Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

South Africa may consider government intervention in Africa's richest city amid deepening financial crisis

Ayodeji Adegboyega
26 June 2026 11:54 AM

South Africa could be forced to place Johannesburg under government administration as years of financial mismanagement, political instability and deteriorating public services push the country’s commercial capital closer to a fiscal collapse that business leaders warn could undermine the national economy.

South Africa has been warned it may need to take over Johannesburg to prevent the country’s commercial capital from sliding into financial collapse.

The warning comes as Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana threatens to withhold R8 billion ($486 million) in annual funding if the city fails to fix its finances.
Business leaders say Johannesburg’s deteriorating finances now pose a national economic risk because the city contributes about 16% of South Africa’s GDP.
Years of political instability, rising debt and declining infrastructure have left Africa’s richest city facing one of its deepest governance crises.

https://africa.businessinsider.com/loca ... id/92grg94

South Africa’s immigration crackdown divides Johannesburg’s inner city
A government push to curb undocumented employment is exposing the dependence of many small businesses on migrant labour.

By Qaanitah Hunter
Published On 21 Jun 2026

Johannesburg, South Africa – In the narrow lanes of Fordsburg in central Johannesburg, Junaid Mohammed* stands behind the counter of a family shop that has been in his family for decades. His father started it as a general dealer. Today, it survives on cheap Chinese imports and shrinking margins.

Junaid, who asks us to use a pseudonym, does not call it a decline. He calls it survival.

But the bigger change is not what he sells. It is who he employs.

Junaid only employs foreign nationals as store assistants and packers. “It was not a deliberate choice,” he says.

It began with cost. Then habit. Then necessity.

“It became expensive to hire locals,” he says.

South Africa’s minimum wage is about $1.87 per hour, roughly $324 per month, plus statutory contributions and strong labour protections.

Junaid says he cannot carry it.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/ ... inner-city

Geoff Hill
South Africa now has its answer to ICE

Friday, June 26, 2026, 12:03 PM

A force of 10,000 inspectors is being recruited to weed out foreigners: door-to-door across the nation, they will check mines, factories and shops, rounding up those without papers for deportation. Oh, and the target will be black people!

Trump madness? Marine le Pen? No, this is South Africa and a project launched by President Cyril Ramaphosa to expel millions of black migrants from across the rest of Africa who have jumped the border or overstayed their visa.

https://spectator.com/article/south-afr ... edition=us

Africa
'They can kill you': African migrants fear a surge in xenophobic violence in South Africa

June 25, 2026 5:00 AM ET
By Kate Bartlett

Johannesburg has always been a melting pot. Traverse South Africa's economic capital and you'll come across Zimbabweans trained as doctors but driving Ubers, Ethiopians running bustling restaurants, and Congolese selling colorful wax print fabrics.

Some of these immigrants have lived here for years. Others have recently arrived, seeking a better life in one of the continent's richest and most stable democracies. Some are here legally, others not.

But all of them are now under threat — not just in Johannesburg but across the country, from Durban to Cape Town — as South Africa is engulfed by a rising tide of xenophobia.

For months now, mobs of anti-immigrant protesters, many brandishing sticks, have been marching through the streets chanting "Mabahambe" — a Zulu phrase meaning "They must go." Some of them claim to perform "arrests" and say they have the right to check immigration papers, although they have no legal authority to do so.

Foreign-owned businesses have been attacked, people chased from their homes, and several migrants have been killed. In Durban, it's a tinder keg, and thousands of Malawians who have fled their homes to escape the violence have camped out in the open, in winter, begging their country to send buses to rescue them.

In Cape Town, hundreds of Zimbabweans also camped outside their consulate. Nigeria, Ghana and Mozambique weren't waiting — they've already repatriated those citizens who wanted to leave.

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/25/nx-s1-58 ... uth-africa

'A wake up call': Municipal misery hangs over upcoming South African elections

Evaton West (South Africa) (AFP) – Mounds of garbage, potholed roads and sewage spills: grim conditions like these led voters near Johannesburg to abandon their long-time loyalty to the African National Congress and hand the rival Democratic Alliance its first black township ward in South Africa, highlighting frustration over municipal-level failures ahead of November's local elections.

Issued on: 28/06/2026 - 10:57

https://www.rfi.fr/en/africa/20260628-m ... -townships

[Higgenbotham]

Johannesburg, while considered the capital city of Africa, is, being in Africa, a city I would still consider to be on the periphery and, therefore, the collapse has been slow so far.

