Sports commentators were forced to abandon a live broadcast and flee for safety when a powerful 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck Panama.

The earthquake hit at approximately 1pm local time on Friday, sending violent tremors through Panama’s southern coast and triggering more than 80 aftershocks.

The epicentre was located near the small town of Pitaloza Arriba in Herrera province. The shallow quake struck at a depth of around 10 kilometres.

Tsunami warnings were briefly issued for parts of the eastern Pacific, including Mexico and Chile, by the US tsunami warning system. Those alerts have since been cancelled.

No deaths have been reported, although at least two people are understood to have suffered injuries.

Dramatic footage captured the moment a group of sports broadcasters ran from their studio as the earthquake rocked the building around them, eventually plunging the set into darkness.

The five presenters initially exchanged bewildered looks as the walls and light fixtures behind them began shaking visibly.

When the movement intensified, some dropped their microphones while others carried the equipment as they stood up and rushed out of the building.

The US Geological Survey first recorded the earthquake as magnitude 8.0 before later revising the estimate to 7.7.

The shallow tremor was felt across Panama, a Central American country of roughly 4.5 million people, and caused buildings and roads to collapse in parts of the interior, according to the National Civil Protection System.

Rene Garcia, the head of emergency operations, said there had been no confirmed fatalities at that stage.

Around 200 kilometres from the epicentre, residents in Panama City were seen fleeing the city’s landmark skyscrapers amid widespread panic.

Salomon Andion, 46, said he was forced to leave his 15-storey building for a second time after further aftershocks struck.

“I was scared because the shaking was very strong and lasted a long time,” he said.

“Heavy items, including dressers, the bed and everything in the kitchen, were shaking.”

A widely shared video also appeared to show water spilling from the rooftop pool of a building more than 20 storeys high.

Another showed a bridge over the Panama Canal shaking violently, but remaining upright as vehicles travelled across it. 

Panama’s President Jose Raul Mulino said: ‘We are facing a major disaster,’ adding that some roads had ‘completely collapsed.’ 

Juana Alveo, a 38-year-old cashier at a store in the city of Penonome in central Cocle province, said: ‘It was horrible, like nothing we ever experienced. My daughter was trapped in school.’ 

The two injuries were reported by people trapped in different collapsed structures – one near a church in Veraguas, the other in a collapsed hotel in Cocle, authorities said. 

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on X on Friday that he was ‘closely monitoring’ the situation, with his office ‘rapidly mobilizing resources and personnel to assist,’ at the Panamanian government’s request. 

The Panama Canal Authority said shipping through the channel, which connects the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, was unaffected and operating ‘as normal’. 

Mulino travelled to Penonome to coordinate the disaster response. 

Health Minister Fernando Boyd said that the most affected areas were the provinces of Herrera and Cocle, as well as Los Santos. 

He said the town of Tonosi in Los Santos was completely cut off, adding: ‘We are trying to figure out how to get there by air, because it’s impossible by land.’ 

Panama City’s international airport, a major hub for the region, was temporarily closed. 

Several flights were diverted to other airports as a precaution, according to the Civil Aeronautics Authority. 

The leaders of Colombia, Ecuador and Guatemala all sent messages of solidarity and offers of aid. 

Earthquakes are rare in Panama and usually occur in the western Chiriqui province, bordering Costa Rica. 

Former president Ricardo Martinelli posted pictures on Instagram of his house in the town of Sona in Veraguas province, which had completely collapsed. 

A church and a hotel in Penonome also suffered extensive damage, images shared on local media showed. 

More than 80 aftershocks, one above magnitude 6.0, were recorded by the local geosciences institute. 

President Mulino called for calm, posting on X: ‘What happened should not be used to generate alarm and disorder,’ adding that he had called for a report on the damage. 

The education ministry announced the suspension of classes in schools nationwide. 

The Panamanian quake is at least the fourth quake this year in Latin America surpassing 7.0 in magnitude, after devastating back-to-back earthquakes in Venezuela’s Guaira in June and a powerful earthquake in western Colombia in August. 

To fellow students on his journalism course at the University of Worcester, Benjamin Day seemed entirely ordinary.

