THE FUSE

South Africa’s Draft National AI Policy was not withdrawn for the right reason. The citation scandal that forced its removal was real, involving AI-generated references that cannot be verified, articles in real journals that do not exist and one journal that appears never to have been published. That was a production failure. The real risk is structural. The policy reproduced three conditions that made Zondo-era State Capture possible. Those conditions were present before the citations were discovered. They remain present now. They are fixable, but only if the replacement is designed to fix them.