It is always such a treat sitting down with Dr Naledi Pandor. And no matter how many times I do, I always leave with something rich.

There are politicians who answer questions like they are reading the terms and conditions on a banking app. Then there is Naledi Pandor, who answers like your smartest auntie has arrived, sat down properly, and is now going to explain the world to you.

And frankly, we need more of that.

This is the long and short of it: Democracy is not a side quest

I started by putting to her something many young South Africans say privately and online: democracy does not mean much if life is hard.

Pandor was having none of it. For her, freedom and democracy are inseparable. Democracy is not just voting every five years. It is people choosing who governs them and shaping the society they live in.

Then came the killer line. If democracy does not matter, what exactly are we choosing instead?

Autocracy? Dictatorship?

“I refuse to do that,” she said.

I asked her about studies showing some young people would accept a dictator if their basic needs were met.

She did not blame the youth. She blamed us.

She said it would be a failure of adults if young people do not understand how societies are built and why democracy matters.

Honestly, it was painful but fair.

Because if all young people see is unemployment, corruption and potholes, then democracy can start to look like a scam with branding.

That is not only a youth problem. It is a leadership problem.

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We then moved to global politics, where everything currently feels like a group project designed by chaos.

Pandor said the current moment is frightening precisely because humanity should know better by now.

We have technology. We have knowledge. We have history books. And yet here we are.

Her diagnosis was sharp. She says some leaders mistake power for wisdom and they think having power means doing whatever they like. But eventually, that destroys the very thing they claim to protect.

So how should young people understand Mandela?

Pandor said young people cannot fully understand Nelson Mandela unless they understand apartheid.

Without that context, Mandela becomes a motivational poster. A superhero. A man with vibes.

But when you understand the brutality of apartheid and the sacrifice required to resist it, then you understand Mandela the human being, not just Mandela the brand.

So what gives her hope? Young people.

What keeps her up at night? Leaders who can press nuclear buttons.

Same, ma’am. Same.

There was something refreshing about hearing a public figure speak with seriousness, clarity and conviction, without sounding robotic or rehearsed.

Pandor reminded me that politics can still be thoughtful. That leadership can still have substance. And that sometimes the smartest person in the room is also the calmest.

Watch the full interview and our must-watch game of world leader Tinder. You will never believe how she swiped!

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Cosmetic procedures are more visible than ever leading to a darker side where people are going to extreme lengths to meet impossible beauty standards. For some, that means turning to backdoor or unlicensed operators who promise cheap, fast transformations but deliver dangerous, often irreversible outcomes. The pursuit of beauty is no longer just about enhancement; in many cases, it has become a risk people are willing to take with their own bodies.

In a recent News24 report, unqualified cosmetic practitioners were linked to botched procedures, infections, disfigurement, and even death, underscoring how unsafe these underground operations can be.  That is the reality behind the glossy images and social media trends. When medical procedures are treated like casual beauty services, the consequences can be devastating.

To understand the other side of the industry, we went to a higher end aesthetic clinic located in Rosebank Johannesburg, and spoke to Dr Bhabha, where the world of beauty looked very different. Instead of shortcuts, there was consultation, skin analysis, personalised treatment planning, and a clear emphasis on technique and safety.  What we saw there was the polished, professional side of aesthetics, which caters to people who can afford expert care, proper equipment, and a more measured approach to enhancement.

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In conversation with Dr Bhabha, we got to better understand the world of aesthetic medicine and the pressure social media places on people to chase unrealistic results. Filtered images, polished before and afters, and endless beauty content have changed how people see themselves, often blurring the line between what is achievable and what is simply curated for the feed. The result is a growing disconnect between expectation and reality, where aesthetic treatments are judged by their final look alone, without enough understanding of the skill, care, and medical judgement behind them.

So while the opinions around cosmetic treatments will forever be split, one thing is clear: the pressure to conform is only growing. On one end of the spectrum, people are risking their health in unsafe, unregulated spaces; on the other, legitimate clinics are turning beauty into a highly skilled, expensive, and carefully managed service. In the end, both worlds reveal the same truth. Whether above board or underground, the aesthetics industry is being fuelled by demand, insecurity, and the promise of transformation.

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I’ve been following Sudan for a long time.

It sits close to my heart in a way that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t been paying attention, and I know most people haven’t. Which is part of what makes this so hard to sit with.

This month marks three years since the war began. Three years. And somehow, we are now entering the fourth.

I keep repeating that to myself because it doesn’t feel real when I say it out loud. I just finished an interview that I genuinely don’t know how to come down from.

There’s a kind of restlessness in my chest, like something hasn’t settled properly. And like always, when I don’t know where to put my feelings, I write it out. So, bear with me.

I spoke with Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, a man who has spent 26 years investigating war crimes.

I went into our conversation thinking I was going to learn about how war crimes are verified in Sudan. And I did.

But what I walked away with was something I didn’t expect, the image of a 45-year-old war crimes investigator, one of the most experienced in the world, standing in front of the UN Security Council in July 2023 and begging.

I felt something drop in my stomach when he said that. I’ve interviewed a lot of people, and I can’t remember the last time a single word made me feel that unsettled.

He told me:

“I’m angry all the time since July 2023. That’s when we privately briefed the UN Security Council for the first time of seven as it relates to El Fasher. I had never before in my life begged. And I begged the UN Security Council to send troops to El Fasher to try to protect the people who were there because we knew what the Rapid Support Forces were going to do.”

Seven briefings. He said seven. And I just kept thinking about what it must feel like to walk into that room, lay the evidence on the table, and watch nothing happen. Then do it again. Then again. Then again.

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Here is what three years of war in Sudan actually looks like, if you’re willing to sit with it.

YEAR ONE: 2023

The war erupted on April 15, 2023 after two generals who had jointly staged a coup, and who had ruled Sudan’s transitional government together, and were supposed to be shepherding the country toward democracy, turned their weapons on each other instead. What followed almost immediately, was a war on civilians. It has now been described by the United Nations as the worst humanitarian catastrophe on the planet. Not one of the worst. The worst.

And most people have abandoned it.

Three months into the war, Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab had already gathered enough evidence to warn the US Government, the United Nations, and the Security Council directly. They said a genocidal massacre would happen if El Fasher fell to the RSF.

Think about that for a moment. Three months in and the warning was already on the table.

Raymond and his team were doing something that sounds almost impossible, piecing together ground-level truth from satellites orbiting 450 miles above the earth. In Sudan, where journalists can’t safely operate and aid workers can’t safely reach entire regions, that is often one of the few ways to prove what’s happening at all. So, they measured. They tracked. They cross-checked everything. And they went to New York and they begged.

The UN Security Council didn’t act.

YEAR TWO: 2024

By 2024, everything they had warned about was already unfolding. The RSF had begun their siege of El Fasher, the last major government stronghold in Darfur, still outside their control, home to hundreds of thousands of civilians and internally displaced people who had already survived the Darfur genocide of the 2000s. Satellite images showed something happening simultaneously in the farmland surrounding it. The RSF began systematically burning the farming communities surrounding the city. This is the part of the conversation where I felt physically uncomfortable. I remember shifting in my seat, like my body was trying to create distance from what I was hearing.

Between March and June 2024, at least 41 farming villages around El Fasher were destroyed through arson. One village was burned seven times. These weren’t random acts of destruction but communities that grew the food that fed the entire city. They were predominantly Zaghawa communities, the same ethnic group the RSF was targeting inside El Fasher itself.

This is the part that made my stomach turn during the interview. Because what YHRL proved scientifically, forensically, from space is that the RSF were engineering starvation. Deliberately. Methodically. And they could prove it. I asked Raymond how do you prove genocidal intent, especially through satellite imagery. Essentially what they’re describing here is a forensic investigation, except the crime scene is hundreds of miles below.

Raymond explained it like this:

“We are measuring the length of objects. We are measuring colour. We are measuring the way objects behave in reference to each other and the way objects change over time as it relates specifically to our work on proving intentional starvation. The fire events go up over 500% versus previous years and they are all localized to communities that are ethnically in the target set for the Rapid Support Forces. What this report ends up doing is being able to prove intent without the statements of the perpetrator being required. They intended to specifically burn these communities in these ways and in each case, they have a specific repeating effect on food security for the population in El Fasher, Abu Shouk, El Salam and Zamzam camps.”

Fire events all producing the same outcome, with farmers displaced, fields dying, and a city slowly being starved from the outside in. They had the forensic methodology to stand up in an international court and demonstrate, without a confession, that this was genocide by design. The data showed a map of intent and that map was presented to the people with the power to act. They didn’t. Even writing this now, I feel that same tightness in my chest. Because it’s one thing to hear and see violence. It’s another to understand that it’s being calculated in that way, with that level of intent.

YEAR THREE: 2025

I’ll be honest, this is the section I had to stop writing halfway through and come back to. In April 2025, the RSF attacked Zamzam Camp, one of the largest internally displaced persons camps on earth, killing civilians, burning homes, and driving over 400,000 people out into the desert.

People who had already been displaced once, twice, some of them three times over. In October, the RSF had built a literal earthen wall around El Fasher, sealing the city shut. It fell on October 26th, 2025, after 500 days under siege. In the days that followed, satellite imagery identified over 150 clusters of objects consistent with human bodies on the ground. Raymond told me that the grass was growing through the market stalls. The stalls were falling over. And a city was emptied.

I don’t know why that detail has stayed with me more than anything else, but it has. Maybe because it makes the absence feel real. A city doesn’t just disappear, but in that moment, it kind of did. By late 2025, Sudan had effectively split in two. The RSF controlled large parts of Darfur, while the national army held the east and the capital regions.

