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President Cyril Ramaphosa, in his 2018 State of the Nation Address, stated that “Thieves who are stealing public funds should be arrested and prosecuted”, and called for lifestyle audits of public-sector employees. The gross misuse of COVID-19 relief funds by public officials indicated the urgent need to execute these audits as an anti-corruption measure. This paper aims to provide a review of the existing state of affairs with regard to the application of lifestyle audits in South Africa.

This paper critically analyses the literature available on the current position of South Africa concerning lifestyle audits in the public sector, based on the mandates of some of the anti-corruption agencies that could be responsible for the conducting and processing of such audits.

South Africa has only recently seen a framework for applying lifestyle audits, developed by the Department of Public Service and Administration. Although these first steps in developing a standard practice are laudable, the practical process of dealing with misconduct and/or criminal matters remains to be seen. It is recommended that South Africa consider a legislative approach to dealing with unlawfully obtained wealth by either criminalising the act of illicit enrichment (per the United Nations Convention Against Corruption) or creating an Unexplained Wealth Order, as seen, for example, in the UK.

South Africa is in dire need of addressing corruption in the public sector. Despite lifestyle audits being called for, the lack of proper implementation is negating any positive outcomes. Therefore, alternative solutions should be investigated.

Asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants’ access to healthcare vary in South Africa and Cape Town due to unclear legal status. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the source of this variation, the divergence between the 1996 South African Constitution, the immigration laws, and regulations and to describe its harmful consequences.

Based on legal and ethnographic research, this paper documents the disjuncture between South African statutes and regulations and the South African Constitution regarding refugees and migrants’ access to healthcare. Research involved examining South African jurisprudence, the African Charter, and United Nations’ materials regarding rights to health and health care access, and speaking with civil society organizations and healthcare providers. These sources inform the description of the immigrant access to healthcare in Cape Town, South Africa.

Asylum-seekers and refugees are entitled to health and emergency care; however, hospital administrators require documentation (up-to-date permits) before care can be administered. Many immigrants – especially the undocumented – are often unable to obtain care because of a lack of papers or because of “progressive realization,” the notion that the state cannot presently afford to provide treatment in accordance with constitutional rights. These explanations have put healthcare providers in an untenable position of not being able to treat patients, including some who face fatal conditions.

The research is limited by the fact that South African courts have not adjudicated a direct challenge to being refused care at healthcare facility on the basis of legal status. This limits the ability to know how rights afforded to “everyone” within the South African Constitution will be interpreted with respect to immigrants seeking healthcare. The research is also limited by the non-circulation of healthcare admissions policies among leading facilities in the Cape Town region where the case study is based.

Articulation of the disjuncture between the South African Constitution and the immigration laws and regulations allows stakeholders and decision-makers to reframe provincial and municipal policies about healthcare access in terms of constitutional rights and the practical limitations accommodated through progressive realization.

In South Africa, immigration statutes and regulations are inconsistent and deemed unconstitutional with respect to the treatment of undocumented migrants. Hospital administrators are narrowly interpreting the laws to instruct healthcare providers on how to treat patients and whom they can treat. These practices need to stop. Access to healthcare must be structured to comport with the constitutional right afforded to everyone, and with progressive realization pursued through a non – discriminatory policy regarding vulnerable immigrants.

This paper presents a unique case study that combines legal and social science methods to explore a common and acute question of health care access. The case is novel and instructive insofar as South Africa has not established refugee camps in response to rising numbers of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. South Africans thus confront a “first world” question of equitable access to healthcare within their African context and with limited resources in a climate of increasing xenophobia.

This study aims to investigate a framework for implementation of legislative framework governing records management throughout the life cycle in the Limpopo provincial government of South Africa.

This quantitative multi-method study used a semi-structured questionnaire, document analysis and interviews to collect data. The dominant approach was quantitative, with some support from limited qualitative data, which served to clarify the statistical data. No sampling method was applied, as the study targeted the entire population of 135 records management participants from the provincial departments with the questionnaire, while nine participants from provincial archives participated in interviews.

The study revealed that the role of the provincial archives in enforcing compliance with legislative frameworks for the proper management of records was always disrupted by a lack of key resources such as staffing, for inspecting and training records-creating departments and working resources at the departmental levels.

The findings will contribute to the field in respect of future studies into compliance with records management legislation, and the proposed framework may be applied as a theoretical basis for, or part of, a conceptual framework.

