Breakdown in law and order in South Africa

Eskom chairman Mteto Nyati said that there has been a clear breakdown in law and order in South Africa, with the country sliding into lawlessness.

Nyati shared his views on the country’s “relentless slide into lawlessness” in a social media post on 1 August 2026.

“Jumping traffic lights has become commonplace. Driving under the influence is often treated lightly. Pedestrians cross roads with little regard for the danger,” he said.

“Informal settlements spring up overnight on any open piece of land. Illegal electricity connections are no longer treated as serious offences.”

“Informal traders claim pavements and intersections as their own. Prisoners somehow manage to keep smartphones. Driving without a licence is widespread.”

He said that the relaxation of rules is understandable due to the harsh and often humiliating laws that targeted black South Africans for decades.

“So society swung from one extreme to the other, from rigid control to an anything goes environment,” Nyati argued.

“In many ways, this chaos is presented as freedom, the freedom that was denied to the majority for so long.”

He cited South Africa’s opening of its borders to illegal immigration with the argument that these countries supported black people during apartheid.

Nyati said that a Minister of Correctional Services was speaking about prisoners and the collective duty to help them reach their full potential.

“The fact that some of these individuals were rapists, hardened killers and career criminals seemed to fade behind the focus on rehabilitation,” he said.

“We appear to have confused ordinary and hardened criminals with the political prisoners of the past.”

“In our emphasis on ubuntu, there is often little room left for the discipline that law and order require.”

Nyati argued that the confused state is not progressive. “It is setting us backwards. I know of no country that has ever become successful on a foundation of chaos,” he said.

“We need to strike the right balance. One that honours our painful history without using it as a permanent excuse to abandon the rules that keep a society from falling apart.”