Sindile Vabaza
Sindile Vabaza is an avid writer and an aspiring economist.
Articles By This Author
A dinner party conversation: Johannesburg vs Cape Town
There was an interesting moment at a dinner the other night that has stayed with me. We were talking about the differences between Johannesburg and
We keep having the wrong argument about safety in South Africa
South Africans have spent years arguing about farm attacks. One side sees them as a national crisis demanding urgent intervention. The other argues that they are too often presented as evidence of a unique victimhood that obscures broader patterns of violence. The debate is emotionally charged, politically entrenched, and by now deeply familiar.
Remembering the fun times: Molefe, Koko and the plunge into darkness
With the current law firm court case (over BEE regulations) being heard at the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria, I thought it would be interesting, for posterity’s sake, to go down memory lane to that other time when former Eskom CEO Brian Molefe and former Head of Generation Matshela Koko sabotaged renewable energy projects that not only destroyed black businesses that they often professed to want to help, but also cost the taxpayer a boatload of money.
Do we really understand South Africa?
I recently came across a tweet by Ntsiki Mazwai, in response to growing anger about illegal immigration, angrily accusing the Ruperts and Oppenheimers of plundering trillions of rands from “us” (I assume she means black people) and lamenting that those who are angered by illegal immigration are “busy with Africans from poor countries but too afraid to confront the people keeping you poor”.
Four ways to make Nelson Mandela Bay world class
This could just as easily be seen as the Chris Pappas model where local government builds trust and goodwill with residents by communicating small wins via multi social media strategy(tiktok, instagram and facebook) in the form of fixed streetlights, cleaned parks and fixed roads in communities across the metro and it is important to stress that it be across the metro because there is still a depressingly thick fog of racialism that permeates how even good things are seen in South Africa.
Incentives and municipal failure: why local government needs a structural reset
Like a lot of things that have gone wrong in South Africa, municipal decline is one that can be squarely put down to a problem of incentives.
How privately owned public spaces are the key to JHB CBD thriving in the future
One of the things that really excites me about the potential of Helen Zille winning the Johannesburg metro mayoral race is that she is far
New wineskins: how to be saved from tax hell
“Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will spill and the skins will be
Let’s ignore Trump’s boorishness and get a deal done with America
With the pageantry of the G20 summit over, and the diplomatic spat between the United States and South Africa continuing to blaze, hotter than ever
The astronomical potential of Nelson Mandela Bay
With local elections on the horizon in 2026 and the story mostly being about Johannesburg, I thought it would be good to highlight another metro