The country that was once home to one of Africa’s most hopeful democratic uprisings had become a fractured, bleeding thing that the world had largely stopped looking at. In 2025, satellite images of El Fasher showed blood from space. Red discolouration on the ground, visible from orbit. It was the images that finally made the world wake up to Sudan. YHRL documented it, published it and for a moment the world briefly sat up and paid attention. And then moved on.

Raymond told me what he believes happened there:

“We watched the city get murdered preventably from space, in an event that probably killed as many people as the nuclear detonation in Nagasaki. It was one of the single largest mass casualty events in human history since World War 2. It was the most accurately predicted, the most precisely in detailed warning, over two and a half years before completion of the massacre, where we had exquisite intelligence about what they were trying to do and what they were going to do. Information had never been the problem. The problem was political will. The West’s relationship with the United Arab Emirates mattered more than the lives of the people in El Fasher. They didn’t matter enough. And so, they died.”

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Nagasaki. The word made me go completely still. I remember just sitting there, not even writing anything down for a moment, just letting that word hang in the air. I’m still sitting with it now, if I’m being honest. I don’t think I’ve fully processed it. There was something else that he said that I sat with for a long time after the interview ended. The one I keep coming back to.

“The West’s relationship with the UAE mattered more than the lives of the people in El Fasher.”

This is not a conspiracy theory, or an activist’s rhetoric. It is a forensic conclusion, from a 26-year veteran of war crimes investigation, who watched it happen from space and is still angry about it three years later. As he should be. As we all should be.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

Today, Sudan enters its fourth year of war. Right now, 34 million Sudanese people need humanitarian support.

That’s nearly two thirds of the entire country. 14 million people have been displaced, a quarter of the entire country’s population. 21 million face acute food insecurity. Some estimates put the death toll at 400,000. The numbers are so large they almost stop feeling real, and I hate that, because they are real.

And what scares me is that the same pattern is starting again that preceded the fall of El Fasher and is emerging in El Obeid, a city in Kordofan currently under RSF siege. Amnesty International has warned that the window to prevent a repeat of El Fasher is fast closing. We have seen this before. We know how it ends.

THE THING I KEEP THINKING ABOUT

Raymond has spent 26 years investigating war crimes. He filed almost 70 reports on El Fasher alone. He briefed the Security Council seven times.

And El Fasher fell exactly the way he said it would. He is angry. And there’s something about that anger that feels justified in a way I don’t think I can fully put into words.

The evidence was visible from space. Three years into this war, going into a fourth, the evidence hasn’t changed. Only the scale has. I don’t really have a neat way to end this. I don’t think there is one. I just know I couldn’t sit with all of this and not write it down.

Until next time.

Z

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It’s been a while since I last chatted to Rise Mzansi leader Songezo Zibi who is pretty busy these days as chair of Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts.

And frankly, a lot has changed since the 2024 general elections.

He says South African politics is shifting from substance to spectacle.

Zibi argues that politics in 2026 is increasingly driven by engagement, virality and “vibes” rather than bread-and-butter issues, as citizens become overwhelmed by misinformation, digital noise and political fatigue.

He is not wrong.

In that environment, many voters are checking out altogether, even as the consequences of politics grow more severe.

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In our chat, Zibi reflects on his own journey from outsider to elected politician, saying distrust in politicians now extends even to him simply because he joined the system.

But he insists meaningful political change requires exactly that: entering institutions, building credibility and doing the hard, often unglamorous work of reform.

He says one of the biggest lessons from launching Rise Mzansi was that South Africans still look for a track record, even when they claim to want “anti-politicians.” I found that fascinating.

A major theme in the interview is Zibi’s belief that South Africa’s political class has been hollowed out by the withdrawal of professionals from politics.

He reminded me that when the ANC was formed in 1912, it was a bunch of clever elites.

Zibi argues that too many skilled South Africans prefer to remain adjacent to power rather than pursue it directly, leaving leadership spaces vulnerable to weaker candidates, especially in local government.

For him, rebuilding politics is a long game that starts with serious people choosing to participate.

That philosophy shapes how he approaches Parliament.

As chair of Scopa, Zibi says he has deliberately pushed the committee away from political theatre and toward technocratic accountability.

Rather than chase headlines, the focus is on systemic reform: improving governance at state entities, setting standards for public appointments and using oversight to solve real problems. Unsexy politics, really.

He points to issues like the Road Accident Fund’s massive backlog — more than 453,000 claims affecting over 4 million people — as proof that detailed parliamentary work can have life-changing consequences.

We debated whether people care and he insists that people stop him at the grocery story about it.

On coalition politics, Zibi argues that South Africa’s problem is not simply too many parties, but the poor quality of leadership and the lack of unifying figures, especially in municipalities.

He is blunt about the dysfunction in local government, warning that without capable candidates and collaborative leadership, instability will deepen.

He is equally frank about President Cyril Ramaphosa, describing him as cautious rather than malicious: sometimes taking the right decisions, but often too slowly.

But then I pushed if that caution was malicious on Ramaphosa’s side. Zibi shook his head.

More broadly, Zibi believes the ANC is no longer the only credible vessel for progressive politics and that South Africa’s political “soul” remains centre-left, creating space for a social democratic alternative.

Despite his grim assessment, Zibi is not without hope.

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What keeps him going, he says, are the small victories in Parliament and the many overlooked public servants who continue to hold the country together.

His final answer to why South Africans should still believe in the country is simple, emotional and telling: because, despite everything, it is beautiful.

You don’t want to not watch the full episode.

Give it a watch and let me know your thoughts.

Best,

Q

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In South Africa’s comedy scene, the laughs often mask a far more complicated reality. As the industry evolves, making a living from comedy is becoming increasingly difficult, with many performers forced to rethink what a sustainable career actually looks like.

The comedy economy is under pressure. While stand-up has long relied on live audiences and club circuits, limited venues, small budgets, and inconsistent turnout mean that income from gigs alone is rarely enough. Many comedians are now turning to alternative revenue streams like corporate bookings, brand work, and digital content to stay afloat.

At the same time, the rise of social media has fundamentally changed the landscape. Online platforms have lowered the barrier to entry, allowing new voices to gain visibility quickly, but they have also intensified competition. Attention has become a valuable currency, and comedians are now expected to perform not just on stage, but across multiple platforms.

We began at the V&A Waterfront, where we spoke to comedian Yaaseen Barnes about navigating this shifting industry. From building a career over more than a decade to adapting to the demands of digital platforms, his experience reflects how comedians are being pushed to evolve beyond traditional stand-up and think of themselves as brands.

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Then we headed off to a live comedy night at Clarke’s Bar to see how this plays out on the ground. These spaces are often self-funded, community-driven, and operate on tight margins, with organisers reinvesting earnings just to keep shows running. For many comedians, these stages are less about income and more about exposure, practice, and staying relevant.

Through conversations with comedians and organisers, a clear picture emerges of an industry in transition. One where passion drives the work, but financial stability remains uncertain.

As the business of comedy continues to shift, the question becomes not just who gets to be funny, but who can actually afford to make a career out of it.

What do you think the future of comedy in South Africa looks like?

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There’s a chilling phrase that has stayed with me. Someone had sent a message to a political activist from Zimbabwe,” You have to go to the police, or you will come to the police with flowers on your chest.” This is the stark reality of those speaking out against the Zimbabwean government.

For months, I’d been watching reports come out of Zimbabwe, arrests, intimidation, the quiet suffocation of dissent. Then public hearings on the constitutional amendments turned violent. People who showed up to speak against the bill were beaten. Students were arrested. And the hearings kept going anyway, the government apparently unbothered by the optics. So I went looking for someone living through it. After searching, I found Youngerson Matete, who’s been moving between safe locations, in hiding, and fearing for his life. He shared his story with me, of how he landed up in exile after fearing death and violence in Zimbabwe. He’d been sleeping under bridges on bad nights, and trying to escape the shadow of the state security agents. All because he stood up against a proposed constitutional change in Zimbabwe that critics say could keep President Emmerson Mnangagwa in power till 2030 and beyond.

The man in hiding

He’s been a political activist for over ten years, promoting democracy, mobilising communities, doing the slow unglamorous work of civic life. He has been training and organising young people to attend the public hearings on the constitutional amendments, to show up and make their voices heard. That work made him a target. The government accused him and his network of inciting violence and of training young people outside the country to destabilise Zimbabwe by force. He told me that it is all a fabrication. But fabricated or not, the consequences were real. I asked him to walk me through his journey of how he ended up in exile.

“It’s because from the beginning of March to where we are now, I’ve seen increased threats around me using my family, my brothers, being tortured by people who claim that they are from the president’s office, looking for me. I really do not have a sense of freedom because the ghosts of the state security agents who have been harassing me for the last three weeks, still follows me. Sometimes I still have nightmares when I’m sleeping. I hardly step out of the door. I can’t go anywhere because I don’t know if I’ll be safe. The government has got a network of state security agents around the region, which they follow people, abduct them, kill them or do whatever that they want to do.” - Youngerson Matete

State security agents visited his family. They showed up at every place he tried to sleep. He ran out of money. The border crossing to safety was its own ordeal. This was actually his second time fleeing, he’d briefly left in October last year during street protests, then gone back. Going back cost him. And even after making it out this time, the fear still stays with him. I asked him what it costs, emotionally, mentally, to keep speaking out knowing the risks. His answer was careful and heavy. He talked about the psychological toll of constant surveillance, the way it strips away ordinary life. He mentioned comrades who have developed PTSD, some who broke down entirely. Female activists sexually assaulted and left without any rehabilitation support, carrying the damage alone. He said he’s currently attending counselling himself, trying to stay functional.

“It’s something you really don’t wish on someone else,” he told me. “But it’s where we are.”

