On the eve of the local elections, Dr Martin van Staden argued that South Africa's real problem was not who ran its towns, but how much power sat in Pretoria. Freshly appointed to build AfriForum's new Institute for Federalism, the legal scholar told Alec Hogg that communities were already doing the state's job, from policing to diplomacy, and that Citrusdal's farmers could not afford to wait five years for a better vote after Washington's Agoa decision. He accused the DA, IFP and Freedom Front Plus of believing in federalism only "on a sunny day", made the uncomfortable case that failing municipalities should feel the consequences of how they vote, and answered the charge that community federalism is ethnic separatism by another name..Listen here.Edited transcript of the interview.Alec Hogg (00:00) Welcome to the BizNews Edge. Tomorrow, South Africans vote for the people who run their towns and cities, and many of those municipalities barely function. So here’s a question worth asking on the eve of our election: is the problem who’s in charge, or how much power sits at the centre? My guest thinks it’s the second. Dr Martin van Staden is a legal scholar and author and, until now, head of policy at the Free Market Foundation. Well, AfriForum has just appointed him to set up its new Institute for Federalism, which will push for community self-government as an alternative to what it calls a failing centralised state. He keeps a foot in the Free Market Foundation camp too. So which hat is he actually wearing today? Let’s find out. Martin, welcome to BizNews. Lovely to have you here. Some surprises, I guess, but if you dig deeper, not that surprising, given that the Free Market Foundation and AfriForum have been working on various projects together.Martin van Staden (01:09) Yeah, thanks, Alec. It’s a great privilege for me to have been appointed to establish and then head this new institute. The Free Market Foundation and AfriForum share a dedication to federalism, and historically, as many of your listeners will know, in 1986 Leon Louw and Frances Kendall wrote South Africa: The Solution, which advocated for a very strict form of Swiss cantonal federalism for the new South Africa, and that went on to be a South African bestseller.So federalism runs deep in the veins of both organisations. So, not quite surprising. But we are now in a very fluid political environment, I guess, where this stuff is actually becoming real, practical reality on the ground, especially if you’re a follower of Dr Frans Cronje as well, who wrote his analysis of tomorrow’s election this morning in The Common Sense, where he said that this election doesn’t matter as much as people think, because communities, businesses and households are already taking over the responsibilities of local government anyway. So this is the moment. This is the federal moment, I think, of the new South Africa.Alec Hogg (02:20) Before we go into more depth, whatever happened to the Federal Party, to Frances Kendall’s political party?Martin van Staden (02:26) Yeah, unfortunately it didn’t do as well as I think federalists hoped in that first 1994 election. I think it got about 15,000 votes, thereabouts. And then most of those representatives, and I believe amongst them would be Leon van Wyk, who was mayor of George until recently and is now in the Western Cape provincial legislature, Frances Kendall herself, they all, I think, went into the Democratic Alliance, which imperfectly, extremely imperfectly, remains South Africa’s main federalist party today. So that, I guess, was a more appropriate political home for the Federal Party remnants. But the Freedom Front Plus, the DA, the IFP, these three parties at least are all nominally federalist on paper. And of course, part of the institute’s work would be to encourage them to take that from the paper into reality as well.Alec Hogg (03:24) Okay, so now you need to tell us what is federalism. And you said nominally federalist on paper, so explain that to us as well, please.Martin van Staden (03:34) So it’s a big topic, what federalism is, but it derives from the Latin word foedus, which means agreement or covenant. And that kind of tells you everything you need to know about federalism, in that it’s premised on voluntariness; it’s not premised on imposition. So the way that federal constitutional systems tend to work, and that includes South Africa’s, believe it or not, is that lower tiers of government, we call them spheres here, engage with the higher sphere based on consensus. So Cyril Ramaphosa cannot fire Geordin Hill-Lewis, mayor of Cape Town. He cannot fire Alan Winde of the Western Cape, because these are separate spheres of government that the centre is not allowed to impose itself on. The United States is the world’s, let’s call it, leading notable federation. Switzerland is a federation as well, where the relationship between the centre and the regions and the municipalities is not simply based on the discretion of the centre.Now, in South Africa it’s started to take on a more classical meaning associated with the German-Dutch thinker Johannes Althusius, who argued for a bottom-up kind of federalism. You build power locally, you build power in families, you build power in local associations, a real, tangible, practical authority on the ground, and then that flows up. And that’s how you constitute a commonwealth, a state.And that is really what has been happening in South Africa for some time now. We have this system that has been set up where the centre believes that it sets policy for everyone, and it says that we will have