3.8 times is not a coincidence. It’s a mirror.
In Part 2 of Both Sides with Dr Zaid Kimmie, the story begins with a number that’s too large to shrug off: people of colour investigated for fraud, waste and abuse at dramatically higher rates than white practitioners.
Kimmie’s first move is important: he doesn’t pretend to read minds. Institutions will always deny discriminatory intent. The only honest place to start is the end result; the pattern that shows up in the data.
And that’s where the discomfort sits. In a genuinely non-discriminatory system, outcomes should not consistently split along racial lines. When they do, the question becomes unavoidable: what is producing the difference?
Kimmie’s argument is blunt. In a country with centuries of racially discriminatory laws and practices, it would be absurd to treat unequal outcomes as unrelated to that history.
Even without an explicit “racist switch” being pulled, systems can still land racially. Design, assumptions, incentives, and enforcement choices can all produce discrimination without anyone ever confessing motive.
Then the episode widens from statistics to society.
Kimmie points to vigilantism at clinics; private individuals deciding who may enter and who gets turned away; while authorities stand by. His warning is not subtle: once enforcement becomes informal and selective, it spreads.
Today it’s “foreigners”. Tomorrow it’s “real South Africans”. The next day it’s payment, favours, permission.
This is the connective tissue of the episode: when systems become selective, the damage doesn’t stay inside one policy area. It becomes a culture. And once the rule of law becomes negotiable, democracy doesn’t collapse in one dramatic moment.
It erodes in public, while everyone pretends it’s temporary.
The final takeaway is as sharp as the opening number: unequal outcomes are not just a technical problem. They are a legitimacy problem.
Because when people stop believing the system applies equally, they stop believing the system belongs to them.