The th!nc Foundation

        In the remedial actions section of Advocate Thuli Madonsela, now Professor at Stellenbosch University, and former Public Protector, report on the State of Capture, she recommended the 'establishment of a Judicial Commission of Inquiry to investigate "alleged bridge of the Executive Members Ethics Code of 1998", "awarding of contracts by certain organs of state to entities linked to the Gupta Family".   Pursuant to the report, a commission was established with expanded terms of reference and became known as the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into allegations of "State Capture, Corruption and Fraud in the Public Sector including organs of State. Then Deputy Justice Raymond Zondo, was appointed the Chairperson of the Commission, thus occasioning the popular naming of the Commission as the Zondo Commission.  In Part 1 of the report, now in the hands of the President, in whom the executive authority of the Republic vests, Deputy Chief Justice Zondo (DCJ)...

         The centrality of integrity, as virtue leaders must possess, has become one criterion to score high in many indices of ethical leadership. Everyday experience shows that societies are willing to trade parts of their envisaged democratic order for greater ethicalness. On such grounds, member integrity management systems assert their superiority in liberation movements such as the ANC. Although the street-level experience of post-liberation struggle governments is almost universal on corruption, there are differences of opinion on how this scourge could be arrested. This rendition argues that the member integrity management system introduced by the ANC at its Mangaung 53rd Conference was a politically risky step but a giant leap for its ethical journey.   Movements with a moral high-ground heritage, such as that of the ANC, have been strong because they balanced the conduct of their liberation struggle with those leading the struggle. A construc...

        The era of thinking in South Africa is not returning, it never left, and only its activists stopped their noble role. The arc of ignorance bends away from national competitiveness. As individuals, we easily believe our thoughts are the context of all contexts, and yet our collective thoughts are in fact what has endured for the entire history of humanity. In reality, ideas that are needed in society rarely find the requisite attention, yet they compete to rise. How ideas find their way to influence the direction of society, is a function of the arrangements thinkers devise to be heard. To understand this phenomenon, the BPI platform, as a beautiful minds space, will be navigated as an abstraction of the general beauty of belonging to the pooling of ideas platform. The BPI boldly declares its mission as “to consolidate a strategic network of South Africans to build an African Business Excellence Solidarity Platform, thereby restoring the African into the cent...

        A wave of South Africanness has caught up with the country and might be redefining the nature, character, and content of politics. The transition from the apartheid regime to a constitutional democracy based on the rule of law and supremacy of the constitution has ushered in a phase of democratic consolidation. The maturity of the post-apartheid democratic state is challenged by the immaturity of some of its politicians to realise that the playbook for political co-existence and diversity of ideology can only be guaranteed by the Constitution. The chronic electricity load-shedding, declined quality of public infrastructure, unmanned national borders, rising crime rates, and, lately, water insecurity is exhausting the patience of South Africans about the political elite across political divides. Albeit unreported, and commensurate to the scale of occurrence, South Africa has been enduring significant discontent since the pre-COVID years, with various prot...

   It was in 2004, on a sweltering night in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). We were sitting in one of the only two good hotels that had survived the destruction of war when Kabila senior led his troops in the march to Kinshasa and the neglect of many years under Mobuto Sese Seko. We were reflecting on the future of Africa, dreaming of the day when the DRC would rise, leaving the pain of dictatorship, war, killing and plunder behind. How it would lift the East, South, Central Africa and the entire continent. Rich Congo It is vast, beautiful and naturally endowed. Its water is teeming with fish, and torrential rains fuel the thick forests that give rise to massive logs, powering the European and Chinese economies. Its rich soils and ample rains allow almost anything dropped on the ground to grow. Its belly has abundant deposits of copper, gold, diamonds, cobalt, uranium, coltan and oil, the wealth that was to be its curse. Mbeki’s Afric...

        In the aftermath of the 54th ANC Conference in NASREC, and since Cyril Ramaphosa has ascended as President of the ANC, the South African democratic order has for a while been defined by resurgences of in-ANC factional fights. Firing the first salvo to the rivalry was the then Secretary General, Ace Magashule, who, at a rally, declared that the term of office for a President is five years. The statement drew one of the boldest factional lines in ANC history.   The ANC, its factions, alliance partners, and leagues were drawn into a large-scale palace conflict that made it difficult to believe integrity management policy interventions, such as stepping aside, were politically innocent of their true intentions. A context where the anti-state capture and corruption program of a Ramaphosa presidency had been pitted against the RET forces, most of whom were 'visibly' charged, developed and polarised what may have otherwise been a noble policy intervention. Amid...