His matter of factness took me aback. I could see he was shouldering a great burden, but still insisting on fighting for his country, despite the immense risk that has followed him.

The constitutional coup?

Matete’s story is set against the political backdrop of President Emmerson Mnangagwa, now 83, who came to power through a military coup in 2017, orchestrated largely by his then-ally and current vice-president, Constantino Chiwenga. He was re-elected in 2018 and again in 2023. His current term was supposed to end in 2028. The proposed amendments, which critics have dubbed “Agenda 2030,” would push that to 2030. The proposed changes go further than just extending Mnangagwa’s term. They also include scrapping direct presidential elections altogether, replacing the public vote with a parliamentary one, where ruling party MPs would effectively choose the next president. Given Zanu-PF’s long-established grip on parliament, this would move Zimbabwe closer to a system where power circulates almost entirely within the party. Other proposals would expand the senate, redraw constituency boundaries, and return the electoral commission to an official widely seen as partisan. Critics say each of these changes, taken together, is about locking in one-party dominance for the long term. In a bold statement, Matete called this a constitutional coup.

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“So what you are seeing now is an unconstitutional attempt to violate the constitution. Some are calling it a constitutional coup, just an extension of the 2017 coup that we saw in Zimbabwe. What they’re trying to do is just creating a precedence of amending the constitution further and civilian future. We are not going to have elections in 50 years, we are not going to have elections in a 100 years. We are now in a dynasty. Cecause once you open that gate, you can’t close it.”

Matete told me that under Zimbabwe’s constitution, changing presidential term limits requires a referendum. And if the sitting president would personally benefit from that change, a second referendum is required, one that cannot happen less than six months after the first. Those rules exist specifically to prevent what critics say is now happening. On paper, Zimbabwe has a 90-day consultation process. In reality, the government compressed in-person public hearings into just four days across roughly 60+ locations, often giving people only a few hours to speak. I asked Matete what he thought the constitutional hearings means for the legal process being used as a way to further authoritarianism in Zimbabwe. His answer stopped me in my tracks.

“Yeah so what the government has done is that they’ve abandoned pretences of democracy and rule of law. They are forcing people through the chaotic and shambolic public hearings that are being organised by parliament, where those opposed to the Bill are not allowed to speak, they’re physically being beaten up, being hunted. We are seeing young people, students being arrested who are opposed to that and actually have some students are currently behind bars. It’s like a worker who extends his own contract before consulting the employer and then comes back and says, ‘I’ve awarded myself this extension, is it okay?’ And you’re not allowed to say it’s not okay. You’re beaten up.” - Youngerson Matete

The hearings were packed with bussed-in ruling party supporters. Zanu-PF structures controlled the microphones, handing them only to those they approved of. People who came to oppose the bill were sidelined, ignored, or worse. By the second day, the main coalition of civil society groups defending the constitution had walked out, declaring the process a charade. This followed a pattern going back months, when in October 2025, a civil society meeting to discuss the amendments was firebombed.

Takunda’s story

In a tragic tale, Matete told me about a student leader named Takunda, affiliated with the Zimbabwe National Students Union. Takunda attended one of the public consultations in Harare. He hadn’t even spoken yet, he’d just arrived to observe, when he was grabbed by what Matete described as state security agents or their proxies and assaulted him. He is currently in custody. His crime, as Matete put it, was simply showing up.

As Matete described it plainly: the government has abandoned the pretence of democracy. And he has a pointed way of framing what’s at stake, not just for Zimbabwe, but for the region. Millions of Zimbabweans already live in South Africa, driven out by poverty and political instability. If the constitutional order collapses further, that pressure only grows, and the consequences spill across borders. What neighbouring countries forget is that Zimbabweans are just trying to make a living and survive. But Matete told me that he still fights for a Zimbabwe that will welcome its people from South Africa and the diaspora back home.

The power struggle within Zanu-PF

What’s less visible from the outside is that these amendments aren’t just about Mnangagwa vs. the opposition, they’re also about Mnangagwa vs. Chiwenga. The two men have a complicated history. It was Chiwenga, as military chief, who made the 2017 coup possible. The informal understanding at the time was that Mnangagwa would go first, and Chiwenga would follow. Extending the term to 2030 effectively kills that arrangement, blocking Chiwenga’s path and consolidating Mnangagwa’s hold and his family’s influence, before any transition can happen. Zanu-PF’s factional tensions, never far below the surface, are being pulled tighter.

Beyond these internal divisions, what we’re seeing in Zimbabwe is part of a wider trend recently, where leaders who came to power through military or dominant-party systems using legal changes to extend and consolidate power. Across the continent and beyond, leaders have used legal mechanisms, constitutional amendments, court appointments, referendum manipulation, to entrench themselves. What makes Zimbabwe’s situation particularly grim is the duration. From the Gukurahundi massacres of the 1980s to the violent suppression of protests in 2019, speaking out in Zimbabwe has always carried a cost. The current moment is not a departure. It’s a continuation.

“Since 1980, speaking out against the government, you will get killed, arrested, disappeared. We have comrades we don’t know where they are, 10 years, 15 years, since 2000. Some since 1980. What it has done is it is put a climate of fear among the ordinary people in Zimbabwe “ - Youngerson Matete

What I keep thinking about

Matete said something near the end of our conversation that I’ve been turning over ever since: “What Mr Mnangagwa is failing to understand is that Zimbabwe cannot be placed in his pocket. It is a country that was fought for by many people and many people still believe in it, despite that many things are not working and we would want to make sure that our country works. It’s an existential threat that we are facing, so we are fighting for our lives.”

He said it almost matter-of-factly. He’s been threatened, chased out of his own country, separated from everything he loves and he still believes Zimbabwe belongs to its people. That it can be saved. That young people can save it. He used another image that stayed with me too: once you open the gate on constitutional manipulation, you can’t close it. He’s not just fighting for 2030. He’s fighting for what comes after. What struck me most, though, wasn’t the scale of what he’d lost, it was the humanness of what he wants back. He wants to go home. He wants to garden. He mentioned flowers, which felt unbearably poignant given the threat he’d received. He loves his country. He wants to keep fighting for it.

Whether the amendments succeed is not certain. Analysts point to the fractures within Zanu-PF, the lingering question of what Chiwenga does next, and a fragmented but present opposition provides complications that the ruling party hasn’t fully resolved. But uncertainty about the outcome doesn’t mean safety for the people caught in the middle of it. My conversation with Matete made me realize that what’s happening in Zimbabwe raises a bigger concern: how easily legal systems can be reshaped to extend political control and how ordinary people are left to live with the consequences.

Somewhere, Matete is attending counselling sessions, trying to sleep without nightmares, waiting for the moment when it might be safe to go home and plant something. He’s not waiting to give up. He’s waiting to go back home.

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I truly did not want to spend my Monday morning talking about Elon Musk. But after yet another weekend-long meltdown about the country he was born in, here we are.

A quick disclaimer. There is nothing new about the Musk-Starlink drama. Starlink wants to operate in South Africa. South African law requires any company seeking a licence for network services to comply with local ownership rules, including 30% local ownership. No, South Africa is not the only country with laws like this. Musk refuses to comply, wants the law changed for him, and has once again gone on a rant about it.

So that is that.

But what triggered the latest tantrum?

Clayson Monyela, the deputy director-general for public diplomacy at the department of international relations and cooperation, tweeted a meme of a child looking completely unimpressed at an extravagant ice cream bowl covered in sparklers.

“Elon Musk watching the more than 600 USA companies investing in South Africa, complying with South African laws and thriving. Zero drama,” he captioned it.

I chuckled when I saw that. It was classic South African humour. Dry, petty and funny. But it clearly got under Musk’s skin.

“Stop being such a fucking racist, you asshole,” the billionaire replied.

Then he went on a familiar bender, recycling old lies and disinformation.

He claimed it was absurd for him to “surrender” 30% of his business in order to operate in South Africa.

Then he revived the old white crosses video falsely presented as evidence of murdered white farmers.

Oh, and he also claimed that the South African government gets kickbacks from current service providers and sets the rates, and that Starlink cannot enter the market because he refuses to pay bribes.

And when that was not enough, he upped the ante.

“All the politicians in South Africa who push their viciously racist laws should be sanctioned, barred from travel, declared criminals and their international assets seized,” he posted.

Then he repeated another old lie.

“South Africa won’t allow Starlink to be licensed even though I was born there, simply because I am not black. We were offered many times the opportunity to bribe our way to a license by pretending that a black guy runs Starlink SA, but I have refused to do so on principle. Racism should not be rewarded no matter to which race it is applied.”

He went on and on, calling South African politicians racists who should be shown no respect anywhere in the world.

“Shame on the racist politicians in South Africa. They should be shown no respect whatsoever anywhere in the world and shunned for being unashamedly racist.”

Responding to a Bloomberg article about Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana not attending a G20 finance chiefs meeting in Washington, he wrote:

“Good, South Africa should be shunned until it stops its extreme anti-white and anti-Asian racism. It’s time for severe sanctions against South Africa.”

No matter how many times the government has tried to explain this, Musk appears determined to ignore the facts.

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On the latest episode of The Debrief which you should absolutely watch on YouTube, subscribe to and share, I spoke to Khusela Diko, ANC MP and member of Parliament’s portfolio committee on communications and digital technologies.

She said that even though Musk is South African, he is blind to the country’s daily realities and is “adamant that the laws of our country must be bent for him and him alone.”