“He was pleasant enough, if a bit aloof,” one student who began the course with him in September 2024 told the Daily Mail.

“He was polite and attentive in lectures, but generally he just didn’t stand out at all.”

Aside from his habit of wearing his coat indoors, even on warm days, Day’s only notable decision was to change courses last September, moving from journalism to applied biology and forensics.

“Going from a creative subject to a science-based course isn’t that common,” another student said.

When the new term began in January this year, however, Day, then 19, had disappeared from the university. His former classmates had no idea that he was behind bars, arrested the previous month over a horrifying murder.

The disturbing details revealed in court this week have stunned those who knew him.

On the night of December 20, the middle-class teenager from a leafy area of Redditch, Worcestershire, stabbed a young woman 78 times before attempting to dismember her body.

Day had carefully prepared for his attack on Maria Saceanu, a 24-year-old mother of a young daughter, in a bedroom at an Airbnb property he had rented for the night.

He turned the room into what was described as a “kill room”, covering the floor, walls and bed with plastic sheeting stapled to the walls to limit forensic evidence. Police also found several knives, a staple gun, duct tape, an apron, a plastic visor and cleaning products at the scene.

But prosecutors said there was an even more disturbing element to the crime. At Wolverhampton Crown Court, barrister Rachel Brand KC told the jury that Day had drawn inspiration from the popular television drama Dexter.

The American series, which first aired from 2006 to 2013 before returning in later spin-offs, centres on Dexter Morgan. By day he works as a blood-spatter analyst for police; by night he becomes a vigilante serial killer who carefully conceals his crimes.

Dexter follows a strict code, targeting people he believes are murderers who have escaped justice. That premise allows viewers to see him as a killer who operates according to a conscience.

The distinction has helped establish Dexter as one of television’s most compelling anti-heroes.

However, the fictional character appeared to give Day a blueprint for actions that prosecutors said had no justification. On the opening day of his trial, Ms Brand told jurors they were “those of a copycat, imitating the things he had seen in that programme”.

Day pleaded guilty to murder on the second day of his trial and is due to be sentenced in December. The case has left one central question: how could a young man raised in an apparently comfortable, loving middle-class family commit such a brutal crime?

The murder has devastated Maria Saceanu’s family and shattered Day’s own. Speaking outside the family’s comfortable home in a quiet cul-de-sac in an affluent part of Redditch, his father told the Daily Mail they were “devastated” by what had happened. “Obviously, as a family we are devastated and that’s all I’m prepared to say,” he said. He also said neither he nor his wife had known about Dexter’s influence on their son. “No, we didn’t know anything,” he added.

Day’s father, who was born in South Africa, is 53 and runs his own business. His 55-year-old mother works as a social worker, and Day has an older sister.

In an extraordinary coincidence, the landlords who rented Maria Saceanu her home in the West Midlands town of Tividale also live in the same road as her killer.

Hermanpreet Pal, who shares her home with husband Savinder, told the Daily Mail of her shock at discovering the connection.

‘It’s so weird. To think that someone from Redditch, let alone the close, did this,’ she said. ‘It’s a total coincidence.’

Unbeknown to all of them was the student’s fascination with Dexter – an obsession, as detectives investigating Saceanu’s murder put it.

‘Day had an obsessive personality and had become obsessed with the character Dexter,’ Detective Inspector Matt Marston, of West Midlands Police’s Major Crime Team, who led the investigation, said this week. ‘He planned this murder in meticulous detail.’

And that detail, as Rachel Brand KC told jurors, seemed designed to emulate his fictional forensic-worker anti-hero.

‘As you know, the defendant changed his university course to study applied biology and forensics,’ she told them. Day lured Miss Saceanu, a sex worker, to the house with the excuse of booking her for a liaison.

‘He had changed into “Dexter” clothing [a khaki long-sleeved top worn by the character] before Maria Saceanu arrived at the house,’ Ms Brand told the court.

‘In the TV series Dexter prepares a “kill room” when carrying out his attacks, lined with plastic sheeting which he fixes using a staple gun or duct/gaffer tape. ‘And this is exactly how the defendant had prepared the room.

