratcheted up and disconnected from local services, the tariffs will never come down

First published in BusinessLive

06 June 2025

The flexible intellectual gymnasts of SA’s political elite have adopted a variety of contorted positions on the desirability of “wealth taxes” in recent years.  

The EFF has unequivocally favoured soaking the rich, calling for a direct tax on high-net worth individuals (other than illicit cigarette manufacturers), expropriation of other people’s property without compensation, and levies on luxury goods (other than Breitling and Louis Vuitton).  

The DA, in contrast, has argued that wealth taxes undermine investor confidence and encourage tax base erosion. The ANC leadership has meanwhile steered its habitual “fudge and inaction” middle course, endorsing wealth taxes in principle while arguing for cautious implementation.

Given that many stores of wealth — for example offshore assets, trusts, art collections and herds of breeding Ankole cattle — are hard to detect and value, the SA Revenue Service will need to establish a comprehensive wealth register as a tentative step towards a formal wealth tax. 

While the EFF and the ANC support wealth taxes, and the DA opposes them, wealthy Cape Town residents believe DA mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis is launching a “stealth wealth tax” in the city. 

Revenue is needed to service Cape Town’s growing population (soon to top 5-million), replace shrinking central “equitable share” funding, and invest in long term water, sanitation, transport and electricity infrastructure.

Hill-Lewis’s latest financing proposal, open for comment until June 13, escalates rates on higher value properties and indexes services for water, sanitation and other services to property values. 

Property rates have historically functioned as user charges that pay for local services tied to property ownership. Like capital gains tax and estate duties, such wealth-linked taxes have not been viewed as formal wealth taxes, in this case because they are not applied to total wealth, which includes cash, bonds, equity, artworks and luxury goods. In Cape Town though, the boundary between municipal revenue source and wealth tax has arguably become blurred. 

Metropolitan authorities were designed as “unicities” so that higher-income households and businesses could cross-subsidise low-income households, and established areas could fund the incorporation and flourishing of new neighbourhoods and residents. A progressive rates system ensures the rich contribute more to city revenue, helping fund basic services for poorer communities and redress apartheid-era spatial injustices. 

This approach is the right one, and it is the way great cities are built. However, if cross-subsidies grow too fast, property rates start to resemble wealth taxes. The relationship between services and taxes is severed, and the vital accountability mechanism that this maintains is eroded.

Homeowners whose asset values rise while their incomes do not — pensioners, for example — are forced to sell their homes to benefit the city fiscus, when the national fiscus would benefit eventually through estate duties. 

Cape Town is in a better place than other metros, in part because of its mildly meritorious behaviour but in large measure because other cities have crashed and burnt under the ANC. The current DA incumbents must be careful not to raise property taxes simply because they can. This could set a dangerous precedent: progressive taxes based on real estate wealth will never come down once they have been ratcheted up and disconnected from actual local services. 

Finance minister Enoch Godongwana justified his abortive VAT increases a few months ago on the basis that he needed the money to fund front-line services. The DA pushed back against this lazy recourse to tax rises and insisted that he focus instead on efficiency savings.

Many richer Capetonians believe the same should be true of the mayor of Cape Town. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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ANTHONY BUTLER: Golf is a convenient obsession for the global elite

It is no surprise that Ernie Els and Retief Goosen attended the White House meeting

 First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

23 May 2025

Golf is no frivolous sideshow in international politics. The delegations that met in the Oval Office on Wednesday included two of the greatest professionals of the modern era, Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, and two of its less talented amateurs, presidents Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa. When Ramaphosa finally emerged from the White Madhouse, he claimed the golf-themed meeting had gone “very well”.

Leftists have long claimed that the world’s most advanced banana republic concentrates power in a small, interlocking elite that dominates political, economic, and military institutions. Representatives of the elite share common backgrounds, world views and interests, their integration reinforced by education in elite universities, overlapping seats on company boards, and memberships of specific social institutions — including golf clubs.

In SA, likewise, exclusive clubs such as Randpark, Houghton or Fancourt are important networking spaces, in which businesspeople, officials, and politicians can mingle informally. Many members of the new political elite have adopted the sport, while ANC golf days have become routine fundraising events.

Gated golf estates have produced walled enclaves of privilege, but they have also nurtured elite networks in which powerful people interact informally, build trust and reinforce group identity.

Even golf’s scourges of racial and gender exclusion have been partially tackled. One Transnet executive apologised for her late arrival at a function because of an overrun of an employer-financed golf lesson that was intended to mitigate her exclusion, as a black woman, from routine parastatal meetings on the golf course.

Golf also promotes global elite cohesion, through pro-am events, corporate-sponsored international tours, day-trips linked to global banks or investment summits, and jet-and-golf resort circuits in Dubai, the Caribbean, or Mauritius.

US presidents, Middle Eastern royals, Asian billionaires and African political leaders can interact outside formal institutions, engage in “soft lobbying” and trust-building, and exchange sensitive, or even classified, information. Memberships in elite clubs, such as Augusta, The Els Club in Dubai, or Trump’s own Turnberry in Scotland, serve as global status markers, and provide arenas of sociability and informal governance in which relationships can be cultivated. Golf may truly be an obsession for many of the rich and powerful, but it is a highly convenient obsession.

This columnist once asked Ramaphosa if he had ever cheated at golf; he seemed genuinely horrified by the idea. Trump, in contrast, an enthusiastic golfer of modest ability, often reports purported victories — especially in his own charity tournaments — that are not corroborated by those who played against him.

On Wednesday, many viewers of the Oval Office spectacle would have been reminded by the presence of these greater and lesser golfers of a famous scene in the movie Goldfinger. Secret agent James Bond, played by Sean Connery, outwits the villainous Auric Goldfinger on a luxurious links at the gold-and-gilt obsessed criminal’s “Royal St Marks” golf club.

Goldfinger is an expert golfer, calm and calculating. But he is also a cheat, whose caddie secretly switches a ball that he had hit out of bounds, allowing the villain to avoid penalty strokes. But Bond tricks Goldfinger into playing the wrong ball on the final hole, which under the rules of golf means disqualification.

The movie is a reminder that the game of golf is bound by moral rules, but that elites will twist or break them. The resemblance between the Bond and Goldfinger face-off and the Oval Office drama was sharpened by the presence at the latter of US vice-president JD “Oddjob” Vance, Trump’s — or rather Goldfinger’s — squat Korean chauffeur, bodyguard and golf caddie.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.