“Let me explain it like this. So there’s a license that you require to provide network services okay. So this license would be required by the likes of Vodacom by the likes of the MTN Starlink. But also Starlink’s competitors like Amazon because they need a license. This license does not apply, for example, to Microsoft. It does not apply to Dell because they don’t have a license. So that 30% B is linked to the license. Why that was done in that way is because that license, you then have to get allocated spectrum, which is a finite resource. It’s like minerals. It’s like water. It’s like, you know, land. So you can’t have such a strategic resource in foreign hands where there’s no local participation in ownership.”

It is a fascinating conversation.

We get into where the ANC stands on Musk, what is happening with Communications Minister Solly Malatsi, who is from the DA, and what options are actually on the table.

We also go deeper into the broader question of transformation and broad-based black economic empowerment, which is really what this fight is about, no matter how loudly Musk tries to make it about himself.

Here is the thing. The ANC is unlikely to back down on this.

But that is not all we discussed.

The conversation also turns to Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi and the explosive allegations he made about police capture. Diko sits on the ad hoc committee probing those claims, and her insights on what is unfolding behind the scenes are worth listening to.

Watch the full episode and let me know what you think.

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In Bo-Kaap, a neighbourhood known for its vibrant homes and deep cultural history, change is becoming impossible to ignore. As development accelerates and costs rise, long-time residents are increasingly being forced to confront what the future of their community looks like and whether they still have a place in it.

Gentrification has become a central issue in discussions about the Cape Town CBD and surrounding areas. It refers to the process where wealthier individuals move into historically lower-income neighbourhoods, buying, renovating, and redeveloping properties. This often drives up property prices, ultimately pushing out long-time residents who can no longer afford to stay.

In Bo-Kaap, this dynamic is increasingly visible. Its prime location near the CBD has made it a target for development, while its rich cultural heritage and iconic colourful homes have long made it a major tourist attraction. This creates a growing tension between preserving culture and commodifying it.

We visited the Bo-Kaap Cultural Hub, home to the Boorhanol Islamic Movement. The space hosts guided tours and exhibitions that showcase Cape Malay culture, while also serving the community through initiatives like a food bank and a preschool.

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In conversation with Mohammad Groenewald, Vice Chair of the movement, we explore what happens when culture becomes a commodity, and how rapid change can leave long-standing communities behind.

In addition, we engaged in open discussions with long-time residents of Bo-Kaap to capture their raw perspectives on the ever-changing landscape of the place they call home.

We unpack what the issues facing the community are, and what it means to fight to stay and preserve culture in an economy which values profit over everything.

When communities are priced out, what’s actually being lost? Share your thoughts.

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It was a traumatic gut wrenching event that sparked in him a mission to change the story of the gruesome realities of life on the Cape Flats.

“My nephew, two-year-old baby, drowned and died in a manhole opposite my sister’s door,” he told The Debrief Network of a turning point in his life.

Nkosikhona recalls the tragedy vividly: “A child left the home just in a split of seconds to go and play in the streets. We could not find him. We found his body lying dead in that open manhole. A manhole that we had reported to the municipality to say, fix this because this is hazardous for this community. And we lost him.”

His trauma is not unique in an impoverished area of Cape Town, marred by the indignity of violence and the lack of basic services.

From this loss, Swaartbooi launched the Right to Play campaign to create safe spaces for children in poor and working-class communities.

“As a way of trying to find justice for my nephew, I started the Right to Play campaign because there are no safe play spaces for children who are black in particular and coloured and living in poor and working-class communities that happen to be the Cape Flats.”

He also co-founded the Role Models Academy on the Cape Flats, using soccer to help young men confront trauma and start difficult conversations.

“The intention of the team was actually to start a conversation between young men and boys to ensure that there’s a conversation about some of the traumas that we have and have not been able to address,” Nkosikhona detailed.

The persisting trauma of life on the Cape Flats has resulted in staggering cases of gender-based violence.

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Nkosikhona says they hope having conversations with young boys and keeping them busy will help.

“I am a co-founder of the Role Models Academy, which is a soccer team that we started in response to the gender-based violence matters but also linked to Cape Town and South Africa being a hotspot for gendered crimes in the world.”

Their interventions are going a step further. He detailed how they want to bring in professional help to change the trajectory of young people living in the area.

“We’re trying to get psychology and social workers to come into this community to train young people to hold space for other young people.”

Aside from community initiatives, Nkosikhona says that he is looking to local government for

accountability and support.

“The City of Cape Town is about 84 billion rand budget. we want to look how much is being allocated for poor and working-class people, particularly for children,” he said.

What began as personal loss is now a broader mission to ensure young people are supported and not left to face trauma alone.

Monique Lewis

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Good morning from the Shinkansen from Osaka to Tokyo.

There is something quietly disarming about writing while moving at that speed. The landscape shifts, the cities thin out and return, and yet inside the train everything remains still, precise, controlled. It feels like a fitting place to reflect.

I spent the Easter break in Japan, immersing myself in a culture that is both unique and deeply disciplined, and I arrived at the height of Sakura season.

The cherry blossoms, many of them planted in the years after World War II, bloom for only a brief window each year. A week, perhaps two if conditions allow. That brevity is part of their power. There is an understanding here that beauty is temporary, and therefore must be fully experienced.

What struck me most was not just the blossoms themselves, but how they are observed. Parks are filled with people sitting beneath the trees in a sort of measured joy.

It is also peak tourist season, and it is easy to understand why.

Japan is efficient, structured, and remarkably predictable.

Systems function with a level of reliability that begins to feel almost unreal if you are not used to it. The trains are not late. The taxis operate with precision. The streets are clean in a way that suggests not enforcement, but collective agreement.

Public infrastructure works in a way that makes me (a resident of Joburg) jealous to the core.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWtLhC9j5uu/?igsh=MXdlZHRzZWhiMWthNg==

And yet, despite that order, there is a strange dissonance.

Here, it feels as though the noise of global conflict exists only inside my phone.

The wars and the political brinkmanship that is escalating every day all seem distant.

The world, as it is experienced in the news cycle, does not fully penetrate daily life here.

The war in Iran, in particular, feels further away than it does when I am in South Africa.

It may simply be that I am not in a newsroom, not surrounded by screens, not absorbing the relentless urgency of breaking news.

Or perhaps some of it is quite literally lost in translation.

Either way, as I get back to reality, that reality persists.

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The situation in Iran is at precarious levels with no clear path forward, and any attempt to predict how it ends would be speculation at best.

US President Donald Trump appears driven by a desire to cement a legacy as a warmonger. His unhinged behaviour is testament to that.

The economist Paul Krugman has gone as far as to accuse him of terrorism, for blowing up civilian infrastructure in Iran and promising to wipe out an entire nation of 90 million people.

The chaos gets worse every day.

It really is a dangerous game of attrition, and Iran is not blinking.

War is unpredictable in many ways but what we know is that the poor get poorer and that instability compounds existing inequality.

We find ourselves on the edge of a world that is being reshaped in real time.

And, predictably, the developing world carries a disproportionate share of the burden.

I will be flying home via Dubai, and it is evident that the United Arab Emirates has already felt the pressure of this conflict.

But the full extent of the economic, political, and social consequences is yet to be understood for Middle East.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that a small number of powerful individuals, driven by ego and ambition, can set entire systems into motion with little immediate restraint. The rest of the world, for reasons ranging from complicity to paralysis, allows it to unfold.

At The Debrief Network, we are committed to documenting that impact.

Part of the reason I came to Japan was to create space for thinking.

To step back from the immediacy of the newsroom and consider how we build something more durable.

We have now completed one year. In that time, we have trained ten people to operate as hybrid journalists, capable of both professional reporting and content creation.

Our first news creator cohort has been an instructive one.

We have learned what works, and more importantly, what does not.

The next step is scale.

Journalism is under pressure from multiple directions- whether it’s generative artificial intelligence or shrinking newsrooms.

If the industry is to survive, it will need to adapt without losing its core function.

That tension is what keeps me up at night.

We have invested both time and resources into this work.

Last week we were in Cape Town, reporting on the stories that define everyday life but rarely dominate headlines. There are plans to travel further across the country, to continue documenting realities that are often overlooked.

This is slow and deliberate work. Necessary, really.

Thank you for being part of this journey with us.

Best,

Qaanitah

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A year ago, at the beginning of April, I wrote a column titled This is either brave or stupid.

It was the moment The Debrief Network had just launched, and I was trying to make sense of what we were attempting to build.

At the time, I described it as a selfish project. I wrote that The Debrief Network was created out of a desire to pioneer the future of journalism, to build a learning platform that could train the next generation of journalists, and to create a home for the kind of storytelling I had always wanted to do.

A year later, I find myself returning to that framing. Not because I now have a neat answer, but because the question still lingers.

Was it brave, or was it simply naïve? The honest answer is that it was both.

Because the past year was a messy, often exhausting reality of building something from scratch.

It has meant training young reporters who had never worked in a newsroom before, while simultaneously trying to understand the demands of social storytelling.

It has meant experimenting with formats, chasing a viable financial model, and constantly trying to stay afloat in an industry that is itself in flux.

Trying to get financial support for journalism has been harder than I thought.

Somewhere in that process, the year passed in a blur.

Throughout this time, I have held onto one idea with almost stubborn conviction. We are not reinventing journalism. The principles remain the same. What we are changing is the vehicle and the medium through which journalism is delivered.

That distinction matters, because innovation in journalism is often mistaken for abandoning its core.

What we are trying to do is the opposite. We are trying to preserve those core principles by adapting them to a different environment.

So what does a year of that effort actually amount to? There have been many, many wins.

We produce as much social video content as some of the biggest newsroom in South Africa.

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Over the past year, we trained ten news creators who arrived with no journalistic experience and left with the ability to find stories, pitch them, script them, shoot them, edit them and produce them for social platforms.

We reported from countries including Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Tanzania and Madagascar, expanding our reach beyond South Africa while also strengthening our national footprint through grassroots reporting from across the country.