‘Dexter wears an apron, a plastic visor and gloves when killing his victims – all such items were found in the bedroom.’

Disturbing as these parallels are, moreover, Day is far from the first murderer whose crimes have been linked to the television series.

Indeed, just three months ago, another British court heard how a man with a disturbing interest in Dexter’s dismemberment scenes had murdered and mutilated two men in Cornish woodland.

James Desborough, 40, was convicted at Winchester Crown Court in July of murdering two vulnerable men whose remains were discovered near his cabin.

One of them – Claudio Aquilino, 57 – had contacted police the night before his disappearance in April 2025, fearful of what Desborough might do to him.

Investigators subsequently recovered more than 1,900 of his burnt bone fragments from a nearby stream. Two months later, Desborough murdered Daniel Coleman, 43, whose dismembered remains were found in a shallow grave. Police later discovered disturbing writings in Desborough’s cabin, including a map marked ‘Kill Zone’ and a note declaring: ‘I know I am a killer and ready to execute any predators.’

Chillingly, Desborough told a forensic biologist searching the woods for Mr Coleman’s body that he ‘particularly enjoyed the dismemberment scenes’ in Dexter.

Meanwhile, in January of 2014, 17-year-old Elizabeth Thomas, from Oxted, Surrey, was murdered by her boyfriend Steven Miles, who had become obsessed with violence generally – and with Dexter in particular.

Miles, then 16, had met Elizabeth in sixth form, but after they started dating she revealed to friends that during one argument he had tried to throttle her.

He had also told her: ‘You will see a lot of similarities in the personalities of Dexter and myself.’

Yet when friends questioned why she stayed with him, she replied: ‘I’m different from other females, I’m fighting for him.’ Her loyalty would end tragically when Miles took Elizabeth back to his family home and stabbed her in the neck, back and head.

He then used saws and knives belonging to his tree-surgeon father to dismember her body, found wrapped in tarpaulin beneath his bedroom desk.

Police found a Dexter boxset on the desk above Elizabeth’s body.

Miles later pleaded guilty to murder at Guildford Crown Court, where his barrister described it as ‘a truly gruesome killing ripped from the pages of a TV script’. He was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 25 years by Judge Christopher Critchlow, who told the court that had Miles been over 18, he would have imposed a whole-life term.

Six months earlier, in July 2013, 21-year-old Mark Howe had inflicted a similarly devastating loss on his family when he murdered his mother, Katrina Wardle, 48, at their Leicester home, stabbing and slashing her 53 times with a 12in kitchen knife.

Howe, whose Facebook profile picture was Dexter’s blood-spattered face and who told a friend he wished he was the character, had previously searched the internet for ‘Dexter’s kill knife’. In January 2014, he was sentenced to life imprisonment at Leicester Crown Court with a minimum term of 21- and-a-half years.

Perhaps one of the most notorious Dexter-linked murders, however, took place in Edmonton, Canada, when, in October 2008, amateur filmmaker Mark Twitchell, who had adopted the persona ‘Dexter Morgan’ on his Facebook page, lured 38-year-old John Altinger to his death.

Twitchell had posed as a woman on a dating site to entice Altinger to a rented garage, which he had transformed into a plastic-lined ‘kill room’ resembling the one used by his fictional hero. Instead of the romantic encounter he was expecting, Altinger was bludgeoned and stabbed to death, his body subsequently dismembered.

Investigators later discovered a document on Twitchell’s laptop detailing the murder in graphic detail and describing his desire to become a serial killer like Dexter.

Twitchell, who was married with a young daughter, was convicted of first-degree murder in 2011 and sentenced to life in jail, with no possibility of parole for 25 years.

A year after Twitchell’s horrific crime, Andrew Conley, 17, killed his ten-year-old brother Conner at their home in Indiana, USA, before dumping his body. He had previously told his girlfriend he wanted to be like Dexter and told investigators that the programme had ‘inspired’ him.

One of the most memorable cases, meanwhile, emerged in Norway in 2010 after the murder of 26-year-old Faiza Ashraf, who was abducted from a bus stop and later found dead.

