Professor Somadoda Fikeni took the stand on Day 176 and said something that should have stopped the room. South Africa's implementation failures are not incompetence. They are design. He called it a "political economy of inefficiency." An appearance of action while the system is structured so that policies and programmes do not actually work. Okay. Let me walk through what he actually said. 1. South Africa has some of the best governance policies on paper. Fikeni should know. He chairs the Public Service Commission. His job is to evaluate whether those papers mean anything. He said he has seen four ministers in five years at the PSC. High turnover is not chaos. It is a feature — because every new minister restarts the clock, and the system behind the minister keeps running. But then he said the quiet part: "The unwillingness to implement, but the presentation of a facade that we want to implement. Okay, let them push, but we'll make sure that it doesn't work." 2. The drone example. The Border Management Authority has four drones for 71 ports of entry. Fifty-two of those ports are land borders. The BMA says it cannot procure more because the budget goes to salaries, with almost nothing left for operations and equipment. Officials have applied for extra funding through the Criminal Assets Recovery Account. Four drones. Seventy-one ports. That is not a budget shortfall. That is a statement. 3. But the drone gap is not the story. The story is the rest of the inventory. Fikeni pointed to a wider pattern: idle equipment. Unspent grants. Software licences purchased and never activated. ICT systems bought and never switched on. Money has been spent. The receipt exists. The box was delivered. It was never opened. This is not theft. It is worse. Theft requires someone to want something. This requires no one to want anything to work. 4. Here is what "political economy of inefficiency" actually means. It is not that the system is broken. It is that the system produces exactly the outcome it was designed to produce: - Appearances of action for the annual report. - Delays long enough for the political cycle to turn. - Just enough functionality to keep the lights on while the wiring corrodes. When a minister announces a new programme, the announcement is the deliverable. The programme is optional. 5. The uncomfortable truth: Incompetence can be fixed. You train people. You hire better ones. You restructure. A system designed to look like it is working while ensuring it does not work cannot be reformed from within. Because the people who would have to fix it are the same people who benefit from it staying broken. Fikeni did not say that last part. He did not have to. Four drones for seventy-one borders said it for him.