We built a daily good news stream that has grown into a consistent and credible offering, one that reminds audiences that journalism does not only have to document crisis.

Our reporting has had impact in real people’s lives.

We also experimented with long-form storytelling through shows such as Mind Your Business, The Debrief with Qaanitah Hunter and Africa Explained.

We also launched Debrief Labs- our offices and studios- as a creative space to expand how we tell stories.

Beyond our own newsroom, we trained more than a dozen newsrooms across South Africa, sharing what we have learned in real time.

We presented our work at three international conferences, rebranded the platform, grew our audience, invested in a stronger team and formalised our commitment to ethical journalism by subscribing to the Press Council.

There are many other wins too. But the setbacks have been just as real.

We have struggled with limited reach on TikTok due to what appears to be shadow banning on the platform. This has constrained growth in a space that is central to how audiences consume news.

More fundamentally, real journalism is expensive. And we have not yet secured the partnerships needed to sustainably fund the kind of journalism we believe in.

We have tried, we have succeeded, we have stumbled, we have failed, and we have had to pivot, often more than once.

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So the reality is that this has been a difficult but rewarding year.

Last year, I wrote that the road ahead would be hard, and that I was prepared to take the risk and share what I learned along the way.

I also wrote that if we succeeded, we would be laying the groundwork for the future of journalism, and if we failed, we would at least be able to teach others what not to do. Either way, I argued, journalism would win.

One year in, I can say this with more certainty than I could then.

Journalism is already winning.

It is winning because we have not compromised on our commitment to facts over virality. It is winning because we have shown that there is space, and demand, for credible storytelling in a fragmented and often chaotic media environment.

And it is winning because The Debrief Network is no longer just an idea. It is a robust young newsroom that is beginning to shape conversations, experiment with form, and build a community.

We are, in our own way, already disrupting the media landscape. We are contributing to how the future of storytelling is being defined. And we are building something that grows, steadily, every day.

Our ambitious plans for the year ahead are equally fun and scary. I won’t list it here but you will want to be along for this ride.

Thank you for being on this journey with us. We love having you here.

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This week, it took me into a conversation about grief. But it was not the kind of human loss we know and understand but the grief that comes with losing a pet.

I sat down with author Dion Chang, who now works as an end-of-life doula for pets.

I did not even know that role or job existed until I spoke to him. But after sitting with him for an hour, I asked myself howcome I never thought about this before.

“This is a calling,” he told me, when we met up in Johannesburg for our interview.

“Very much like a sangoma. You get called, and I heeded mine,” he explained.

Chang explained that as an end of life pet doula, he sits with people in the final moments of their pet’s life and in the immediate aftermath.

“I’ve assisted people before, being in the room, creating a ritual or ceremony to help ease that pain.”

I thought about how we reserve rituals and ceremonies for human loss but but for many people, losing a pet carries the same emotional weight.

Chang explained to me that society reacts differently when pets die but the pain can be the same as human loss.

This is because people are relying more and more on animals for connection.

“Lots of people, particularly younger people, don’t want to have kids. There are declining birth rates globally, ageing populations, and pet ownership is growing,” Chang told me.

It is a shift that is showing up in real ways.

I was shocked when Chang said that in 2023, a major e-commerce retailer recorded more sales of pet prams than baby prams.

This shift has changed the way people relate to pets and have created a boom in the pet economy.

“I can see where the pet economy is going, and the need for people to acknowledge the grief that comes with it and find an outlet.”

So what exactly is a pet doula?

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Change says his work sits at the intersection of emotional support, guide, and witness.

So he can’t resolve grief but he can create the structure for it to help people overcome it.

And beyond working with people one on one, he is now launching a pet loss café in Johannesburg.

This is a physical space where people can come together, talk about their pets, and sit with their grief without having to minimise it or explain it away.

And then, in the same week, the story took me into Johannesburg traffic.

Because while some people are learning how to sit with grief, others are just trying to survive the N17.

Somewhere in that stop-start, drivers have started rolling down their windows and playing rock, paper, scissors with the person next to them. A quick round, a small laugh, and then it’s back to moving inch by inch.

We saw it in a viral clip this week, and it stayed with me because it felt very Joburg. We have seen it before in different forms, from coffee sellers weaving through traffic to people holding up CVs, and others hosting concerts, all trying their luck in a moment of standstill.

And speaking of traffic, my next story introduced me to someone tackling a problem much bigger than being stuck on the N17.

Sizuyile Ngcanga, a former Mercedes-Benz engineer, discovered how serious this problem could be during a personal crisis. When his father passed away, it took six hours for help to arrive. Paramedics could not find the house and the mortuary van took even longer. The delay was not because anyone was unprepared, but because the house did not exist on any map.

That moment stayed with him. If something as basic as finding a home could fail when it mattered most, what else was broken?

The solution he built is called Zuza GPS. Instead of relying on street names, it pins every household with exact coordinates. People can enter their section, zone, or unit and anyone can navigate straight to the door, even in areas that have never been mapped before.

Sizuyile did not stop there. The app also allows people to report potholes, broken streetlights, uncollected rubbish, and it even works without mobile network.

Zuza GPS is still in pilot phase in the Eastern Cape and Sizuyile is now raising funds to expand it across South Africa and eventually the continent.

From watching strangers play rock, paper, scissors in traffic to seeing someone build a tool that could save lives, it is clear that people are finding creative ways to deal with the challenges around them.

Do you think this is the kind of innovation South Africa needs?

When it emerged that Geordin Hill-Lewis would run for DA leader, it felt settled. He was the frontrunner.

His candidacy was fashioned as the safe pair of hands to take over from John Steenhuisen.

It seemed obvious that he would be he leader candidate the party could rally behind without much friction.

Then we learnt on Tuesday that Sibusiso Dyonase decided to run.

Dyonase is 33 councillor and Sedibeng caucus leader.

He is definitely not a household name and an unknown in the party.

But when I asked him why would he bother with a race he is likely to lose, he said that he read that Hill-Lewis might go uncontested, and that was enough.

“I believe in democracy, and I believe if we are going to have very important elections like the Federal Congress, the delegates in the Federal Congress needs to also have their choices, and they need to be afforded the chance to make a different choice than the one that is normally usual. I believe good contestation is very important to show democracy and to show that, we actually push open opportunity society for all. Because I believe that the general rules of the Congress is that every member can put in their nomination. And I believe I’m a member in good standing, and I have been tested in my leadership skills, and I’ve been practicing my leadership skills for a very long time,” he said.

Dyonase story is not the usual one. He joined the DA at 19, straight out of matric, because he couldn’t afford to study further.

It started as something to do. It became something more as over time, he found alignment with the party’s values and stayed.

He has spent most of that time on the ground as an activist.

“I think I have time, I have spirit, and I actually have a great amount of dedication and with a great amount and an open space to actually learn for further and sharpen my abilities in becoming the leader of the Democratic Alliance. I know it’s not gonna be a simple task. I’m going to have to commit myself hundred percent to the job,” Dyonase said of why he thinks he is best positioned for the party.

That is the case he is making now. That the party should not only be led from the top, but also shaped by those who have built it from below.

Let’s be honest. is still the favourite. He has been mayor of Cape Town since 2021.

He has the profile and the backing. Most analysts see this as his race but Dyonase’s entry shifts the conversation.

It forces a contest where there might not have been one.

It also puts the idea of internal democracy under the spotlight.

Dyonase is not naïve about the scale of the task.

So what is he really after?

He says it is not just about winning. In a party that often speaks about democracy, that might be the point.

Over the last week, all I’ve heard, in meetings, in news articles, even over coffee with a friend, is that Africa is Europe’s energy lifeline.

It sounds urgent. Hopeful. Almost heroic.

With gas prices spiking and instability flaring across the Middle East, everyone’s looking for a saviour. Russia’s gas is available, yes but it comes with its own set of complications. So while the world and Europe were scrambling at first, they’re now scrambling in panic. The Gulf doesn’t just have oil; it also has gas. And that gas fuels industries all over the world. Here’s the number that keeps rattling around in my head: 21% of the world’s LNG flows through a single chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz. This is the chokepoint everyone was already worried about. Now add active strikes on the gas fields themselves. The scramble for alternatives just went from urgent to existential. And Africa is the only continent with the reserves, the proximity to Europe, and crucially, no active war on its infrastructure. So everyone is looking for an alternative. And Africa keeps coming up.

So, I spent the week deep in Africa’s energy sector: reading reports, calling analysts, scrolling through energy and shipping trackers, listening to ministers’ speeches, and rewatching every interview I could find. But all I wanted to know is Africa actually the fix?

Well. There’s a catch. And honestly, the gap between what Africa could be doing and what it’s actually set up to do right now is wilder than I expected. I had no idea, when I started working on this story, that the gas fields in the Middle East would be literally on fire by the time I wrote this entry.

What just happened in the Gulf and why Africa is suddenly everything?

Here’s what I need you to understand about South Pars: it’s not just any gas field. It’s the largest natural gas field on the planet, shared between Iran and Qatar. Qatar calls its side the North Field. When Israel struck Iran’s facilities there on March 18th, in a move coordinated with the Trump administration, it triggered an immediate chain reaction.

Iran’s response was swift. Within hours, missiles hit Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the facility that processes and exports most of Qatar’s LNG to the world. Qatar expelled Iran’s military attachés. Trump claimed on Truth Social that Israel acted alone, then threatened to “massively blow up” the entire South Pars field if Iran struck Qatar again. US and Israeli officials confirmed the attack was, in fact, coordinated all along. –confirmed

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Why African gas is suddenly the hottest thing on the market

Chatting to Menzi Ndlovu, Lead Country Risk Analyst at Signal Risk, this week, he was refreshingly blunt about it. The Gulf instability had already injected what he called “significant uncertainty” over the availability of oil and gas throughout the world, causing shocks in global supply that translated directly into financial market shocks. That uncertainty had given African energy projects a kind of urgency they’d never quite had before.