one police force, we will have one diplomatic corps, we will have one Department of Trade and Industry, and it will give everyone their marching orders and so on. But due to state failure, which is completely self-imposed by the ANC and company, those functions have simply gone dormant. And in their place, there has been this bottom-up construction of new authority. We have private diplomacy in this country now, where groups like AfriForum, Solidarity, the Free Market Foundation and Lex Libertas are going to the United States and to Europe to argue on behalf of their members.Martin van Staden (05:57) We have private policing in this country. We can call it private security, but really the main source of order in South Africa today is community and commercial mechanisms. Private energy provision. Increasingly, bottom-up authority is being created, and that’s really the new federalism, if we want to call it that. It’s not just going to be someone writing something in a constitution saying there will be autonomy around the country. It’s simply communities saying, “Well, we have no choice, and we eagerly embrace this responsibility that now rests on our shoulders.” And in so doing, we are renegotiating our relationship with the centre.Alec Hogg (06:38) So, what Frans calls enclaves?Martin van Staden (06:41) Yes. I think “enclave” carries a negative connotation. “Fragmentation” has been used before. Some hysterical people call it the return of apartheid, or Balkanisation and so on. But I think we should speak about it as federalisation. We are moving in the direction of a more equitable, renegotiated relationship between neighbourhoods, communities, even the provinces, and the centre, on a more voluntary basis, on a more agreeable basis that really works for everyone, rather than the ANC’s idealistic, let’s call it Marxist-Leninist, concept of top-down imposition. But yes, in practice it is what Dr Cronje calls the enclavisation of South Africa. I would just encourage listeners to see it in a significantly more positive light. This is a good thing. This is communities taking responsibility rather than waiting for rescue from someone else.Alec Hogg (07:40) The waiting part, I guess, could be quite painful for certain people, especially those in Citrusdal, after we heard yesterday that South Africa, together with Rwanda, which seems to have been forgotten, both of those countries are being kicked out of Agoa. There’s been a Busa... I don’t know if you saw Busa’s statement, Business Unity South Africa, almost downplaying it: it’s, you know, not really that big a deal. For the people in Citrusdal, it’s a very, very big deal if South African citrus is now out of the United States. So I’m sure they must be thinking to themselves, can’t we go and do some of that private diplomacy that you were talking about?Martin van Staden (08:17) We’ll see more of that, I’m sure, now. This has been happening. We’ve had the Southern African Agricultural Initiative going to the US through Dr Theo de Jager, and then Sakeliga as well, to argue for what’s being called differentiation: to say, listen, we understand that there is an issue, a conflict between the US federal government and the South African government. And by the way, Trump is leaving office in two-odd years, but the Republicans will be back at some stage. So I don’t know why some people are so excited about the idea of Trump leaving. This is not just going to blow over, as many people think it is.But going forward, there are South Africans arguing for differentiation: that if the federal government is unhappy with the national government in South Africa, it must direct its ire towards Pretoria and institute a separate dispensation for, for example, the citrus farmers, the other businesses, and even provinces and municipalities that are more positively disposed towards the United States. So I think, come what may in the midterms, come what may in the next presidential election, this is to some degree going to be the new normal in South Africa, because of the abdication of this responsibility by the centre. Thank goodness, because they’ve really made a mess of it.Now, for now, we’re not going to save Agoa. The Americans, I think, have made it clear that they cannot implement a differentiated scheme under this dispensation. But things are moving, so I’m sure there will be new understandings in time. And certainly, telling the farmers to just wait, to just vote harder, as politicians like to tell us: you just have to pick correctly every five years, then all will be fine. That is meaningless to people who have to wait those five years even though they voted exactly how they were told to vote. It doesn’t help the people of Mitchells Plain to tell them, “You have these gang wars, but you really should have chosen a different government at the centre, because SAPS is responsible for safety.” Stop telling that to those people. They don’t deserve that.Martin van Staden (10:32) Rather, the immediate thing that they can do to bring order to chaos in their reality is, as a community, to take ownership of safety and security in their area and get involved. Now, I understand some people might think that’s vigilantism. We can use scary words, but currently in South Africa we do need to bring order to chaos. And there are essentially three choices, I think. The one is the waiting game: we will just keep voting and trying, and voting and trying, until one day, in an ideal world, we get the result that we all want. The other one is we can sit on our hind legs and allow criminal forces to take over: the zama