The Common Sense has launched a dedicated section on our website to track and explain the current Phala Phala crisis, which may lead to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s impeachment.

We will be publishing analysis, explainers, and timely updates as the impeachment process unfolds. Some of what is already there:

• •The Section 89 report is damning: Our long-form explainer walks through the Section 89 report, outlining what the president did, the laws the panel found he broke, and the proposed charges that would form the basis of any impeachment process.
• •The country wants him gone: Our polling analysis shows more than half of South Africans would support a no-confidence motion against Ramaphosa, including a striking share of African National Congress (ANC) voters themselves.
• •Everyone is missing the point: In our editorial, we argue that the parliamentary arithmetic and the legal delays miss what really matters: the president's value to the ANC was always as a symbol of reform, and that symbol is now dead.

On 8 May 2026, the Constitutional Court ruled that Parliament acted unlawfully when it voted in December 2022 to reject the Section 89 Independent Panel's findings against Ramaphosa. The Court has ordered the National Assembly to do what it should have done three years ago: convene an impeachment committee and consider the panel's conclusion that the president has a prima facie case to answer.

What will follow in the weeks and months ahead is one of the most significant accountability processes that a South African president has ever faced.

The story is moving quickly and pulls on multiple threads at once. These are: the Section 89 report itself, the criminal investigations that have run alongside it, the political fallout inside the ANC, the legal review the president is now mounting to set the report aside, the reactions across the Government of National Unity, the polling, the markets, and underneath all of it, the question of whether the institutions that the Constitution designed to hold a president to account can do so when the president is the most powerful person in the country.

The Common Sense will be following every turn of the Phala Phala case.