“ And as you know the Gulf is a hub for oil and gas and various other inputs in productive processes, but oil and gas in particular, most countries that are net energy importers. And so what that has done is pose significant uncertainty over the availability of oil and gas and various other inputs throughout the entire world, given the amount of oil and gas that these countries account for and that has caused a shock in global supply which is also translated to a shock in financial markets.”

— Menzi Ndlovu, Lead Country Risk Analyst, Signal Risk

The numbers back this up. Africa already accounts for over 11% of global LNG exports and that share is set to grow. The continent sits on an estimated 620 trillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves, nearly 10% of the global total. And the geography is a genuine structural advantage that no other major supplier can match: LNG carriers from West Africa reach European terminals in 8 to 12 days. From Asia-Pacific, that’s 40 days or more.

So who’s actually doing something about it? Right now, Africa is still more vulnerable than it is powerful in this space. But there is real money starting to move. Energy ministers from Africa’s biggest producers are meeting European buyers in Paris next month to lock in deals. Nigeria alone already supplies over half of Portugal’s total LNG imports. Senegal started producing in 2025. Congo is targeting 3 million tonnes of annual export capacity. After this week, the Europeans sitting across that table in Paris will be a great deal more motivated than they were when the meeting was scheduled. Ndlovu explained it to me further:

“What that has done is engage or inject rather a degree of impetus in African oil and gas projects that we haven’t seen before and so we are seeing projects being expedited like Namibia as mentioned, Senegal for instance that has been expedited, Mozambique as well. We see movements in markets as risky as Libya as well, we know that the Italians are heavily involved in Libya. We are also seeing movements around Tanzania, which has been frozen for quite a while now. And we’re seeing movements in other West African markets.”

The one to watch: Mozambique

Talking through African resource capacity with Ndlovu, it kept coming back to Mozambique. The Rovuma Basin is sitting on an estimated 180 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves. Major energy companies, like TotalEnergies and ENI, are already committed. The momentum has been building for years despite serious setbacks. And something he said now reads very differently after the Qatar strikes.

“Mozambique is gaining significant momentum not just through TotalEnergies but also through ENI with the offshore gas projects. Perhaps if there’s any country that can potentially serve as a short-term route, it is Mozambique, due to the floating liquefied natural gas facility. That is the only one I believe that can actually serve as some kind of repository.”

A floating LNG facility. In a world where Qatar’s Ras Laffan, the world’s biggest fixed LNG export complex, just took missile strikes and suspended production, that distinction suddenly matters enormously. Mozambique’s offshore floating infrastructure is harder to target, faster to reposition, and represents the kind of supply resilience that no Gulf facility can currently offer. The world just got a very loud demonstration of what happens when you concentrate that much gas infrastructure in one place.

The Rwanda complication and what it’s really about

But Mozambique’s story comes with a complication that I covered in last week’s entry and it’s worth connecting the dots here, because the energy angle changes how you read it entirely.

If you missed it: earlier this month, the US imposed sanctions on Rwanda. I covered the full breakdown in my last entry.

The background you need: Cabo Delgado, the province where Mozambique’s Rovuma Basin sits, was gripped for years by an insurgency that made the region effectively uninvestable. Rwanda deployed troops and stabilised the security situation. TotalEnergies, which had suspended operations after a particularly brutal attack on the town of Palma in 2021, returned. The projects restarted. That part of the story is real. But what’s happening now is something different. Rwanda is threatening to withdraw from Mozambique, not out of some principled stand, but as direct leverage in response to the US sanctions imposed on Kigali earlier this month. Kagame is using Rwanda’s presence in Cabo Delgado as a bargaining chip, specifically to pressure the EU into helping circumvent those American sanctions. It’s a calculated move: signal that you’ll walk away from the security arrangement, watch European energy ministers panic, and use that panic to extract concessions. Rwanda is essentially daring the EU to choose between its transatlantic relationships and its gas supply.

“Rwanda is basically playing a game of chicken. They’re essentially saying, you can try us and see how far you go with securing these assets, because we know that you know that we are crucial to the security.”

It’s a sophisticated play. And with the Gulf in flames and Mozambique’s floating LNG facility now looking like one of the few credible near-term alternatives for Europe, it’s a play that just got a lot more leverage behind it. But let’s be clear about what it is: Rwanda using African energy infrastructure as a geopolitical escape hatch from American sanctions pressure. The stability in Cabo Delgado is real. The motivation for threatening to undo it is entirely self-interested.

So why can’t Africa just step up right now?

Because even talking to Ndlovu, someone who knows this sector better than most, the answer was the same: yes, but not yet. And that gap, between yes and not yet just became one of the most consequential gaps in the global economy.

The gap between what’s in the ground and what can actually be delivered is enormous. No amount of reserves fixes a bottleneck problem, and right now the bottlenecks are everywhere, from logistics, pipelines, to refining capacity. Only Nigeria has a refinery large enough to service international markets. The continent currently exports raw and unprocessed gas rather than refined products, which means slower delivery and less value captured from its own resources.

“ And that once again has injected renewed impetus as Africans and other stakeholders to look at our logistical facilities, to look at our oil and gas infrastructure in order to position us appropriately, to take advantage of some of the openings that are happening in the oil and gas markets. So it’s great on paper but we’ve got very serious practical realities to deal with this. The other reality of it is actually refining the products here as opposed to importing raw crude or unprocessed gas. So, we can serve as an emergency rescue for Europe and global markets because we have the endowment but that is in the long term. Because in the short term we don’t have adequate capacity to extract and to transport those minerals that are needed. So, the net result is we end up suffering in the short term but if we do the right things, we’ll benefit in the long term.”

When I started writing this entry, the question was whether Africa could eventually be Europe’s gas backstop. By the time I’m filing it, Iran’s largest gas field has been bombed, Qatar’s biggest LNG facility has been struck, Brent crude oil is above $107, and Europe’s gas benchmark jumped 6% in a single session.

The geography works. The reserves are real. West Africa’s proximity to European terminals is a structural advantage no other supplier can match right now. The Paris meetings are happening. The deals are starting to move. And every missile that hits a Gulf gas facility makes the case for African energy more urgent than any amount of diplomatic advocacy ever could.

As always, my honest answer is that infrastructure still takes years to build. Refineries don’t appear overnight. And as the Rwanda situation shows, Africa’s energy potential is already being pulled into geopolitical games that have nothing to do with actually getting gas to the people who need it. Africa has the resources and the geography to shift global energy markets. But to truly seize this moment, we need infrastructure and political urgency.

Until next time.

In December 2022, a respected panel of the country’s top legal minds, including a former Chief Justice, presented a report to Parliament. They were tasked with determining whether President Cyril Ramaphosa had a case to answer and whether impeachment proceedings should follow.

This was in relation to the 2020 robbery of $580 000 in cash hidden in a couch at his Phala Phala farm in Limpopo. There has been plenty of political spin and there is still no full clarity in the public domain. But what is known is that a large sum of foreign currency was stolen and the source of that cash will always remain a cloud over the President’s head. The panel told Parliament that there was enough reason to believe the president may have been guilty of misconduct and may have acted inconsistently with the Constitution. But the political timing dictated what followed. It was just before the ANC conference. The party still held a majority in Parliament, whipped its members, and secured a vote against adopting the report.

Then the EFF vowed to challenge that decision. By 2024, it argued before the Constitutional Court that Parliament had acted irrationally. The case was thoroughly debated at the apex court. I remember sitting in court and thinking that this is the kind of matter that will be as seminal as the 2016 Nkandla judgment was for our body politic. It involves the top of the executive, the top of the legislature, and is now being arbitrated by the apex of the judiciary. To have this matter finalised is undoubtedly urgent.

But now, more than 470 days later, there is no movement. And for the EFF, which has repeatedly marched on the court, this has all the hallmarks of something suspicious. And with every day that passes they are more legitimised in their criticisms. But this delay is just a symptom of a much deeper problem.

A report by journalist Dianne Hawker points out that the Phala Phala matter is the longest the Constitutional Court has ever taken to deliver judgment. This means, whichever way the court rules will be consequential. If it takes the EFF’s side now, it risks being seen as having fallen prey to public pressure. If it sides with Parliament, the delay itself will invite scrutiny.

Chief Justice Mandisa Maya knows just how politically charged this matter is. She has conceded that the public could reasonably interpret the delay as something untoward. There is no easy way to explain it. But there’s awkward realities the country has to also contend with.

Since a 2013 decision that effectively made the Constitutional Court the final arbiter in all legal matters, not only those involving constitutional issues, the workload of the court has increased significantly. Yet there has not been a corresponding increase in resources. The President himself acknowledged this last year. And now, the Chief Justice is not only responsible for judgments but also serves as the administrative head of the judiciary. The Office of the Chief Justice operates much like a government department, without equivalent resourcing.

Then there is the question of capacity. There are vacancies on the court that the president must fill. The court has had to rely heavily on acting justices. It is now nearly five full months since the Judicial Service Commission interviewed and recommended five judges for President Ramaphosa to select two for appointment to the Constitutional Court.

The president has not yet made these appointments. Experts say this leaves the highest court in the land to hobble along without a full complement of 11 permanent judges for the tenth year in a row. There is also the issue of support.

Research by academics Nurina Ally and Leo Boonzaier shows that, over the period between 2010 and 2024, the Constitutional Court’s performance has been gradually declining. The court is taking longer to hear cases and deliver judgments.

