South Africa’s cartel crisis shows us more than the spread of criminal networks. It exposes that the country is not a true collective. A collective, as the Fractal Divinity Framework explains, is not just a population grouped by geography or a flag. It is a body of people organized around a shared truth, committed to a cause negotiated together and upheld in common. Without this commitment, what remains is not a collective but a scattered mass of individuals, each living for themselves.
In that vacuum, a scattered mass of individuals and groups emerges. And from this disunity, cartels are not just allowed to flourish — they are birthed. They step into the very spaces where Covenant Structures — the resource application systems created to steward shared needs — have failed. Eskom, Transnet, water boards, municipalities: these forms were meant to direct resources for the good of all. But when leaders treat these forms as private fiefdoms, colluding with cartels or hoarding privilege, the form itself becomes corrupted. This corruption is not random; it reflects the spirit that inhabits the form. When the spirit of truth and accountability is absent, the form is overtaken by the spirit of domination.
The public’s silence makes this worse. When citizens refuse to confront corruption or hold leaders accountable, they are not neutral. They are complicit. A task team only functions if the collective itself demands alignment with truth. Without that demand, leaders can collude with cartels, enrich themselves, and present their theft as leadership. The cartel is not an alien invasion. It is the shadow of the people’s refusal to act as a collective, proof that when truth is abandoned, domination rushes in to fill the gap.
Cartels reveal the same destructive pattern as cancer in the human body. In cancer, cells begin to grow for themselves, consuming the body rather than sustaining it. Cartels behave the same way in a nation. They exploit, dominate, and consume resources, forgetting that their survival depends on the health of the larger body. This is why they embody the Devil-form my framework describes: spirit overtaking form, overwhelming structure, and consuming it for itself. They represent the collapse of covenant both in public institutions and in the daily lives of ordinary people.
We have seen this collapse most vividly in Eskom, where corruption and sabotage have thrown the nation into recurring darkness. I have written about this before in “When the Lights Go Out: Leadership and Collective Failure.” The link is not merely metaphorical. Just as loadshedding marks a breakdown in the stewardship of resources, cartels mark a deeper breakdown in the stewardship of covenant itself. Both show that when the spirit of domination overtakes form, the result is disintegration — whether of the power grid or the society as a whole. The solution cannot be found in policing cartels alone. If the collective does not return to truth, no investigation, no commission, and no reform will last. What must be rebuilt is the collective itself: people choosing again to align with covenant, demanding accountability from their task teams, and refusing to tolerate domination. Only then will the forms we build — our Covenant Structures, our resource systems — hold. Without this, the darkness will deepen, no matter how many cartels are exposed.
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