Chris Hattingh
Chris Hattingh is Executive Director at the Centre for Risk Analysis.
Articles By This Author
Poland vs SA: making a choice, and holding to it
Poland and democratic South Africa started in almost the same place. In 1993, Poland’s gross domestic product per person was $4,700. South Africa’s was $4,400.
Is South Africa serious about its sovereignty?
Speaking at Waterkloof Air Force Base, defence and military veterans minister Angie Motshekga opened the 13th Africa Aerospace and Defence (AAD) exhibition with a message worth taking seriously. She told delegates that July’s Defence Industry Lekgotla had produced a roadmap built on “localisation and sovereign capability, ensuring South Africa designs, manufactures, and sustains its own defence technologies.” She pointed to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent visit to Denel as proof that government backs the sector, and she framed the exhibition’s drones, aerospace platforms and cyber systems as engines of industrialisation.
AGOA survival doesn’t cure South Africa’s growth challenge
Last week United States (US) President Donald Trump signed into law an extension of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), keeping duty-free access to the US market open for more than 30 African countries until the end of 2028. For over a year, Republican Senator John Kennedy and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer had both floated cutting South Africa out of the programme entirely, citing its ties to China, Russia and Iran. Neither proposal made it into the law Mr Trump signed.
South Africa’s hidden tax: why crime is now a line item
Every business operating in South Africa already pays a tax that never appears on a South African Revenue Service assessment.
South Africa’s growth problem isn’t a story problem
Discovery CEO Adrian Gore’s latest statement on South Africa’s economy makes a case that has become all too familiar: driven by anaemic growth and structural unemployment, the country has spent a decade in societal crisis, but the tide has turned. Load-shedding has ended, state logistics are recovering, credibility has been restored, and what South Africa now needs is a shift in narrative – from perpetual decline to what Gore calls “realistic optimism.”
When the market builds what the state cannot deliver
A two-bedroom house in Protea Glen, Soweto, now sells for R1.03 million. It sits behind a boom gate, inside a perimeter wall, with private security patrolling a neighbourhood of paved roads and managed common areas. Emperors Security Estate, developed by Cosmopolitan Projects, is the first full-title security estate in South Africa’s largest township.
Fixing a burst pipe is not the same as owning the pipe
Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Geordin Hill-Lewis’s proposed plan that private companies should help buy electricity and fix water systems elicited the usual predictable backlash on social media.
Two in three young South Africans can’t find work
The rate of joblessness among South Africans aged between 15 and 24 reached 62.8% in the second quarter of 2026, a percentage-point rise of 1.9 on the quarter and 0.6 on the year.
Water reform needs teeth
South Africa’s dams are almost full. At the end of June 2026, they stood at 96.6% of capacity. Despite consistently full dams, in 2025 nearly 28% of households endured water interruptions lasting more than 48 hours, and 20% went without water for a cumulative 15 days or more over the year. Thus, while South Africa doesn’t have water shortage, it definitely has a shortage of working systems to deliver it.
Tau is right about the decline, but the remedy misses the cause
Parks Tau, Minister of Trade, Industry, and Competition, told a defence industry conference in Pretoria this week that South Africa must confront three decades of decline in its arms industry. Defence force acquisitions from local manufacturers fell to R850m in 2017 from R26.2bn in 1989/90. Over the same period research and development funding dropped to about R500m from R6.1bn. Employment across the sector collapsed from 130,000 people across 3,000 firms in 1990 to 13,000 people across 600 firms today.