This article was first published by Business Day on 30 October 2026
For most of human history, people lived in small nomadic bands, learning about the world and the bounty it offered, but also the hungers it imposed. Security depended on kinship, and strangers were often met with force. About ten thousand years ago, a radical change began: not in human nature but in our institutions. Humans learned to cultivate grains, domesticate animals and settle in territories. They observed the skies, anticipated the seasons and worked the land. Agriculture brought settlement, and settlement brought rules governing ownership and exchange. It also brought kings and empires. Then, three hundred years ago, the Enlightenment transformed the relationship between the individual and political authority. Individual rights, private property, competitive markets and the rule of law produced an abundance our ancestors could not have imagined.
At the heart of that order are two concepts: the individual’s right to own property and the right to transfer it through exchange and contract. Property settles what belongs to whom; contract lets people agree on what to do with it. These rights matter because they allow strangers – even those separated by continents – to cooperate. Our instincts of solidarity and altruism serve us well within families and close-knit communities, but a modern economy cannot treat every stranger as a neighbour, nor as an enemy. It needs rules that encourage coordination without familial trust. Friedrich Hayek called the result the “extended order”: millions of people coordinating their activities without any central authority directing the whole.
Yet the conceit Hayek warned against persists: the belief that a ruler, or ruling party, can direct society’s resources and dispense them benevolently. That is not progress but a return to the age of kings, dressed in modern language. Whether free exchange or benevolent rule produces greater prosperity is not merely a matter of opinion. Its consequences can be measured.
The Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) report has done that annually for three decades. Its research provides a framework for comparing countries and examining how individual economic freedom relates to outcomes such as income, longevity and other measures of human flourishing. The report shows countries in the most economically free quarter earn about seven times the income per person of those in the least free. Their citizens live longer, with less corruption and healthier environments. Even the poorest 10 per cent in the most free countries earn several times more than their counterparts in the least free. These findings suggest the institutions which allow individuals to exchange property and pursue opportunities are central to the creation of abundance.
Of the report’s five areas, one is foundational to the others: Legal System and Property Rights measures judicial independence, impartial courts, secure property, the enforcement of contracts and reliable policing. South Africa performs poorly on almost all of them. In the 2026 report, it scored 4.88 out of ten for impartial courts, 5.08 for property rights, 5.44 for legal integrity and just 1.83 for police and crime (which puts it 151st out of 165 on this measure).
South Africa’s figures reveal weaknesses in the institutional foundations on which a prosperous society depends. First, the protection of people and their property is undermined when the police cannot reliably prevent or respond to crime. Second, confidence in the justice system suffers when courts are not perceived as sufficiently impartial or the legal institutions lack integrity. Third, property rights and contractual obligations become hollow promises when individuals cannot rely on the law to uphold them.
What the report measures, businesses feel: construction sites held to ransom by extortion gangs, copper cable vanishing faster than it can be replaced, and commercial disputes taking years to reach judgment. And who guards the guardians? Evidence before the Madlanga Commission suggests that, too often, it is the police who are the criminals.
Some of these measures rely on perception surveys, but that is no reason to dismiss their importance. What, after all, are animal spirits if not a subjective view of the future? Confidence in the security of one’s property, the fairness of the courts and the enforceability of agreements shapes the decisions people make about investment and enterprise.
For thirty years, South Africa has pursued a state-driven development path while failing to secure the most basic conditions for economic freedom. The language of the “developmental state” and the National Democratic Revolution has promised transformation, yet the institutions responsible for protecting property and enforcing the law remain deeply deficient.
When individuals cannot confidently exercise their rights, the spark of enterprise dims, and with it the drive on which prosperity depends. The cost is counted in businesses never started, factories never built and jobs never conceived, this in a country with one of the highest unemployment rates in the world.
What South Africa needs is a rethinking of the state’s role. It should be strong enough to protect people and enforce the law, yet restrained enough not to threaten the rights it exists to secure. Law and order is not one government function among many; it is the function that justifies government at all. A state that cannot protect its citizens and their property has failed in its first duty, whatever else it attempts.
Even the United States, whose founding ideals helped shape the modern tradition of individual freedom, has recently demonstrated how fragile those principles can be when political power becomes arbitrary and concentrated. Liberty is never a permanent achievement.
The great discovery of the Enlightenment was not that governments could organise society more efficiently, but that free individuals, protected by impartial laws, could organise their own affairs in ways no government could anticipate. South Africa does not need to abandon that inheritance. It needs to complete it. Prosperity cannot be legislated into existence. It must spring from institutions that allow individuals to build, exchange, plan and invest without fear of arbitrary interference. It is time to stop promising young South Africans their future and give them the freedom to build one.
