The quips about teaching being an “extreme sport” aside, many soberly reflected that the incident is yet another indictment of our education system, particularly in public schools. 

Discipline is a big problem — and has been central to the enduring discourse about the wisdom of abolishing corporal punishment.

But this is just the tip of what’s wrong with the education system. Its many problems include poor infrastructure, generally bad exam outcomes, a high dropout rate and an unwieldy teacher-to-learner ratio in many state schools that has seen some educators managing classes as big as 50 pupils, according to a Stellenbosch University study.

The Western Cape government has been on the defensive against the outcry that ensued after it announced the loss of 2  400 teaching jobs by the end of the year because of severe budget constraints.

The Democratic Alliance was quick to blame the national government, citing a “fiscally irresponsible public wage increase in the October budget last year that is now forcing provinces to slash frontline service posts to the detriment of the most vulnerable”. It pointed out that the bloodbath will be worse in KwaZulu-Natal, where 11  000 teaching posts may be lost.

The Good party was having none of it, pushing for a debate on the issue and vowing not to allow educators’ careers to be sacrificed “at the altar of a political fight that the Western Cape government is unnecessarily orchestrating”.

While political parties bicker over who is to blame, the reality is that millions of pupils in public schools will find themselves crammed into even larger classes, vying for the attention of ill-equipped teachers.

We hold no brief for a blanket defence of bad teachers — news sites are littered with headlines of educators behaving badly, including skiving off work and sexually abusing learners.

But we’ve also seen the best in teachers, such as the legendary maths teacher William Smith, whose recent death triggered testimonials, including from luminaries of society, many from poor backgrounds, whose lives he touched in a profound way as students.

And as the author of the Stellenbosch study, researcher Gabrielle Wills, put it: “You cannot win a war unless you train your army. Our teachers are the key agents for change with respect to providing quality learning and education for children.” 

There is no arguing that South Africa has an unsustainably large public sector wage bill and should trim its civil service.

But in doing so it must prioritise the protection of key sectors such as health, public security and education.

Parties inside and outside of the government of national unity came to the debate armed with well-considered arguments and constructive contributions about dealing with extortion, which cost the industry R68  million last year.

None minced their words in drilling down into the weaknesses in the policing system, corruption in the police service, inefficiency and underfunding. The contributors from both sides of the house were clearly more interested in parliament assisting in finding solutions to South Africa’s problems, rather than using the debate to settle political scores.

The sensible and constructive nature of Tuesday’s debate is not the first indication that a change in mindset has taken place in the parliament and in the provincial legislatures.

Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) president Julius Malema challenged President Cyril Ramaphosa in the house last week about an earlier promise by the head of state to build one million houses in Alexandra.

Malema demanded, and secured, an apology through a measured argument focused on the ethics of the president’s actions. This is a far cry from EFF members charging the stage or being removed for disrupting proceedings.

Malema was removed from the assembly’s online platform for unparliamentary language on Wednesday, but the green shoots are clearly showing.

South Africa’s seventh parliament has just started its work, and it appears to be doing so with a far more collaborative spirit — and significantly less playing to the gallery — than it did during any of the previous three terms.

At a local government level, there is little of this sense of rationality and of common purpose that is appearing in parliament, particularly in Gauteng’s hung metros.

There, the political chess game about control of the key portfolios in the cities continues, fuelled by toxic inter-party relations that have soured over the past decade of tit-for-tat collapsing of councils and ousting of mayors.Local government elections are coming and the leaders in our cities would be well served to follow the lead provided by their parliamentary colleagues, if they are to avoid being punished by the electorate come voting day in 2026.

On Tuesday, it was the turn of auditor general Tsakani Maluleke to beg local governments not to steal or waste (or at least not to steal or waste as much) of taxpayers’ money, while presenting the 2022-23 report on local government audit outcomes.

The trend of poor audit outcomes in local government has continued, with only 13% of municipalities obtaining clean audits for the reporting year.