The study will serve as a resource or benchmark for archivists and records management professionals in the industry, as they count amongst the policymakers who find ways of monitoring, evaluating and enforcing compliance with the legislation governing proper records management.

The proper implementation of recommendations from this study will lead to significant improvements in the management of records with enduring value, allowing them to finally be transferred to an archival repository to serve the public interest as heritage, national memory, or resources for researchers and authors, amongst others.

The study proposes a framework for implementation of legislation governing records management with greater ease in the Limpopo provincial government of South Africa.

This paper aims to provide an overview of South African perspectives on preventing, monitoring and combating hate victimisation, towards informing international understandings.

Using a general review approach, this paper provides a historical examination of measures proposed by the South African Government and civil society since 1994, to prevent, monitor and combat hate crime, hate speech and intentional unfair discrimination.

Regardless of a constitutional commitment to social inclusion, diversity and minority rights, significant progress remains lacking after almost three decades of related advocacy, lobbying and limited government intervention. Findings of the South African Hate Crimes Working Group (HCWG) longitudinal Monitoring Project emphasise the need for decisive legal responses to hate victimisation.

A Bill, recognising hate crime and hate speech as distinct criminal offences, has been in development for almost 15 years and will soon serve before Parliament. Enactment of this legislation will be ground-breaking in Africa.

This paper contributes to the field of hate studies by providing an overview of the journey towards current conceptual understandings of hate in (South) Africa. It sets the stage for evaluating the potential of the redesigned HCWG monitoring tool, which holds promise for early identification and intervention in hate hotspots and targeted sectors. This instrument can establish trends not only in South Africa but also across the African continent.

Targets set out by state institutions, with respect to supplying water to deprived communities, seem to be idealistic and not realistic. Study envisioned to assess challenges of financing water infrastructure projects, and determines the role of the state towards infrastructure development by holistically planning and engaging with the private sector.

The study adopted a quantitative approach, whereby a questionnaire survey was conducted among different stakeholders involved in water infrastructure projects in South Africa. Data gathered were analysed using percentages, mean item score and standard deviation.

The study revealed that most challenges affecting the success of the financing of water infrastructure projects in South Africa are corruption, hostility towards private participation, cost recovery constraints, high fiscal deficits by state government, unreliable planning and procurement processes, and a rapid increasing number of municipalities that lack technical and administrative capacity to plan implement, operate and maintain water assets.

This research paper investigates projects’ financing challenges with a broad inspection on the role of the public sector. The apparent role of the international structures such as OECD, IMF and World Bank had no influence in the study. From the findings, it is clear that the central government and state institutions lack the necessary resources to accelerate infrastructure development, water infrastructure in particular. The study, thus, recommends a complete expansion and development of state capacity as well as improved collaborations with the private sector to drive the success delivery of services to the public.

Improved and flexible regulations and legislative guidelines are required to ensure that both sectors fulfil their side of the bargain, with an ultimate goal of meeting the predetermined targets of supplying adequate water to the deprived communities.

This paper aims to explore the problematic of public policies and leadership challenges for socio-economic transformation in South Africa. The paper illustrates that policies and laws of socio-economic reform have been introduced in democratic South Africa. However, socio-economic transformation remains a challenge. Lack of trust in the leadership relationships amongst political and economic agents is pointed as a contributing factor. Hence, LE emerges as a leadership strategy to help mitigate the problem.

The paper starts by presenting the current economic situation of South Africa touching on some important economic indicators to illustrate the consequences of poor leadership in public policy implementation process. The paper then analyses the leadership challenges to drive socio-economic reforms that have been introduced in South Africa since the end of apartheid with focus on the current National Development Plan. Lack of trust in leadership is identified as a problematic factor and leadership ethos (LE) emerges as a leadership strategy to enable the building of trust in leadership for the purpose of a successful implementation of public policies.

Lack of trust in leadership is identified as a problematic factor contributing in the absence of cooperation and collaboration in the leadership relationship amongst public servants (from up to bottom) and citizens for the purpose of successful implementation of public policies. Hence, there is need for a new leadership paradigm that would enable the building of trust in these leadership relationships. LE emerges as such a leadership strategy.