These are not abstract concerns. They have been raised in official reports and acknowledged by the Chief Justice herself. There have also been ongoing discussions within the executive about better funding the judiciary, with some movement in the most recent budget cycle. But this is not enough to explain the delay to an ordinary, rational person.

So the question inevitably arises. Is the president dragging his feet on judicial appointments in a way that weakens the courts? And if there is even a perception of that, it needs to be addressed. In the immediate term, a solid judgment in the Phala Phala matter must be delivered, and delivered speedily. I don’t have to remind the Constitutional Court that justice delayed is justice denied. Because whichever way the judgment goes, it will carry enormous weight.

No serious legal observer can ignore the dent this unprecedented delay has caused to the standing of the court. Once the Phala Phala judgment is delivered, there must be an immediate intervention to ensure this never happens again. This moment is awkward for our democracy. And it carries real risks.

This is no longer just about one judgment. It really is about the credibility of the court itself. The longer the silence stretches, the easier it becomes for suspicion that something is “being cooked” behind the scenes to fill the gap. And we all can agree that the Constitutional Court does not trade on power, it trades on trust.

And right now, that trust is being tested.

On our debut show, The Debrief, I sat down to discuss what had happened after I went to a media briefing at the Department of International Relations and Cooperation. And from that briefing, I immediately knew something serious was unfolding.

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The briefing came just a day after the US ambassador to South Africa, Brent Bozell, made his first public remarks at a business conference. What should have been a fairly standard diplomatic appearance quickly became controversial. The ambassador spoke about trade and repeated the familiar Trump-era line that relationships must be reciprocal, with the implication that American companies are somehow doing South Africa a favour by operating here. But the speech became far more explosive when he turned to South Africa’s relationship with Iran and to the long-running debate around the chant “Kill the Boer.”

He said South Africa should rethink its friendship with what he called a “pariah”, referring to Iran. That was already bound to provoke debate because South Africa’s relationship with Iran has long irritated parts of the American political establishment, especially since South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice. But his comments on the court ruling on the political chant “Kill the Boer” really escalated matters.

This chant has been the subject of years of political and legal battles in South Africa. Our highest courts have ruled that, in context, it is not hate speech. People can disagree with that judgment, but in a constitutional democracy, court rulings matter. The ambassador signalled that he did not care what South African courts had said and insisted that he viewed the chant as hate speech. That crossed a diplomatic line.

For the South African government, this was not simply about a disagreement over politics. It was about a foreign diplomat openly dismissing the authority of South African courts and inserting himself into a sensitive domestic debate.

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That is why DIRCO moved quickly to summon him.

In diplomatic language, this is called a démarche, which is essentially a formal warning from a host country to a diplomat that their conduct or comments are unacceptable. What made the moment even more striking is that South Africa had reasons to object to this ambassador long before he arrived. He has a history of controversial remarks about the ANC and South Africa.

Pretoria could have refused his credentials and asked Washington to send someone else. Instead, the government accepted him, despite reservations, because South Africa’s foreign policy generally prefers engagement over escalation. The thinking was that keeping channels of communication open would be better than cutting them off.

At the briefing, Minister Ronald Lamola made that logic clear. South Africa had chosen the bridge-building route. But that did not mean the ambassador had a free pass to disregard the country’s constitutional order. According to Lamola, the ambassador later expressed regret and apologised. He also acknowledged that after visiting places like the Apartheid Museum and District Six, he had gained a better understanding of South Africa’s history and the need for redress.

This understanding mattered because one of the deeper tensions in this dispute is that some on the right, both in South Africa and the United States, attack transformation and redress measures without engaging the historical reasons they exist. The bigger issue is the deteriorating relationship between Pretoria and Washington under Trump. Since Trump’s return, there have been tariffs, threats and growing hostility toward South Africa’s foreign policy positions.

The current conflict involving Iran makes things even more fraught because the United States increasingly wants countries to choose sides. South Africa is resisting that pressure, saying it remains non-aligned and guided by international law.

That position is often criticised as inconsistent, but Pretoria argues that international law is in South Africa’s interest. It protects smaller states from the whims of powerful ones. For that reason, South Africa says it will not simply follow Washington’s line on Iran or any other conflict.

For me, last week’s story was about more than one ambassador’s loose comments. It was about sovereignty, diplomacy and the limits of foreign interference. South Africa was right to push back. You can disagree with our courts, our laws or our politics, but if you are a diplomat posted here, you do not get to dismiss the constitutional framework that governs this country.

The world and the news have been in absolute chaos over the past couple of days, so to relieve you of the anxieties of the outside world, we welcome you to “The Good News”. The Good News is a newsletter where we highlight the best of humanity, even while faced with the worst.

Have you ever wondered how deaf people experience the world of entertainment today? In this growing digital landscape, the media we consume becomes more and more audio-reliant, which unfortunately makes it inaccessible to consumers with hearing disabilities.

Meet Fopakwe Tejiklea, a Cameroonian blockchain developer who is broadening the world of innovation with inclusivity. With his Artificial Intelligence application, Reach, Tejiklea is turning social media content into content that is accessible and enjoyable for deaf communities.

Check it out:

When the high cost of living closes one door, the youth builds another one from scratch. This is the story of Matimba Mabonda, a young engineer who could not afford to build himself a house. From this frustration came a stroke of genius: making his own cheap bricks.

By combining soil with other waste materials, this young man created building materials that not only helped him build himself a home but were also sustainable and eco-friendly.

Follow his journey:

You’ve heard of stokvels for groceries and basic living expenses, but have you ever heard of stokvels for parties? That’s right, stokvel ya groove. A Generation Z entrepreneur named Nene Mahlungu took a spin on the traditional savings model to help people afford concerts and festivals.

With a community of 300 members, Nene Mahlungu’s initiative has sent people to enjoy artists like Mariah The Scientist and Gunna. Which artists would you like to see live?

Have some good news of your own? Or perhaps you know someone who is changing the world for the better? If you do, let us know via our social media platforms.

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The last two weeks have proven to be difficult in the search for Good News. Between the bombings and the missiles, the world has been chaotic to say the least. However, among all the warning messages and calls for evacuation, I managed to find beacons of hope in people who stand tall even in times of uncertainty.

There is a South African phrase, “Ubuntu”, which refers to the belief that we are stronger and better when we work in community with one another. This belief was seen amongst South African ex-pats and travellers being stuck in the Gulf region, amid US- Israel attacks on Iran.

I found one individual who carries this philosophy with them, even beyond our South African borders, is Makida Khumalo. The young professional, working in the UAE, has opened up her home to host South Africans who have been stranded in Dubai.

This is her story:

My search for hope didn’t stop with Makida; I found even more people willing to lend a helping hand to assist. With air travel grounded, some South Africans were stranded in Saudi Arabia on Sunday. I managed to track down Durban-based travel agents who assisted in the repatriation of South African pilgrims who were in Saudi Arabia.

Here’s what they had to say:

While there have been success stories for our fellow South Africans coming home, there have also been some not-so-great stories. Like this South African teacher who had managed to book a flight home, only to be intercepted by a drone on the airstrip, she and other passengers had already boarded the flight.

This is what she spoke about with my colleague, Hasina Gori.

Have some good news of your own? Or perhaps you know someone who is changing the world for the better? If you do, let us know via our social media platforms.

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I say alleged, but I want to be honest with you because that’s what this entry is for - it stopped being alleged a long time ago. Political Analyst, Gedeon Baleke told Africa Explained that even though Paul Kagame denies supporting the M23 rebel group in Congo, the evidence is glaring.

“Paul Kagame continues to deny any involvement, insisting Rwanda is not backing the M23, while it has been all documented in the DRC. The sanctions reinforce long-standing accusations that external support is fuelling instability and conflict in the region. The sanctions suggest a harder line from the US.”

When I went deeper into the specifics, the accusations against Rwanda became detailed and damning. Washington isn’t speaking in vague diplomatic language in their report. The US points to satellite imagery, battlefield intelligence, captured equipment and eyewitness accounts to back its position. Independent analysts, UN investigators and human rights researchers have been saying the same thing for years. I wanted to find out what these sanctions would mean practically for Rwanda, and an independent political risk analyst, Rose Mumanya, told me they land “more as a diplomatic blow than a practical one”, at least in the short term. But a diplomatic blow from Washington, after decades of carefully cultivating that relationship, is not a small thing.

Mumanya, who has been covering this conflict for years, broke down this support plainly for Africa Explained:

“More recently we saw the government coming up to say that they do coordinate with the M23, but they of course qualified it to say that it’s only for security and defensive measures and so I mean it’s not really up for debate. Some of this support includes overseeing M23 operations, providing them with military equipment, things like drones, but also participating in their recruitment activities and they also mentioned recruitment in refugee camps.”

To understand why these sanctions feel so significant right now, you have to understand what M23 actually controls on the ground and what that control means in practice. Goma and Bukavu are two of eastern Congo’s most strategically vital cities, sitting on key trade corridors right next to some of the most mineral-rich land on the planet. Whoever holds these cities holds commerce, cross-border trade and political influence across the entire eastern DRC, and M23 has had them for nearly a year, this time, unlike their brief occupation back in 2012, while showing no signs of letting go.

I wanted to understand what that control looks like beneath the surface. What I found was difficult to hear. Mumanya described to me what is currently happening inside the mining sector: “They’ve taken over a lot of the mineral concessions in eastern DRC, which has made it much worse in terms of visibility and oversight. We’re hearing more and more reports of child labour in the mines, way more reports of mines collapsing and people dying, including children.”