South Africa has 257 municipalities, but only 34 govern in an exemplary manner.

That no one was particularly surprised by this number speaks volumes about how low the bar for clean governance is in this country.

It also demonstrates how immune taxpayers are to seeing their money being flung around like a cow’s tail trying to rid itself of a plague of flies. 

“Local government’s inability to comply with legislation remains a significant obstacle, with 86% of municipalities receiving material compliance findings. This marks a slight regression from previous years, with compliance findings at 85% in the last year and 83% in 2020-21,” said Maluleke.

She made her presentation to the portfolio committee on cooperative governance and traditional affairs, the chairperson of which is Zweli Mkhize, who, along with members of his family and friends, is alleged to have had his hands in the department of health’s R150  million Digital Vibes cookie jar.

It would be tragic if it wasn’t so farcical. 

What is tragic is that Maluleke’s pleas have been the same as those of her predecessors and other authority figures for more than a decade: please don’t steal. Please do more with the money taxpayers give you. Please, political leaders, try to be less corrupt.

What is even more tragic is that we know who is doing the stealing — every publication in this country is crammed with allegations of such on a daily basis, and myriad cases are sitting with our police and courts.

But unplugging those municipal patronage networks on the path to good governance necessitates that our politicians and officials be made of sterner stuff.

Sterner stuff starts at the very top of any organisation or government, and flows down like a sublime syrup, penetrating the pores of every employee or official. 

It doesn’t happen by magical thinking or nine-point plans, by press releases or “family meetings”, and it certainly won’t be found stuffed inside a couch, no matter how far down one reaches.

As juvenile and churlish as they might have been at times, South Africa needed boisterous defiance at that point in its history. The ANC ruled with a presumed majority, unchallenged by an insipid opposition that had demonstrated scant willingness to think or do differently. 

With the tentacles of state capture (which we only later found out about) slithering beneath the surface, dreary politics would have wonderfully suited the country’s bad actors.

But the EFF allowed disruption to become the status quo. In only a few years parliamentary protests went from being “hold the press” events, to barely justifying a tweet. The EFF, too, had settled into a brand — one characterised by reactionary tactics and opportunism.

Over the past two weeks, we’ve seen that once-bright flame flicker weakly. Some even murmur that we’ve seen it extinguished as a relevant political force.

Floyd Shivambu, deputy president and founding member, has gone to the uMkhonto weSizwe Party — the establishment’s new noisy neighbours. EFF leader Julius Malema, faced with rumours of further departures, has doubled down on his strongman rhetoric, doing away with any pretensions that the party and his personality were ever two separate entities.

But Monday’s show of strength painted a fragile figure.

We are watching the culmination of three months of remarkable lack of introspection. Malema has refused to acknowledge any poor performance in the decline in the national elections and will seemingly watch the organisation he has built implode before he does so. That attitude, as much as anything else, explains why he could never adapt and build on the support base he had initially established.

What makes the situation infuriating to the neutral is that South African politics still needs the EFF. The Red Berets speak to the interests of the downtrodden to a degree that no one else does. Its manifesto has some objectively intriguing ideas about addressing the grossly unequal nature of our society.

Malema is equally infuriating. Intelligent and beguiling, he promised us a new type of politician after he was ostracised by the ANC. We still see glimpses of that politician when smart questions are put to him in interviews and he is given the scope to respond. But at the lectern he resorts to the same tired populist gameplan.

The party that was marked as the antidote to political stagnancy has become one of its most painful symptoms.

This weekend, President Cyril Ramaphosa and International Relations and Cooperation Minister Ronald Lamola will attend the Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit in Harare. Their motorcade will pass streets that have allegedly been purged of protesters by Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa.

Troubling reports have ratcheted up in the past two months about the state’s critics and political opponents being thrown into jail for dissent. In the words of Human Rights Watch, the government has spent the lead up to the summit “accelerating its crackdown against legitimate and peaceful activism ahead of the August summit”.