The paper calls for an exploration into the understanding and practice of LE and its inherent critical success factors (CSFs) considered as a leadership strategy that can help drive particularly public policies implementation process. LE intends to promote moral leadership that helps public servants to build good character and thus the will to do the right thing, and mutually trusting relationship is a CSF of LE. Therefore LE enables build the much needed trust in leadership relationships for a successful organisational leadership and management.

This paper provides significant implications by identifying lack of trust as a problematic factor in the leadership relationships amongst political and economic agents in South Africa, contributing thus in the poor implementation of public policies. LE emerges as a leadership strategy that would help mitigate the problem by enabling the building, the maintenance and restoration of trust in organisational and or institutional management for a successful public policy implementation process.

Many organisations, including professional councils, operate manually to ensure document flow to clients and stakeholders. This results in the loss of valuable documentation such as certificates and the incurring of costs due to the returning of post to the sender. The purpose of this study was to explore digital transformation of document flow at the South African Council for Social Science Professionals.

The methodological approach involved qualitative data collected through interviews, observation and document analysis in response to research questions. The study was a participatory action research project that involved collaboration between researchers and study participants in defining and solving the problem through needs assessment exercise. All three phases of participatory action research were followed, namely, the “look phase”: getting to know stakeholders so that the problem is defined on their terms and the problem definition is reflective of the community context; the “think phase”: interpretation and analysis of what was learned in the “look phase” and the “act phase”: planning, implementing, and evaluating, based on information collected and interpreted in the first two phases.

The study identified various issues relating to poor data quality, high rate of registered postal returns and non-delivery electronic messages that cannot reach all the intended recipients and accumulation of data for decades. In this regard, the study proposes a framework that can be used by SACSSP to update and verify their details on the portal, as well as digital certificates for membership.

Although the proposed framework is tailor-made for the professional council, it is not depended on prescribed technologies due to usage of open standards that can be used by industry and researchers. Therefore, it can be applied in other context where institutions such as universities communicate with many clients via postal or courier services.

The study used participatory action research involving the researchers and the organisation to solve the problem. The study presented a workflow that the council can use to ensure that the documents reach intended recipients. Furthermore, digital transformation of the process will ensure that the registered professionals are able to access their certificates online and can print them when necessary.

In South Africa, the majority of the population struggles to access care and support for mental health challenges. Drawing on challenges faced by asylum seekers and refugees in the urban margins of Johannesburg, this paper aims to explore the relationship between migration and mental health through a lens of heightened vulnerability, precarious urban spaces and unmet basic needs.

Remote interviews were conducted with respondents working in the mental health-care sector (public and private) and with migrant communities in Johannesburg. Respondents were identified via purposive sampling and interviews were conducted in English. Key findings were identified using thematic analysis.

Effective responses to asylum seekers and refugees facing mental health challenges are based on an understanding of context, of crisis and of the need to meet basic needs such as paying rent, finding employment and providing for families. These “daily stressors” not only compound “extreme traumatisation” but are a form of trauma in and of itself.

This paper shows how alternative responses determined by an understanding of context, of crisis and of the need to meet basic needs provide critical and potentially far-reaching interventions. Locating trauma in the unmet needs, precarious urban spaces and marginalisation opens up space to further question the ways that migration and mental health shape and reshape one another.

A healthcare system in any country is rarely the product of one logical policy-making experience, but rather a manifestation of many years of historical development. The purpose of this paper is to examine the characteristics, components, and variables of South Africa’s healthcare system in the context of global patterns. It leverages a dynamic period in South Africa since 1994, and applies a comparative health systems analysis to explain where the country’s healthcare system is, and where it is potentially going.

This paper reviews literature related to South Africa’s healthcare system, outlines its historical development, and discusses three fundamental challenges experienced in the country. This paper also reviews the literature on healthcare system typologies and identifies three framework models that have been used to categorise national healthcare systems since the 1970s. This paper then discusses the categorisation of South Africa’s healthcare system in these models, in comparison to Canada and the USA.

This paper finds that the framework models are useful tools for comparative analysis of healthcare systems. However, any use of such typologies should be done with the awareness that national healthcare systems are not isolated entities because they function within a larger context. They are not static, since they are constantly evolving with many nuances, even with very similar healthcare system categorisations.

This paper charts the trajectory of change in the South African healthcare system, and demonstrates that the change process must keep internal conditions in mind if the outcome is to be successful. Imitating policies of countries with well-functioning systems, without regard to local realities, may not work, as the government attempts to usher in changes within a short span of time.