When New York City and the other capital cities of the hegemon collapse, it should be a lot more sudden and a lot more violent.

Billionaires building bunkers and moving to Argentina.

[aedens]

Collapse zone notes.
In the economic domain, e.g., financiers, stock-exchange speculators, merchants, shopkeepers skim the cream; in civil matters, the lawyer fleeces his clients; in politics the representative is of more importance than the voters, the minister than the sovereign; in religion, God is pushed into the background by the “Mediator,” and the latter again is shoved back by the priests, the inevitable middlemen between the good shepherd and his sheep. In France, as in England, the great feudal territories were divided into innumerable small homesteads, but under conditions incomparably more favorable for the people. During the 14th century arose the farms or terriers. Their number grew constantly, far beyond 100,000. They paid rents varying from 1/12 to 1/5 of the product in money or in kind. These farms were fiefs, sub-fiefs, &c., according the value and extent of the domains, many of them only containing a few acres. But these farmers had rights of jurisdiction in some degree over the dwellers on the soil; there were four grades. The oppression of the agricultural population under all these petty tyrants will be understood.
Monteil says that there were once in France 160,000 judges...
Alexis Monteil: “Traité de Matériaux Manuscrits

The implosion will be guided and is.
Zones are being erased since borders did not concern them.
They will be erased and just are.
Eco leads Pol.

What these fools still ignore and yes will continue to do so.

[Higgenbotham]

In the West today, we operate under the influence of our own key philosophy, which we can call scientism: the tendency to rely on scientific claims to describe the functioning of society, even when there is no empirical reason to assume that they apply. We act as if we are already living in a scientifically-planned society, immune to collapse on a time scale that any of us have to worry about. This is very far from the truth. We are certainly living in socially-engineered societies, but they are not scientifically planned in any straightforward way. Our organs of economic management do not secretly know how the economy really works. Our systems of political regulation are operating on the fumes of their institutional inheritance from two or three generations ago—the last spurt of institutional growth in Western societies happened roughly during the 1970s. At this time in the United States, new federal bodies such as the Department of Energy and Education were created and organizations such as NASA reached their modern form. Concurrently, the United Kingdom dispensed with organized labor as a political force in favor of an expanded administrative apparatus, and France saw the resignation of Charles de Gaulle, the architect of the Fifth Republic; neither country’s political economy has evolved much since.

Civilizational collapse always looms on the horizon. Though we usually think of collapse as a slow process, it can in fact happen very quickly, as was the case with the Late Bronze Age collapse. The old dictum “gradually, then suddenly” is cliché, but accurate. To ascertain whether or not we are headed for collapse, we must first analyze the functionality of our own society and pinpoint where things go wrong.

Mechanisms of Collapse

Our society is dominated by large bureaucracies. These bureaucracies break down the processing of physical goods and information into discrete tasks, such as how a factory worker puts doors on a car, or a stock trader buys futures contracts. These tasks are shorn of their context and executed in a systematized environment whose constraints are quite narrow: put the car door in, increase the portfolio value. Our society is thoroughly compartmentalized. This compartmentalization isn’t driven by the division of labor, but rather by the need to make use of misaligned talent without empowering it. By radically limiting employees’ scope of action, you make office politics more predictable. By fragmenting available knowledge, you can leverage information asymmetries to the intellectual or material advantage of the center. Some of this is necessary for scaling organizations beyond what socially connected networks can manage—but move too far towards compartmentalization, and it becomes impossible to accomplish the original mission of the organization.

Such large bureaucratic systems do not emerge organically; they require design and implementation. Empirically, we can know this simply by examining the intent of the original founders of these systems. If you want to know, say, why the FBI exists, you can find the answer in the documents of its founder, J. Edgar Hoover. You could do the same for the IRS, or for Amazon, or for any other number of institutions.

It is very difficult, though, to apply this analysis to the construction of society. No matter how large or how small, institutions always coexist in a symbiotic relationship with other institutions. There is no Amazon without the United States government, no U.S. government without—at least—some parts of the U.S. economy. Each of these institutions depends on the others in an intricate mesh. Society is not a single institution, after all, but an ecosystem of interdependent institutions.

In addition to this complexity, non-functional institutions are the rule. Our institutions today rarely function in accordance with their stated purpose. Individuals within a given society are often very bad at judging institutional functionality. Some people spend their entire lives ruthlessly profiting from the misery of others, or greatly contributing to the prosperity of others, without even knowing that they are doing so.

https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/03/08 ... -collapse/