This week, the international relations department shot down a call from the Democratic Alliance to move the SADC meeting, insisting it has no authority to make the demand. Activists’ issues, it said, “can be resolved by sitting around the table”.

That evasion betrays pro-democracy efforts across the border and brings the country’s foreign policy objectives into question.

Many South Africans welled up with pride when they saw their leaders earlier this year in Switzerland battling Israel on the legality of its invasion of Gaza. Opponents of the International Court of Justice mission were eager to highlight the hypocrisy, that it betrayed the staunch non-aligned stance adopted in the wake of Russia’s war with Ukraine. But the government could reasonably counter that in both cases it refused to be cowed by international pressure and had acted on well-thought out, self-determined reasons.

That moral standing crumbles when rested against the hollow pretexts for remaining silent on Zimbabwean repression.

Freedom of speech and demonstration are core tenets of who we are – our diverse nation is united by the belief that they are inalienable. Protest is part of the fabric of our democratic DNA. 

A country beholden to those ideals must – at the very least – publicly condemn the silencing of activists and political opponents. Bureaucratic platitudes will only further breed impunity, a resource that has always flourished around the seats of power in Harare.  

South Africa regrettably has a long history of not only turning a blind eye to the abuses of its neighbour, but actively keeping them secret. Former presidents Thabo Mbeki, Kgalema Motlanthe and Jacob Zuma all battled to keep the Khampepe report from the public domain. It took a five-year fight for Mail & Guardian lawyers to get a favourable outcome through the Constitutional Court who ordered its release. The documents would show that the 2002 Zimbabwean elections – held 12 years earlier at that point – were not “free and fair”.

That episode, and his overall silence on the Robert Mugabe regime, has irrevocably tarred Mbeki’s legacy, in particular.

President Cyril Ramaphosa would be wise to walk towards the right side of history.

Take the Islamophobic protests across the United Kingdom, the identity furore that dragged behind Algerian boxer Imane Khelif at the Olympics, and the xenophobic abuse hurled at Chidimma Adetshina in South Africa. These three disparate incidents are rooted in malevolent distortions of the truth. They share an impatience with the process of fact collection and fair analysis.

What we have watched over the past two weeks is the sacrifice of nuance.

The media has long rallied against fake news and disinformation — undeniably real dangers of society. But what is often understated is the power of framing and delivering information. Or, in a word: context. A narrative paved with cherry-picked facts can be more insidious than thumb-sucked particulars. 

No sooner had Khelif’s second-round opponent left the ring in tears than outrage was drummed up by speculation. The bit-part story that was broadcast — wilfully by some, incompetently by others — fed the vitriol until it was soon uncontrollable. Hate can rarely be rebottled after the cork has come off.

The UK is confronted with that reality. The far-right rioters are untroubled by updates to the circumstances that ostensibly first put them on the streets — the murder of three girls — as they continue embarking on anti-migrant and racist protests. The fire will continue to burn as long it is flamed by tabloid kindling.

Gayton McKenzie pounced as soon as questions of Adetshina’s nationality and her eligibility to enter Miss South Africa began to circulate. He has played off his calls for her paperwork as innocuous acts of officialdom, insisting he has a duty to investigate. But any politician in his position knows better; knows the incendiary effects of his suggestions.

Our social media masters are not going to save us. Elon Musk has been as egregious as anyone, resharing spurious notions with reckless abandon. Mark Zuckerberg might portray himself as more measured but he is the spiritual architect of the algorithms that ensure provocative content floats to the top of your timeline. 

We have to help ourselves. As readers and consumers we have to fall back in love with nuance. We cannot accept anyone’s narrative at face value and should ruthlessly scrutinise any knee-jerk reactions that are flung our way. Those of us in the media have the responsibility to not dump anything into the public domain until we have aligned the facts and considered them appropriately. The health of society, both globally and in South Africa, is too important to sacrifice in a race to be first.

