South African journalists are often ignorant and often malicious in their reporting, particularly when fused with the rough-and-tumble of social media. When one brings ignorance and malice together under the banner of journalism, however, we have quite the cringeworthy cocktail.
Colour me surprised when I discovered last week that “Brendan Seery”, the account on X (Twitter) that I recently blocked on suspicion of being a bot, was the Deputy Editor of The Citizen, who then took his tirade onto the pages of an otherwise respectable publication.
I use these harsh words against Seery because if he could not handle it, he should not have dished it out to me by name as he did in “In the post-truth era, facts no longer matter” (6 January 2026).
A right of reply was originally submitted to The Citizen, which refused to publish and instead opted to make certain modifications to the original article. This column is a modified version of the original right of reply. (To its credit, past experience shows that the Daily Friend would not have hesitated to offer a right of reply to someone who had been attacked in their pages.)
Disagreement is part and parcel of the legal profession. As far as I am concerned, Seery could simply have declared his political preferences and framed our disagreement as a matter of opinion.
Instead, in The Citizen, Seery crudely calls my legal expertise into question. I hold a Master of Laws (with distinction) and will graduate later this year with a Doctor of Laws from the University of Pretoria. My work has been published in South African, African, and international law and other academic journals, with editors and peer-reviewers usually not sharing my classical liberal worldview. Both the aforementioned postgraduate degrees are in public law – the field relevant to this discussion. (I go out of my way to avoid credentialism unless the credentials are called into question.)
But Seery does not stop there. He then proceeds to lump me in as a fellow “propagator of disinformation” in a “Post Truth Era”, while betraying his own lax journalistic standards.
Seery should take care before accusing others of disinformation.
Let us get the first thing out of the way that simple journalistic legwork would have covered for him: Jaco Kleynhans is the Head of International Liaison for the Solidarity Movement, not, as Seery declared him to be, a staff member at the South African Institute of Race Relations.
All right, not off to a good start.
Seery’s interactions
Seery was bizarrely outraged on X with my noting (not “claiming”) the fact – not in any serious scholarly, academic, or constitutional dispute – that South Africa is a federal, not a unitary, state.
This is akin to any jurist explaining that the roots of South African common law are largely Roman-Dutch and English. These are normative issues to be sure, but no less factual.
Seery claims that he “challenged” me on X to “show where this actually appears in the Constitution”, after which (he claims) I “went silent”. In fact, I responded to him within two hours, citing no fewer than thirteen (13) constitutional provisions that illustrate the federal essence of the Constitution.
For a journalist who was apparently active during the transition, none of this should have been contentious to Seery.
That is when he went silent.
Days later, when he accused me in a separate interaction on X of avoiding engagement, I blocked him. Again: I reasonably suspected such a malicious actor to be a bot unnecessarily and dishonestly keeping the temperature of discourse high. The next time I heard from him was in The Citizen article.
Federal state
Now to the substance of the matter: why is (not why do I “claim”) South Africa a federal state?
As African National Congress constitutional luminary Kader Asmal explained in 1994, in a federal state “the allocation of power between a federal and a provincial government is [expressly] delineated” rather than being left to the discretion of the central government.
Two years prior, Douglas Irvine of the then University of Natal and technical advisor to the Commission on Provincial Government and the Constitutional Assembly during the transition, explained that a federal dispensation has three characteristics: (1) the federal unit (the province) cannot be abolished without its consent; (2) it has an area of original legislative and administrative competence; and (3) it has the right to participate in the governance of the whole state.
Seem familiar? To those who know the South African Constitution, it should be.
In a unitary state, the authority of a subcentral sphere of government is entirely dependent on the leeway afforded to it (as a gift) by the central government. In fact, the very existence of these spheres is left in the hands of the centre.
This is why the United Kingdom, which is a decentralised dispensation, remains a unitary one, because Parliament can abolish the governments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland at its own discretion.
A federal state is one wherein the source of authority is outside the discretion of the centre and entrenched in a supreme constitution. Even if they desperately wanted to, none of the federal governments of the United States, Canada, India, or Australia could abolish the governments of their states and provinces or unilaterally vary their powers.
And neither could the government of South Africa.
Still not satisfied, with Asmal, Irvine, or Van Staden, these so-called “legal experts”? Let us refer to a standard textbook on constitutional design by CF Strong, Modern Political Constitutions, first published in 1930, with at least seven editions following. In the seventh (1966) edition, Strong writes:
“A unitary state is one organised under a single central government; that is to say, whatever powers are possessed by the various districts within the area administered as a whole by the central government are held at the discretion of that government, and the central power is supreme over the whole, without any restrictions imposed by any law granting special powers to its parts.” (63)
In a unitary state, the subcentral units are essentially offices or branches of the centre. Meanwhile:
“In a federal state the powers of the central or federal authority are limited by certain powers secured to the units which have united for common purposes. We note, therefore, in a federal state a distinction of powers between the federal authority and the authorities of the units forming the federation. This being the case, there must be some authority which determines this distribution. This authority is the Constitution itself.” (64)
This debate was concluded decades before Seery decided to reflexively call it “disinformation”.
The South African Constitution is the source of the authority of not simply provinces, but uniquely even among federations, also municipalities. No matter how much Cyril Ramaphosa might disagree with Alan Winde or Geordin Hill-Lewis, neither he nor his compliant Parliament could “fire” either Winde or Hill-Lewis or abolish their respective governments.
In a true unitary state, such a limitation on the authority of the central government would be unthinkable and impossible.
“Federal” versus “unitary” is not a question of the degree of centralisation, but a question of the source of legal authority. There are decentralised federations (the United States, Canada) and centralised federations (South Africa, Austria), and decentralised unitary states (the United Kingdom, Spain) and centralised unitary states (Zimbabwe, Venezuela), all over the world.
South Africa is, simply, as a matter of definition, not a unitary state. And even though the political elite think they can use mere rhetoric to skirt around this fact, South Africa is, formally, a federation.
This is not subject to any meaningful dispute, and it is a shame that Seery, who had clearly been caught up in the “unitary vibes” that characterise South African politics, was unable to look beyond these vibes at basic constitutional and political reality.
What is becoming of journalism?
It is unfortunate that journalists – and Seery is by no means an exceptional instance of this problem – have stooped this low.
Gone are the days of journalists at least pretending to be above the fray, objectively assessing discourse and conduct and reporting the facts. Now, journalists openly and actively pick sides and make little effort to engage in real fact-checking. Almost everything is nowadays subjected to a vibe-check, where the feelings and publicity around something matter more than real, on-the-ground truth.
One need look no further than how South African journalists (almost to a man) have chosen to report on the indisputable existence of race laws, or even more recently, on the Steers debacle, taking social media outrage by a tiny group of more-than-likely bot accounts and turning it into a public affair that could harm the lives and livelihood of a dozen families.
The press’s performance on the recent G20 disaster was also laughable, with media houses opting overwhelmingly to rescue Ramaphosa’s image and portray him as some sane statesman holding cartoon villain Donald Trump at bay.
I have long believed that it is better for the façade to be ripped off rather than continuing to gaslight the public. Journalists should simply wear their biases and prejudices on their sleeves and abandon the pretension of objectivity. Discourse would be healthier for it.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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