Mike Gatvol argues that South Africa’s unemployment, failing infrastructure and entrenched crime point to a state that is not meeting its most basic obligation: creating the conditions in which citizens can work, live safely and plan for the future. The test of a functioning state The sharpest question in Mike Gatvol’s argument is not whether South Africa has problems. It is whether its institutions still behave as though those problems demand a sustained, practical response. He places unemployment, infrastructure vandalism and urban lawlessness in the same frame: each is a test of whether government can protect public goods and widen opportunity. The case is not simply that conditions are bad. It is that a government should be judged by whether it can see a failure clearly, assign responsibility and act before that failure becomes normal. Gatvol’s frustration is directed at the public habit of accepting breakdown as routine, from dark highways and damaged traffic lights to young graduates unable to find work. South Africa’s labour-market figures give the concern real weight. Statistics South Africa recorded an official unemployment rate of 32.7% in the first quarter of 2026, with 8.1 million people unemployed. For people aged 15 to 24, the rate was 60.9%; for those aged 25 to 34, it was 40.6%. Those figures do not settle every question about government policy, but they make the scale of the employment emergency impossible to treat as an abstraction. Employment and the obligation to explain choices Gatvol’s most contentious criticism concerns the employment of non-South Africans in public institutions, including the South African Human Rights Commission, schools and universities. His argument is that, in a country with widespread unemployment, public bodies should be able to explain why a suitably qualified South African could not fill a post before recruiting elsewhere. That principle has a place in existing policy. Public-service policy requires the local labour market to be properly tested before a foreign national is considered for a critical occupation, while employment law and migration rules set their own requirements. The constitutional standard for public administration, however, is not a blanket nationality test. It calls for personnel practices based on ability, objectivity, fairness and broad representation. Any allegation that a specific appointment was improper therefore requires the vacancy, the recruitment process, the person’s work authorisation and the available local candidates to be examined, not assumed. The distinction matters. A country can pursue a stronger commitment to local opportunity without treating every foreign professional as proof of institutional failure. The harder and more useful demand is transparency: public institutions should disclose how appointments are made, when scarce skills are genuinely needed and how they have demonstrated that qualified local candidates were considered. The argument turns on whether those explanations can withstand the experience of people who have invested in qualifications and still remain outside the labour market. Infrastructure theft is not a minor nuisance On infrastructure, Gatvol is right to stress the chain of consequences. Cable theft and vandalism do not end with a missing fitting or an outage. They disrupt electricity, transport and communications, increase costs for households and businesses, and reduce confidence that public assets will be protected. The state already recognises the problem as organised and economically damaging. Police and prosecutors have pursued infrastructure-crime cases, and the National Prosecuting Authority said in April that a Free State offender received 20 years’ direct imprisonment for convictions involving theft and damage to essential infrastructure. Government crime briefings have also linked cable-theft syndicates to outages and economic harm. That makes Gatvol’s challenge less a call to discover the issue than a call to measure whether current action is enough. A specialised unit is only valuable if intelligence, investigation, prosecution and asset protection work together. A public-awareness campaign may help build care for shared infrastructure, but it cannot replace visible enforcement, reliable repairs or controls over the illicit scrap-metal market. Law and order as an economic condition Gatvol describes law and order as the foundation for development: investors will not commit capital, businesses will not operate confidently and families will not settle where public space feels ungoverned. His example of inner-city Johannesburg is deliberately blunt, but its underlying point is sound. Disorder imposes costs long before it appears in a budget line. Crime policy cannot be reduced to tougher rhetoric. It depends on capable detectives, dependable prosecutions, municipal enforcement, functioning courts and a clear division of responsibilities between national, provincial and local government.