zamas, the mafias, the gangs. Or well-meaning, productive, constructive communities bring order to that chaos. And it’s that third option that we’re very interested in at the institute.Alec Hogg (11:29) Okay, now you didn’t answer the second part of my question, which was: you said the DA, the Freedom Front Plus and the IFP are nominally in favour of federalism. What do you mean by that?Martin van Staden (11:35) Yes. So I’m going to insult all of them now, and I’m sure all of them are going to be very displeased with me, but the IFP, the DA, the Freedom Front Plus, they talk a big game about self-determination, they talk a big game about restoring local governance, but where the rubber meets the road, they are all very resistant to what I would argue is the unilateral initiative that is necessary. The Western Cape, for instance, keeps saying, “Well, we need authority from Pretoria to establish a detective unit in the province.” And my argument for many years now has been: listen, you’re not going to get it. You’re dreaming a dream. They are not interested in doing that. So take the initiative, establish something that resembles a detective unit. And I think some of that is happening now, finally, after many years of pleading.DA local councillors, for example: you often see, if the community says, “We’re just going to fill that darn pothole that has been harassing us for many years,” they would say, “Oof, we don’t have municipal authorisation. Please hold off.” That is not the federalist mindset that South Africa needs under these circumstances. And I include the IFP, I include the Freedom Front Plus in that. There has to be far more eagerness to take responsibility.And there is this notion of competent municipalities. Both Hlabisa and Ramaphosa recently launched the revised White Paper on Local Government. The whole premise underlying that new policy on local government is that where there is a failing municipality, the province and the centre must essentially take over and intervene. Now, that might sound nice, and while the GNU is kind of semi-stable, it might work out relatively well. But in five years or ten years, we might have an MK-EFF government at the centre, and now they appoint who the municipal finance person is, the CFO. And now suddenly your well-governed DA municipality no longer has a DA CFO, and that causes chaos by itself.Martin van Staden (13:50) So already you see these nominally federalist parties, specifically the IFP and the DA in this context, being pragmatically in favour of centralisation, but with very little foresight. What we need to see, unfortunately, and I know this is going to sound very horrible to many listeners, is that we need to enforce responsibility: to say that if a municipality chooses ruin, if they keep electing the ANC because “this time, darn it, they will do it right,” they must live with the consequences of that, without that municipality being able to go cap in hand to Pretoria to say, “Well, you know, we stole the money, so please come bail us out.” No. Actually, the residents in that municipality must develop a very healthy anger towards their local representatives, and things must collapse there so that the residents know to vote better next time. That is part and parcel of federalism.It means that you get to enjoy the fruits of your success as a municipality, as a community, as a province. But at the same time, it must also mean that you get to enjoy the fruits of your failures. And that is where there is a miscommunication from these parties, maybe for understandable political reasons. It’s very difficult to sell to a constituency that if you vote wrong, we’re going to allow ruin to follow. But a healthy federalism would mean that if you don’t take responsibility, you will find ruin. So that’s broadly what I mean by nominal federalism. It’s federalism on a sunny day, but on a rainy day, no, we have to centralise. That is nominal federalism.Alec Hogg (15:33) Well, it reminds me of the conversation I had with the finance minister about his backtracking on the withdrawal of funds from errant municipalities, the worst of them, where it really just is a plunder party. And he said, “But there are real people involved at the bottom end, so we had to give them money.” You’re saying tough for the real people?Martin van Staden (15:57) Unfortunately, yes. This is how you develop a political culture in a country: there has to be a consequence from your vote. In South Africa currently, sure, there are consequences, but ultimately you can continue voting for the ANC year after year, maybe the EFF, maybe MK. You can embrace ruin, you can invite ruin, or you can not vote and indirectly also invite that ruin, knowing that the generally sensible people at National Treasury, even in the Zuma administrations, are going to be there to pick up the mess that you’ve made as a voter. So yes, unfortunately, to develop a mature political culture, sometimes you’re going to have to take your medicine.It sounds very heartless, but it’s a long-term view too. We want a South Africa where every sphere of government, every municipality, actually believes that if I bring ruin to the people here, they might vote me out. And that reality doesn’t yet exist. Look at the Eastern Cape. That province has just completely collapsed, and it’s still an ANC stronghold. And one has to ask at some point: do we really reward that, let’s call it, electoral misconduct, democratic misconduct, of the people of the Eastern Cape by continuing to keep the Eastern Cape a going concern, by taking money from the taxpayers in Joburg and