Bizarrely her killer, petrol station attendant Havard Nyflot, also 26, used his obsession with Dexter as an elaborate defence.

Nyflot had been offered money by taxi driver Shamrez Khan to kidnap Ashraf, who had rejected Khan’s romantic advances.

But Nyflot claimed that after watching episode after episode of Dexter, he decided Khan was ‘vermin’ who ‘fit the code like in the series’ and deserved to die.

He claimed that while he had kidnapped Ashraf, in fact he planned to bludgeon Khan to death, dismember his body and bury him in woodland, even digging a grave in preparation.

However, it was Ashraf who died after Nyflot bundled her into his car boot, bound her head with duct tape and put a rope around her neck. Investigators found no evidence supporting his extraordinary account of a planned vigilante killing.

Instead, prosecutors believed he had kidnapped Ashraf on Khan’s request to pay off gambling debts, so he was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to 18 years behind bars. Khan was also convicted of his part in the death.

Taken together, these cases present a deeply unsettling picture, with the parallels between Dexter’s fictional violence and the real life equivalents often striking. So how does Dexter influence these killers? Is it, as has been said, ‘the most dangerous TV series’?

Behavioural criminologist Alex Iszatt tells the Daily Mail: ‘What makes Dexter particularly useful to a violent personality is that he provides a justification for killing.

‘You’re not a monster with uncontrollable urges; you’re a vigilante, with standards, and the people you kill deserve it. It doesn’t matter if they happen to be your mother, brother or girlfriend.’

The appeal also includes the precise protocol surrounding his crimes. ‘Dexter gives them a ritual,’ Iszatt says.

‘They can fully become him: follow the same code and principles, wear the same clothes, and use the same methods of killing and disposing of bodies.’

Intriguingly Michael C. Hall, the actor who played Dexter, once suggested that it was not so much the character’s actions but the reasons behind them that appealed to audiences.

‘I think we live in a world where maybe we feel an increasing sense of a lack of control and this character, who in his own unique way, has taken responsibility for his darker impulses and is taking some sort of control in his corner of the world that appeals to people,’ he told CNN in July 2013. ‘They identify with that somehow.’

For Jacqueline Helfgott, a professor at Seattle University and author of Copycat Crime: How Media, Technology and Digital Culture Inspire Criminal Behaviour and Violence, the relationship between fictional violence and real-life murder is far from straightforward.

She identifies a small subset of individuals she calls ‘edge-sitters’ – often isolated people who may have fantasised about killing for years, and for whom fictional characters can provide both validation and a blueprint for violence.

She says such individuals may already be contemplating violence and looking for something to propel them towards acting on their fantasies.

Like Iszatt, she also believes that the character’s moral code is significant. ‘It can be a very powerful message for people who are looking for reasons to commit a crime,’ she says.

But she also warns against labelling every murderer with an interest in Dexter ‘a copycat’, pointing out that multiple factors play their part in pushing vulnerable individuals towards violence.

‘We do have to ask questions about digital culture in general though,’ she says. ‘Is it making a difference between somebody who would not have committed a crime and somebody who did commit the crime?’

It is a question to which there may never be a definitive answer.

What is certain though, is that while for millions Dexter has remained safely confined to the television screen, for a disturbing few, the fantasy has spilled over into real life – with devastating consequences.

Thirty-two years after apartheid ended, black South Africans remain barred from living or working in the town of Orania.

Set beside the Orange River in the Karoo of South Africa’s Northern Cape province, the all-white settlement stands as a troubling remnant of the country’s era of state-enforced racial separation.

Built across 8,000 hectares of farmland and home to roughly 3,000 people, Orania admits only Afrikaners—the ethnic group largely descended from Dutch settlers who arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652.

Frans de Klerk has spent most of his life in the secluded community and says he plans to remain there until he dies.

Now 26, de Klerk says he can imagine no better place than the isolated enclave. Orania was founded a year after Nelson Mandela’s release from Robben Island, just before white-minority rule came to an end elsewhere in South Africa.

“It’s not separatism as much as it is preservation, or just finding a place that we can simply call home,” he says. De Klerk rejects the idea that Orania is driven by white supremacist beliefs, describing it instead as an effort to preserve Afrikaner culture.