These are areas so locked down that independent monitors and civil society organisations struggle to get access, and people on the ground are self-censoring out of fear, which means the full scale of what is happening inside those mining sites may not be known for a very long time. In February, I tried to get in touch with people who were affected by the Rubaya mine collapse in Goma, where almost 200 miners died, but my sources on the ground were blocked from even entering the site. It is easy for a story like this to become about geopolitics and mineral supply chains and Washington’s strategic calculations, and in doing so lose the human beings at the centre of it entirely, so I want to stay with them for a moment. Civilians in eastern Congo are living under a rebel administration that is trying to project an image of stability and governance, while underneath that surface the reality is displacement, loss of livelihood, insecurity and severely limited access to food, healthcare and humanitarian aid. Many have fled multiple times, as the conflict spread to more areas. Not once, not twice, but over and over again with no clear end in sight. This conflict has been particularly vicious for women, children and ethnic minorities.

Here is where the picture gets complicated, and I want to be honest with you about that, even when the honesty is uncomfortable. As I continued my research into the sanctions, I understood why analysts are careful not to overstate what sanctions can achieve. While they could affect Rwanda’s military ties, international partnerships, and even business deals linked to the region, Rwanda still has options. Meanwhile, the DRC’s leverage grows, especially with US interest in its critical minerals. Policy Analyst, Azwimpheleli Langalanga was frank about the limits of what sanctions can achieve:

“I personally do not see or foresee the sanctions, however severe they might be on Rwanda, changing the dynamics in eastern DRC. Rwanda itself has forged relations with other countries besides the United States, with much more interest in the critical minerals that are found in eastern DRC. These countries, like the Gulf States, will still continue to support Rwanda.”

Rwanda has significant room to manoeuvre, through France, through its UN peacekeeping contributions, through partners who will help it navigate the pressure. Analysts expect concessions, but short-term and symbolic ones, not a genuine withdrawal. Analysts expect Rwanda to offer concessions, but concessions that are short-term and symbolic rather than fundamental. These will be enough to take some heat off, but not a genuine withdrawal, because relinquishing eastern DRC means relinquishing something Rwanda sees as both an economic interest and a legitimate security concern that goes back decades.

As I spoke to all these analysts, I understood that the sanctions are not nothing either. Sanctions raise costs and can push talks but might also escalate tensions if leaders feel trapped. Success depends on ongoing diplomacy and regional cooperation. The DRC’s bargaining power has genuinely shifted in ways that matter. Washington’s interest in Congo’s critical minerals and its desire to reduce China’s dominance over those supply chains, means Kinshasa is now a more strategically valuable partner than it has been in a generation, and Rwanda, which long relied on being seen as the more stable and reliable US ally in the region, is finding that advantage quietly but meaningfully eroded. Mumanya framed their real value clearly: “What the sanctions have done is that they’ve provided additional pressure on Rwanda to basically start withdrawing from eastern DRC or reducing its support for the M23, which increases the likelihood of the conflict ending, especially if the US remains engaged in the process.” That last condition is the critical one, because sanctions that are not followed by sustained diplomatic engagement tend to fade into background noise over time, and Rwanda is watching very carefully to test exactly how far Washington is willing to go before blinking.

As I researched further, I kept arriving at the same uncomfortable place. While sanctions can be used to exert pressure, Rwanda and Congo’s problems go far deeper. There is no simple solution, in such a complex, ongoing conflict. Even with all of that pressure, analysts are clear-eyed about what sanctions fundamentally cannot fix. Mumanya told me plainly: “The fears of marginalisation amongst Congo’s ethnic Tutsi community, which are real and justified, and the DRC’s fear of annexation are all genuine concerns that all parties have, and they need to be resolved through political dialogue because they cannot be resolved through violence.”

Langalanga explained it to me even further, situating the conflict in its full historical context and arguing that without addressing those roots, external pressure will only ever be partial: “Until and unless the issue of security and full citizenship of eastern DRC’s Tutsi minorities is not resolved, Rwanda will continue to support the M23. And even without Rwanda’s support, that rebel group will still exist because the conditions that gave rise to its birth still exist in eastern DRC.”

This conflict did not begin with minerals, and it will not end with sanctions. Its roots go back to the 1994 genocide, to decades of ethnic tension and governance failure in a country the size of Western Europe that has never been fully stitched together. Real peace requires sustained political will, genuine regional cooperation and an honest reckoning with origins that run far deeper than any executive order in Washington can reach.

I’ll keep digging, and I’ll keep writing about it honestly, especially when the honest answer refuses to be simple.

Until next time.

At first, I told myself this was a Middle East story. Tragic. Destabilising. But geographically distant from Africa. The more I researched, the less true that felt. So, I started asking a simple question: if this conflict escalates, where does Africa feel it first?

When I interviewed analysts, one region kept coming up immediately, the Sahel. Mali. Burkina Faso. Niger. These are countries already battling jihadist insurgencies and already stretched thin. As I dug deeper, I realised that when global powers shift focus and resources, insurgent groups notice. Escalation elsewhere can create opportunity here. Then I turned my attention to the Horn of Africa. Somalia and Djibouti sit along vital Red Sea shipping lanes. Djibouti hosts multiple foreign military bases. I researched how much global trade moves through that corridor, as it links Europe, the Gulf, and Asia. And I found out that any disruption there does not stay local. The Red Sea has already seen vessel attacks in recent years, and so tensions are not hypothetical. Israel also strengthened ties with Somaliland earlier this year, adding another geopolitical layer to a region that is already delicate.

Denis Muniu, Security and Policy Analyst at The Global Centre for Policy & Strategy, explained it to Africa Explained like this:

“Any escalation will bring retaliatory signalling or heightened scrutiny in the Horn of Africa. Fragile states with active insurgencies may experience opportunistic attacks as these military groups may exploit regional instabilities to advance their agenda. Maritime routes along the Red Sea and also the western Indian Ocean could also become flashpoints. As we remember during the previous wars, the Red Sea has become a flashpoint for conflict, even that the Houthi rebels have attacked ships passing through that route.”

The phrase “opportunistic attacks” has stayed with me. Escalation does not always look like tanks crossing borders. Sometimes it looks like armed groups stepping into chaos. But beyond these countries, Sudan worries me most. Sudan’s war is not isolated from Gulf dynamics. The RSF militant group has been widely linked to networks connected to the United Arab Emirates, while Iran backs the Sudanese army. If the confrontation between Iran and the Gulf intensifies, those financial and supply pipelines could shift or close and Sudan’s battlefield could once again be reshaped.

As my research progressed, I shifted from security to diplomacy. I tried to imagine the conversations happening quietly in African capitals right now.

Who do we align with?
How publicly?
And at what cost?

For South Africa, I found this question especially complicated. South Africa is part of BRICS and maintains relations with Iran. At the same time, its economy is deeply tied to Western trade and financial systems. I looked at how quickly the rand moves when markets sense geopolitical risk and it reacts almost instantly.

Dr Ross Harvey, Director of Research & Programmes at Good Governance Africa, put it plainly:

“In an increasingly fragmented world, following neutrality can raise risks for your country and certainly it does that for South Africa. In other words, we would suffer the secondary effects of direct sanctions on Iran and so your trade politics becomes a lot more fluid in this situation and South Africa is at risk.”

And so, I dug into the numbers for you. After striking the world’s largest oil export terminal, Saudi Aramco, Iran has now targeted Fujairah Port in the UAE as well. Fujairah is key because it sits just outside the Strait of Hormuz and handles major oil storage and exports. Any disruption there could quickly impact global oil supplies and prices. And we know that when oil prices spike, investors flee to the dollar. I already know what comes next for many African economies. When oil prices rise because of instability in the Gulf, African import bills rise. When investors pile into the dollar, African currencies weaken. Many countries across the continent carry significant dollar-denominated debt. A stronger dollar means more expensive repayments and higher oil means higher fuel costs. Countries like Kenya, Egypt, Tunisia, Ethiopia, and Ghana are particularly exposed because they rely heavily on fuel imports and are already managing debt pressure. In South Africa, fuel prices are directly tied to global oil prices and the rand–dollar exchange rate. It does not take long for global shocks to filter through to the petrol pump.

Dr Harvey described the paradox clearly:

“So, the craziness of this situation is that those countries like Angola and Nigeria, I mean Nigeria is improving little by little but still not nearly enough. And so, when the dollar rises and the oil price goes up, well that’s kind of good for foreign exchange revenue but it’s extremely costly in respect to maintaining fossil fuel subsidies. And then for countries that are not oil rich they don’t necessarily have any kind of buffer against that. In South Africa, there’s going to be a fuel price hike on Wednesday and that’s because the global oil price is going up because oil supplies are going to be disrupted and so oil may well climb back up to $100 barrel or so and we haven’t seen those kinds of prices sustained anyway since around 2014.”

I kept thinking about what this looks like for an ordinary African just trying to survive. Taxi fares will rise. Food prices edge upward. Fertilizer becomes more expensive for farmers. Governments tighten spending because debt repayments increase. And families who rely on remittances from relatives working in Gulf countries may start worrying about job security and income disruption if instability spreads.

Energy and infrastructure policy expert Lom Nuku Ahlijah told me what African countries need to focus on:

“This conflict is not only about the final missiles but the real impact and the shockwaves that will be affected in Africa. And in African countries we need to work as a continent on ensuring that there are significant buffers as far as storage of essential commodities are concerned, as far as foreign action reserves are concerned and also work significantly on strategic diplomacy to ensure that we have options when challenges of conflicts like this arise.”

As I close this entry, one conclusion feels unavoidable. This war may be unfolding in the Middle East, but its shockwaves travel through oil markets, shipping corridors, fragile security environments, and financial systems that connect directly to Africa. It does not feel distant anymore, it feels interconnected.

Until next time.