in the Western Cape? Surely that is not a viable political system. We do have to take responsibility more seriously than just the humanitarian empathy that we might have.Alec Hogg (17:44) I guess at some point in time it all will work out. As you say, it could be a long way into the future, though, because we are a young democracy, and it could take us a long time to get there. But you talk about community federalism. Isn’t that just another word for ethnic federalism? In other words, AfriForum being primarily the white Afrikaans community in their own little enclaves?Martin van Staden (18:10) Well, under certain circumstances, that’s what it might mean. You might have people who choose to organise ethnically. AfriForum does not organise ethnically. If we’re talking about biological Afrikaner blood or white skin pigment and melanin, there’s none of that. It’s a cultural organisation that emphasises Afrikaner culture and so on. But the benefits of that community federalism flow to whoever happens to be in those communities. And as we know, in South Africa we abolished apartheid. We don’t have segregated residential areas anymore. So people from across the racial spectrum, across the ethnic spectrum, all benefit from having an active AfriForum neighbourhood watch in their area, having an active AfriForum branch in their area. And there are no hard feelings from AfriForum’s side about that, I can guarantee it.But obviously AfriForum has been working closely, and increasingly at scale, with traditional communities across cultural and racial lines to try and plant the seeds of this community federalism on a broader base, so that it’s not just limited to Afrikaners, and it’s also not just limited to the wealthy. There is a lot that poor communities can also do, just by being vigilant, just by sweeping their own streets, and it doesn’t really cost anything, ultimately, to establish a neighbourhood watch and so on. If that can happen at scale, you will see the disorder that we’ve all become very used to in South Africa replaced by real order.And if a community chooses to do that on a Zulu cultural basis, that is fine. If Midstream in Pretoria, in Midrand, decides to do that on a kind of non-racial geographic location basis, that’s also fine. Whatever basis you choose to do it on, as long as you do it peacefully, harmoniously, but ultimately firmly, we at AfriForum certainly will encourage that. And I think what AfriForum and the broader Solidarity Movement have achieved over the past 20 years is really to show that you can in fact do it.Martin van Staden (20:29) It is something that is doable. It’s not a theoretical dream of, “Maybe if communities take responsibility, they might solve problems in their areas.” No, it actually does happen. You just have to do it. And that’s really the message. AfriForum’s motto, and the Solidarity Movement’s motto, we will do it ourselves. And we encourage all communities to adopt that mentality and that sentiment in the politics that defines South Africa today. Just do it yourself. And you don’t have to do that by harming anyone.Alec Hogg (21:01) Martin, why is there such kickback from the elites? I’m again drawing on the conversation I had with Frans on Friday, where he says that it’s almost like the elites, the political elites and, one I suppose has to add, the business elites as well, love the status quo, or enjoy the status quo and its benefits. But the people are saying, “Hang on, we’re suffering here. We would like to have more cohesive political engagement, people working closely together.” Why are the elites so anti what seems to make a heck of a lot of sense, the way you put it, anyway?Martin van Staden (21:48) So look, elites by nature have more skin in the game of the status quo. They don’t want to upset the boat. You understand that the kind of businessmen who have built their business on the assumption of our country working, or not working, as it does would be very concerned about something that could upset that status quo. Certainly the political elite have power in the current centralised model, and they know that once you have a self-organised civil society that is no longer as dependent on the centre as it used to be, then their power really comes into question.Now, a healthy political society will see that as a good thing. You don’t have to have all the power as a politician. Maybe it’s good that the people have some power themselves, and communities have some power. But that is not how our political elite functions. And it’s unfortunately also a very ideological phenomenon. The political elite in South Africa ultimately comes from a Marxist-Leninist background, where the political religion is essentially that “we are the revolutionaries of the insight. We understand the class warfare that is happening in South Africa. The proletariat doesn’t have this consciousness yet, and we must lead them. We must tell them how things are.” And then, if they get caught up in this community federalism thing, they might countenance their own oppression, is how these ANC Marxist revolutionaries would see it.Also very scientific socialism. It’s derived from a very negative part of the French Enlightenment, this idea that society needs a plan; there must be a plan at the centre that we all broadly follow. And that works a little bit in well-developed countries, but in a country like South Africa, where the state almost voluntarily said, “We are going to loot at such a scale that our own capacity to enforce this plan is extremely diminished,” obviously that is just never going to happen. So there is that ideological aspect, and that cognitive dissonance between their desire to loot and their desire to keep society flowing according to their preset plan, their national democratic revolution, essentially.Martin van Staden (24:08) So that’s broadly why you see some pushback from the elites. But ultimately, what is actually happening on the ground is what’s going to carry the day. And what we see on the ground... remember, most voting-age South Africans do not vote. We have to remember that a minority of the eligible electorate are voting. So there is a very big rejection of formal politics in this country. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing, but that is the reality. So the political elite would do well to catch up with this reality. The AfriForum Institute for Federalism is also a response to this reality: to see how we can make sense of this, and how we can channel it in a productive, constructive and peaceful way that ultimately benefits all South Africans.Alec Hogg (24:54) So what are you going to be doing for the next five years? Just give us a track forward on what you would define as success.Martin van Staden (25:02) Yeah, so very simply, it is legitimising federalism. South Africa is a federal state. People don’t believe me when I say this, but the Constitution is written federally. It’s a federal constitution, a centralised federal constitution, let me emphasise. Like Austria, like Russia, we are a federation that is centralised. But we don’t talk about it in that way. So a lot of what I’m going to do is normalise the rhetoric of speaking about federalism and decentralisation, not as an aberration, not as something where, goodness, we are now forced to do this thing, but rather as a positive thing: this is actually how it should be. Communities should have the responsibility for bringing order to the chaos that faces them specifically.So normalising and legitimising thinking about South Africa through a federalist lens. That’s going to take the form of conferences. It’s going to take the form of working closer with AfriForum branches and with other communities in South Africa, to help them understand that this is something that you are allowed to do; this is something that you should be doing. Research, of course, into this question, looking at various models of community federalism all around the world. Just this year we saw various states in Nigeria taking unilateral action and establishing state militias against the wishes of the federal government in Nigeria, and that’s now been retroactively allowed by the federal government in Nigeria. So case studies like that, to see what’s happening in other jurisdictions around the world. How has the Nation of Islam in the US approached the question of community self-organisation amongst the black community there? How has Hezbollah, the horrible terrorist group in southern Lebanon, approached having medical aids for their members? How do these things work? And then seeing to what degree you can apply a peaceful and productive version of that in South Africa, in addition to what Solidarity and AfriForum have already achieved, and how we can make that acceptable to a broader range of South Africans, as an insight from within the Afrikaner community.Martin van Staden (27:19) So that’s just a very bird’s-eye view of how the next five years might look.Alec Hogg (27:20) Is it because people are so "gatvol" that you are being given a job like this to do?Martin van Staden (27:31) Well, yes, of course. We must react to the reality that South Africa is in. If all had gone well for the last twenty years, if Trevor Manuel had remained Minister of Finance and the communists weren’t eagerly embraced in the hallways of government, South Africa might have retained a five, six percent growth rate. We might not have had load shedding if people had listened to Eskom and more generation had been built and everything was maintained. Crime is the big thing. If SAPS wasn’t hollowed out with sheer incompetence and corruption, then it’s very conceivable that there would have been no need for any of this in South Africa; that we would have been a veritable regional superpower at this stage.But alas, certain political choices were made, and this is now the reality that we live with. And I’m not sure that it’s reversible politically. And I say this with a lot of deference to the good politicians that we have in South Africa. But I’m not sure that just electing a DA municipality in Joburg, or getting a Democratic Alliance-led coalition government in South Africa, while very much, I would say, a good thing, is going to fundamentally alter that logic of managed decline, at least not speedily. So at least for the foreseeable future, if communities want to be rescued from the chaos of powerlessness, waterlessness and rampant violent crime, they are going to have to do it themselves, at least to a degree.Alec Hogg (29:13) Just to close off: Frans Cronje was talking about the unitary state holding, with the rational approach being that the DA, with the middle class, gets together with the ANC, with the aspirant middle class, and that this is something the people want but the politicians don’t want. Let’s just say there’s a Damascene conversion and the politicians say, “We see it, this is what we need to do.” In that kind of scenario, the unitary state scenario where you have a strong political leadership grouping, does that attack your federalism theory?Martin van Staden (29:54) Not at all. I think any such arrangement, which is not the worst arrangement, but any such arrangement where