The maelstrom of hate has been vicious of late. But we have the choice to get out at any point.

The wheels of justice are grinding, albeit at a painfully slow pace. But, as we learned during a trip to Limpopo this week, that is scant consolation to the victims who feel their plight has been forgotten.

Matodzi is the second VBS official to be jailed for the theft of R1.9  billion deposited by municipalities, burial societies and pensioners until 2018, when it was eventually placed under curatorship.

The bank’s former chief financial officer, Phillip Truter, was the first, and was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2020 after he — like Matodzi — pleaded guilty to charges of fraud, money laundering and corruption.

Truter has been released on parole after serving three years and six months of his sentence.

Truter and Matodzi are likely to be state witnesses in the NPA’s case against a further 12 accused — including former ANC Limpopo provincial treasurer Danny Msiza — which will resume in Pretoria on 14  August.

The matter is at the pre-trial stage and all indications are that the case will be a drawn-out one, because Msiza and former ANC leader Kabelo Matsepe have indicated they will bring a number of applications, which will delay the matter.

Criminal charges may also be brought against more people implicated in the affidavit by Matodzi — including prominent members of both the ANC and the Economic Freedom Fighters — over payments they received from the looted millions.

Six years have passed since the bank was placed under curatorship. A parallel process of the recovery of looted funds on behalf of the VBS creditors has also been under way since 2018. 

Like the criminal process, it has been painfully slow, in particular for the individual investors, pensioners and burial societies who lost everything in the orgy of looting.

They complain that much of the focus is on the funds lost by the Limpopo municipalities — which unlawfully invested in VBS in return for bribes to the officials that led them — and that they have been forgotten.

Residents this week told their painful stories of loss, their concerns about a lack of information from the liquidator and their fears that they will be the last to be remembered and recompensed — if at all.

Although the priority of recovering lost municipal funds is understood, it cannot be correct that the needs of those who are least able to survive the loss of their life savings may be left to last.

Debt is debilitating. It tears families apart, fuels crime and destroys lives. We cannot allow ourselves to be comfortable with the fact that so many of us are scraping by to meet monthly interest payments.

Innumerable micro- and macro-economic factors have led us here — and rarely are two individual situations alike. We are a grossly unequal country. Debt doesn’t discriminate by class; it ensnares some in their interminable pursuit of the excesses of modern life, and captures others who hope only to put food on the table.

But one factor continues to float to the top: financial illiteracy. We are continually taken aback by the lack of understanding of monetary matters across all sections of society. 

This perception is borne out in reliable data. According to a 2015 survey by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority and Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa has a financial literacy rate of 51%. In 2021, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development put that number at 42%.

A dearth of understanding first creates debt and then entrenches it. It is an intractable problem. Such an environment allows the nefarious to flourish. Mashonisas (loan sharks) and other unscrupulous fly-by-night microlenders lurk in newspaper classifieds and online running adverts that read something like: “Need a loan? Blacklisted? No problem.”

Despite the ubiquity of debt, we are afraid to talk about it. A lack of understanding breeds stigma, forcing many to suffer in silence until it is too late, or turn to the dangerous informal sector. 

We have to collectively change that thinking. As the late anthropologist David Graeber wrote: “If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt — above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.”

There is a vast market of some 10.09 million consumers with impaired credit records, according to the National Credit Regulator, a number that rose 2.7% during the first quarter of 2024. We should not take this increase lightly … or turn a blind eye to practices that increase it.

Authorities should be clamping down harder on banks and other financial institutes that continue to hound consumers with “courtesy calls” offering their clients new credit cards, or outrageous increases to their existing limits.

If that is not a blatant violation of the National Credit Act 34 of 2005, which prohibits the granting of reckless credit and offers legal recourse for consumers who have fallen victim to these reckless lending practices, then we don’t know what is.

