II Countries and Regions, 18 State Capture or Institutional Resilience: Is There a Crisis of Constitutional Democracy in South Africa?

Ever since Thuli Madonsela, South Africa’s former Public Protector—a constitutional institution empowered to investigate government impropriety—released her final report entitled “State of Capture” in late 2016, there has been a growing sense of crisis at the heart of the country’s constitutional order.1 While corruption in post-apartheid South Africa has grown in political and economic significance, the question is: When does government malfeasance become a constitutional crisis? From the earliest days of democracy in the mid-1990s there have been episodes of...