the ANC specifically continues to play a meaningful role, will simply amount to managed decline. Unfortunately, the Democratic Alliance specifically has shown itself not to have the Machiavellian grit that is necessary for dealing with a party like the ANC. The ANC is overflowing with Machiavellian grit. It knows how to manage the DA. The DA has struggled with that. There have been some successes. But in any governing arrangement where the ANC retains a large degree of influence and leverage, my analysis over the last few years has been that the DA will defer to “steady as she goes”. “We can’t upset the apple cart, we can’t threaten to pull out of the coalition, we cannot act unilaterally.” Ronald Lamola, ANC foreign minister, acts unilaterally; he does whatever he wants. But DA ministers in the same government tell us, “No, we can’t act unilaterally, we need Cabinet’s blessing.”With that kind of mentality, it will simply be managed decline, because the benefit that the ANC has is that it has 30 years of policies and institutional culture that it has embedded deeply at every single level of government in this country. And even if you have the ANC as a minority partner, 30%, in a DA government, the ANC is still buttressed by that institutional reality and its own Machiavellian manoeuvring. So under those circumstances, again, that would probably be a better outcome than many of the alternatives, but it is still ultimately an outcome of managed decline. That is not going to be the outcome that delivers massive job creation for South Africa, which I guess is the most tangible big thing that needs to happen. That is simply not going to happen under those circumstances. So order has to be created.Alec Hogg (31:53) But the DA people are not stupid, Martin. They’re not stupid. They would know this as well as you know it. Is it because of who’s funding them that they act and behave with this Marquess of Queensberry rules approach when they’re going in to take on a street fighter?Martin van Staden (31:57) No, of course not. No.Martin van Staden (32:08) Yes, surely that is a big part of it, of course. No, there are very smart people in the DA, and when you speak to them in private, you get the sense of frustration as well. I’ve presented to groups of DA and FF Plus councillors and so on before, and I’ve always been struck by the eagerness amongst these people, these DA and FF Plus representatives, to actually get things done. But they are constrained by party culture and party institutional culture. And of course, I think the funders play a big role in that.And that brings it full circle to what we said earlier about the business elite in South Africa. They are very worried about upsetting the understanding, the very little certainty that there is in South Africa’s business environment. They wouldn’t want to create more uncertainty. And then there’s also, of course, the question that if they’re seen to be supporting this party that has now taken the gloves off, as it should, they might be victimised by an ANC regulator, an ANC-aligned regulator, or an ANC minister. So unfortunately it’s a very complex web of considerations and political forces, which thankfully do not bind communities and civic associations to that degree.And that’s really a golden opportunity: to say that you can’t do it alone. You can’t just take the civic approach; it’s part of it. But at least take that off the table. At least let us be able to say that communities have now started securing themselves; there is now safety on ground level in South Africa. That will take the pressure off significantly, to start dealing with these more macro issues. And where there are AfriForum neighbourhood watches, where there are special rating areas that non-AfriForum groups have set up, where they have put in boom gates, even in townships, crime collapses in those areas, just because of a mentality shift. Not “I’m going to vote for this party because it has a nice idea about crime and safety”, but rather “We’re going to pay a little bit in, and we’re going to establish this thing in our neighbourhood.” And there that problem is resolved. And once a lot of that is taken care of, then the macro issues can start being addressed. And it doesn’t have to take long.Martin van Staden (34:28) These are very practical things that the community just has to decide to start doing, and at its own pace it can happen very quickly.Alec Hogg (34:38) Well, you’ve planted quite a lot of seeds. I think if anybody examines the reality of South Africa, the oligopolistic way that business runs in this country, the way that... well, BEE is not bad for big business. Actually, it works very well for big business. It’s the smaller businesses that get nailed as a result of it. And then you wonder why there isn’t more resistance to this terrible system that is hurting the economy on every single level. And we all know it, but there isn’t really the kickback that one might anticipate if you had such a destructive policy in a different society, perhaps. But who knows? We are continuing to go forward. It’s a fascinating new role that you’ve got, Martin. We look forward to hearing your focus points and the areas where you are having successes, and perhaps failures, and keep pointing out the rational approach, because here at BizNews we really do always stand for the rational perspective. Dr Martin van Staden is the head of the new AfriForum free policy unit that is looking at federalism, the Institute of Federalism, and he’s still associated with the Free Market Foundation. And I’m Alec Hogg with your BizNews Edge.