Our argument was simple. For the union to endure, South Africa needs a strong nationalist administration in Pretoria, not a limp, net-zero-obsessed government allergic to hard choices.

As the state has weakened, the greatest loser has been the African National Congress (ANC). The Democratic Alliance (DA) has grown, the radical left has grown, and smaller opposition parties have grown. Meanwhile, the rich and the middle classes have secured their futures within South Africa's expanding archipelago of private enclaves.

We remain proponents of the Government of National Unity (GNU), but David Ansara made a compelling argument against it on our Makin Sense podcast last week. He contends that South Africans have misread the country's fundamentals, that it can never be well governed from Pretoria. Instead, this moment should be used to allow the country to evolve into a federation of cantons. For him, the GNU merely delays that inevitable outcome.

A recent Durban visit brought us face-to-face with Chris Pappas, the DA's mayor in uMngeni. His political career is remarkable. In the heart of KwaZulu-Natal (no easy environment, and one where politics comes with lethal dangers) stands this diminutive but formidable young, white, fluent-Zulu, gay man leading a town and, by all accounts, doing it better than anyone else in that province. Amazing country.

South Africa's government, for its part, never lacks ambition or self-confidence. At The Common Sense, we have praised the energy minister for his pragmatic efforts to curb load-shedding by improving the performance of coal plants. Yet the 2025 edition of the Integrated Resource Plan he presented to journalists over the weekend, promising to lift national generation capacity from roughly 50000 MW to 160000 MW within fifteen years, repeats every mistake of its predecessors.

It offers the most complex, costly, and impractical route imaginable to achieve the energy needed to hike the growth rate to over 4%. Thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines must be built, alongside more than 5GW of storage capacity and dozens of new power stations, all while chasing every net-zero target imaginable and financing it with borrowed money.

We're sceptical, and betting it won't happen. Get the basics right first: fix potholes, guarantee water in places like Johannesburg, and stop the theft.

Walk before you run. The "walk" option on electricity is to use the coal we already have, in the (defunct) power stations we already possess, connected to the grid we already built and to finance this with the money we already have in the budget. Forget net-zero for now. Follow that energy plan, and South Africa could lift peak daily energy output by 50 percent within three years which will be enough to sustain growth above 4% for the rest of the decade.

Wealthy people with rooftop solar in their enclave-archipelagos ask how we can hold such views on energy. Our answer is simple. A youth unemployment rate above 50%, rising to over 70% among black women, motivates us. We care about reducing those numbers to below 10% so that millions, mostly black South Africans, can escape crushing poverty. We care about that more than we care about anything else.