In the first episode of The Royal Sense, Princy Mthombeni and Gabriel Makin discuss the latest Quarterly Employment Statistics, which show South Africa has lost 435 000 formal jobs since June 2023, and ask what happened to the National Development Plan’s promise of 11 million new jobs. They also discuss crime and gender-based violence before moving to immigration. They talk about how South Africa signed the 1951 UN Refugee Convention in 1996 without a single reservation, why Botswana signed with limits on work, movement, and naturalisation, and what it means to integrate asylum seekers into poor communities. Princy argues that “compassion without control becomes chaos”, takes on what she dubs “pseudo-pan-Africanists", and asks who ordinary South Africans are supposed to blame when the state is absent.