Former EFF MP Dr Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, now a senior fellow at the Thabo Mbeki Foundation, sits down with Gabriel Makin to unpack his 11 Theses on the Call for Batho Pele Convention. He argues that South Africans traded their agency for the ballot (“we vote, and then we wait”), and that local government is sliding into a mafiocracy run by extortion cartels. He also says communities must organise to take responsibility for their own streets and schools, among other things. Gabriel and Mbuyiseni then argue it out over a wide variety of issues: liberals and pan-Africanists, the lean state versus the developmental state, China and Deng Xiaoping, Black Consciousness and the Institute of Race Relations, racism and the 1994 settlement, and whether Bantu education or SADTU is to blame for South Africa’s failing schools.