But our financial watchdogs are failing us. These are the Financial Service Conduct Authority (FSCA) — which is supposed to regulate the industry and protect investors — and the Financial Intelligence Centre, which has been set up specifically to combat organised crime by tracing the financial proceeds of terrorism, drugs, arms, tobacco smuggling and the like through money laundering.

If this were not true the International Financial Action Task Force would not have greylisted South Africa in February 2023. We are now languishing under this dark cloud. Hopefully, we are also working hard on the jointly agreed (by South Africa and the task force) “action plan” to fix 22 factors linked to our strategic deficiencies that mean we fall short of the International Monetary Fund’s Anti-Money Laundering and the Combating of the Financing of Terrorism policy regime.

According to the International Monetary Fund, “These policies and measures are designed to prevent and combat these crimes and are essential to protect the integrity and stability of financial markets and the global financial system.” 

This failure has created holes in the fences of our financial markets, allowing people to prey on investors,who trustingly sink their funds into dodgy trading platforms and hand their life savings over to brokers in the hope of making incredible returns.

South Africa’s largest Ponzi scheme, Mirror Trading International (MTI) was one such online trading platform that cost investors dearly. Another is the BHI Trust, which allegedly was on the radar of the FSCA several years ago but was allowed to operate, leading to many losing their life savings when the pyramid scheme crashed last October.

MTI founder Johann Steynberg fled South Africa for Brazil shortly after the scheme’s collapse in late 2020, where he was arrested on an Interpol warrant but is now believed to have died while under house arrest on a farm. Craig Warriner was convicted of fraud earlier this year and is serving 30 years for his involvement in the BHI Trust scandal.

Usually, victims come from the most vulnerable, but professionals such as IT experts and advocates have fallen for these online trading scams. They bleed out financially and most never recoup their losses.South Africa’s fall on the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, in which it ranked 72 out of 180 countries in 2023, further raises the concern that we are facing economic lawlessness.

This creates a nightmare for the judiciary and confirms what President Cyril Ramaphosa’s selection of ANC cabinet ministers suggested — that his unwieldy coalition is beholden to the troubled inner workings of his party. Plus ça change.

There was hope that things may unfold differently after ANC chief whip Mdumiseni Ntuli took advice and withdrew the motion for the appointment of parliamentary representatives to the commission for more consultation.

Speaker Thoko Didiza ably dealt with objections from Hlophe’s uMkhonto weSizwe party and the Economic Freedom Fighters.

Consultation did happen, but on Tuesday she wrote to NGOs that there was no impediment in law to Hlophe serving on the JSC. Ntuli told the assembly sitting the same, paving the way for Hlophe’s appointment. But there is a lacuna in the law precisely because the present scenario is so unthinkable that lawmakers could not have foreseen it.

Hlophe was impeached for flouting judicial ethics by trying to sway two constitutional court justices to decide applications relating to the arms deal saga in Jacob Zuma’s favour. It now falls to him to decide whether aspirant judges can bring integrity and impartiality to the bench.

And he will do so while answering directly to Zuma, who has faced charges of rape, corruption and contempt of court. Judges who heard these cases may well invoke a reasonable apprehension of bias and ask for Hlophe’s recusal from their interviews with the JSC for promotion to higher courts. 

It will delay judicial appointments and compromise a structure that has struggled to reclaim respectability after Mogoeng Mogoeng allowed MPs who serve on it to misconduct themselves. Incoming chief justice Mandisa Maya will have to manage an inherently political problem, but is not well-placed to do so given her past friendship with Hlophe.

To avert the above, parliament’s decision will be challenged in court, primarily on the basis of rationality. It is not a difficult argument to make but it invites the court to the terrain of the legislature, where judges are rightly loath to tread. 

The alternative was for the ANC to oppose the nomination and allow the Democratic Alliance to call for a division. But the party could not trust its members who would have preferred a pact with Zuma to one with the DA to follow the whip in a secret ballot.

Hence the cop-out, probably at the direction of Luthuli House.

If the May elections signalled that voters will punish corruption and cowardice, the ANC is still not listening.