Still, reminders of apartheid appear throughout the gated town, from old-era flags to monuments honoring former prime ministers. The displays contribute to the unsettling impression of a settlement frozen in time—and determined to remain apart from black South Africa.

Critics have compared Orania with a modern ethnic Bantustan, the segregated territories created under Hendrik Verwoerd, the former prime minister frequently described as the “architect of apartheid.”

“What we are against is forced integration,” de Klerk says during a Zoom interview from his office. Behind him hangs the Orania flag, whose orange, white and blue design closely echoes the colors of the former republic.

South Africa marks Freedom Day each year on April 27, commemorating the landmark 1994 elections that brought the country’s first democratic government and formally ended decades of racial oppression.

Yet in Orania, which celebrated its 35th anniversary this year, many of apartheid’s symbols and ideas remain visible, roughly 380 miles southwest of Johannesburg.

“Orania is a town, certainly, but in a much more real sense, it is a project,” de Klerk says.

“A project for Afrikaners to build their own freedom, to be able to make their own decisions.”

The community is expanding and now includes two schools, a college, shops, bars, hair salons and numerous churches. It is also drawing more young residents, attracted by the promise of returning to their roots and rediscovering their identity.

Anyone seeking to move to Orania must first submit an application.

Applicants must be Afrikaner, speak fluent Afrikaans and have no criminal record to be considered for admission.

For many residents, Orania’s appeal lies in the sense of security it offers them from dangers they associate with life beyond the enclave.

‘There is a safety and security in this community that you will rarely see elsewhere in South Africa. In Orania, you are safe to wander the streets, even late at night. Children can safely ride their bicycles or walk to school and back,’ de Klerk says.

‘I see the interviews people do with residents of Orania, and many of them say they moved here for their own safety. I’ve heard stories about people’s houses being broken into, and afterwards, they made the decision to come.

‘I spoke to a lady this year, who was a victim of a farm attack in South Africa and is looking for solutions, and is considering Orania.’

De Klerk suggests Arikaners, who number more than 2.5 million out of a population of more than 60 million, are a persecuted minority.

As he speaks of politicians calling for Boers to be killed, he echoes the language of US President Donald Trump, who in February 2025 delivered a controversial executive order announcing a refugee resettlement programme for Afrikaners who he said were fleeing a ‘white genocide’.

Since then, more than 13,000 have moved to the US, according to state department figures. 

Arrivals are also accelerating, with more than 2,600 admitted in August.

But the South African government has criticised Washington’s decision to prioritise refugee applications from white Afrikaners, saying claims of a white genocide have been widely discredited and lack reliable evidence.

In February last year, a South African judge dismissed the idea of a white genocide as ‘clearly imagined’ and ‘not real’, and ministers have tried to emphasise that official crime data does not show farmers or white people experiencing crime at higher rates.

White South Africans still hold three-quarters of privately held land in the country, and control about 60 per cent of top corporate management jobs, despite comprising only 7 per cent of the population.

And while affirmative action policies have helped to develop a black elite and middle class, about 38 per cent of black South Africans are unemployed, compared with 9 per cent of white South Africans, according to official data.

Three decades after apartheid, the average white household in South Africa still holds 20 times more wealth than the average black household.

But de Klerk insists white people are the victims in the democratic nation. ‘The race-based laws of apartheid have certainly switched to a more discriminatory law system, discriminating against white people,’ he says. 

On Friday nights, the younger generation of the town congregate at Stokkies bar, where students from the enclave’s new training college gather for country music and drinks.

Nearly all its 250 students come from elsewhere, selected – as are all residents – on the basis of ethnicity, religion and a strong work ethic.

The college is planning for an intake of 800 students within four years, according to town spokesman Joost Strydom, noting the dormitories under construction.

But few are likely to stay after graduation: jobs are scarce and the biggest nearby town, Hopetown, with 10,000 inhabitants, is 25 miles away.

Nevertheless, de Klerk posits that within the settlement, quality of life is vastly better than anywhere else on the outside. 

‘You have the freedom to organise your own jogging club, go for a swim in the river, or at the swimming pool. 

‘Picnics, stargazing… there are sporting clubs, movie nights, the churches also have their own youth groups organising coffee [outings].’

Try as he might to paint the enclave as a quaint idyll, anybody who does not fit the white-only racial profile of inhabitants is likely to feel like an unwelcome outsider in the arid land. 

The town, which he says is supported by ‘strategic relationships’ with sympathisers in Belgium and American Republicans, has its own distinctive calendar, different to the rest of the nation.

April 6 marks Founder’s Day, commemorating when Dutch colonial administrator Jan van Riebeeck, working for the Dutch East India Company, established the settlement at the southern tip of Africa that became Cape Town in 1652.

The day was once celebrated country-wide as a national holiday, but was abolished by the new democratic government in 1994.

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The face of van Riebeeck also formerly adorned the national currency, the rand, which now bears the image of the first black president.

Other historical events are granted special importance such as the Day of the Vow, when a small force of Voortrekkers (people of Dutch extract) defeated a Zulu force on December 16, 1838, during the Battle of Blood River.

On a rocky hill above the settlement, the bronze busts of pre-democracy Afrikaner leaders preside over the town. 

Paul Kruger, JBM Hertzog, DF Malan, JG Strijdom and Verwoerd gaze out across the vast semi-desert of the Karoo, as vestiges of another age.

Disdained elsewhere, Oranians herald these men as heroes. 

Verwoerd, the editor of the National Party’s pro-Nazi Die Transvaler during World War II, is widely dubbed the ‘father of apartheid’ for his fundamental role in socially engineering the country’s segregation decrees as minister of native affairs in 1950 and later as prime minister in 1958.

He instantiated the system that banned marriages across racial lines, reserved many skilled and semi-skilled jobs for white people, and forced black people to live in what were called townships and homelands.

He infamously remarked in the 1950s that ‘blacks should never be shown the greener pastures of education. They should know their station in life is to be hewers of wood and drawers of water’.

The dismantling of white minority rule in 1994 ushered in a new era for South Africa, widely dubbed the ‘Rainbow Nation’, but for some Afrikaners like de Klerk, the change was threatening.

‘Forced integration forces people into not being able to freely or practically speak their own languages, or have their own heritage days,’ he says.

‘When one culture starts to accommodate another, then you have to take a little bit away from yours to make space for another. 

‘And then it is lost to history.’

He continues: ‘It’s a question of freedom of association. We feel that people should be free to associate with their groups – with their cultures – as far as they can.’

For de Klerk, marrying out of the Afrikaner ethnicity, or attending schools where other languages apart from Afrikaans are spoken, is destructive to his sense of identity, making its dissolution inevitable.

‘I don’t see Afrikaners as superior. I see the Afrikaner people as the culture that I’m in, and that I’m most comfortable in.

‘I would always choose to rather live amongst my own people than with others, but that’s not a superiority complex – that’s simply association and comfort,’ de Klerk says. 

White-only enclaves such as Orania and Kleinfontein, founded in 1990 near Pretoria, have met fierce criticism from across South Africa.

‘ActionSA firmly declares that Orania and Kleinfontein are not cultural enclaves but ideological fault lines,’ said the party’s chief whip, Lerato Ngobeni, in a May 2025 statement.

‘These communities are not heritage sites; they are sanctuaries of apartheid nostalgia, dressed up in the language of self-determination, but founded on the very bones of a brutal, exclusionary past.’

She warned that behind the fences of Orania and Kleinfontein, ‘children are not learning culture’.

‘They are being taught to fear difference, to internalise racial superiority, and to live apart rather than together.’

While the 26-year-old, who works for the Orania Movement, maintains that he is not racist, the town he spends his life promoting has a troubled and violent history.

By the end of the 1980s, the probability of losing governmental authority had already dawned on several Afrikaners, with some assuming impending democracy put their way of life at risk.

During apartheid, Afrikaners ruled South Africa. The regime repressed the black majority, while keeping white people protected and affluent.

The fear about becoming a powerless minority motivated a small group of Afrikaners – including Verwoerd’s daughter and son-in-law, Carel Boshoff – to purchase a strip of land in the sparsely populated Karoo desert, which would become their new homeland.

By moving in, the founders displaced a community of 500 poor black and mixed-race squatters, who had made their homes in the buildings of an abandoned 1960s industrial project on the southern banks of the Orange River.

According to Cambridge historian Edward Cavanagh, Orania’s genesis marked one of the final large-scale evictions under apartheid.

It was completed with beatings, pistol whippings and dogs, he said.

One 55-year-old black man and his wife, who have lived on a small nearby plot since the 1980s, told the Guardian they were once pursued and harassed by a pickup truck laden with Orania stickers when walking home after an evening with friends. 

‘Now you must run,’ he told his wife at the time, pushing her through a fence. ‘I’ll be behind you.’

But de Klerk even rejects that his people descend from colonialists, framing the Afrikaners as a precarious people in an echo of rhetoric from the Trump administration.

‘Throughout history, we are often described as a nation always fleeing, a people in flight,’ he says.

He is also hesitant to recognise the sanctioned racial oppression that defined apartheid – associating the system instead with an unsustainable period of ‘centralisation’.

‘There was certainly discrimination, but we can see that today as well,’ he says regarding the country’s racist history, quickly claiming there are more ‘race laws’ in present-day South Africa than there were during apartheid.

He believes the separatist model of Orania is one which other countries should learn from.

‘I do hope so,’ he says, when asked about whether other nations might introduce a similar model of ethnicity-based living.

‘I’m not sure if it will happen, but I do hope so, and if there are people considering it, if they are looking at the experiment or the blueprint, Orania is always open to visitors.

‘For people to come and see what we are doing, and how we are doing it, and how it works.’

For several years, I stood behind the counter of a Lotto kiosk at Midland Gate, a shopping centre locals had nicknamed Hellgate. Located in one of Perth’s roughest suburbs, it was the sort of place that could make Sydney’s Mount Druitt seem almost like a gated estate. From there, I helped sell Australians the tantalising fantasy of instant wealth.

As a teenager, I had an unrivalled view of people’s superstitions, financial anxieties and, occasionally, the extraordinary luck that genuinely transformed someone’s life.

The kiosk had its regular customers, including plenty of lonely older men. They would shuffle to the counter, ask me to kiss their tickets for good fortune and promise to buy me a car or take me overseas if they struck the jackpot. Others wanted my birth date so they could turn it into a lucky number.

Needless to say, my involvement was never going to bring them romantic luck.

I eventually stopped counting the number of customers who told me, “Make sure you give me a winner.”

My imagined response was always the same: “Sorry, mate. I sold every winning ticket to the first 20 men who used that line today.”

Besides, if I had known which ticket would win, I would hardly have been earning $12 an hour behind the counter while politely pretending their joke was fresh.

Still, the most unfortunate piece of luck I encountered at the Lotto kiosk involved a customer who would eventually become my frequently criticised ex-boyfriend.

He came in one day to buy a ticket and apparently took a liking to my smile — and to my rather memorable uniform: synthetic trousers paired with a loud patterned top that looked as though it had been bought by my nan at a Katies clearance sale and might induce a seizure.

I, meanwhile, was drawn to his enthusiasm for travel and his almost childlike excitement about life.

This was long before Tinder, direct messages or pocket-sized smartphones. Mobile phones were still the size of house bricks, so he returned the next day and asked me on a date.

Like so many lottery tickets, he seemed full of potential at first. In reality, he turned out to be a disappointing loss who cost me considerably more than he ever gave back.

Yet the most surprising lesson from my time behind the Lotto counter had little to do with lucky numbers — or with choosing a partner.

I was astonished by how frequently people won without even knowing it.

During slow afternoons, my colleague and I would search the bins for abandoned scratch cards. Many older Australians struggled to read the instructions or had difficulty seeing the symbols clearly, which meant potential prizes were sometimes thrown away.

Some customers glanced at their ticket, assumed it was worthless and discarded it immediately. Others scratched off roughly four-fifths of the card, decided the untouched section was unlikely to contain anything valuable and tossed the whole thing out.

We’d casually fish them out and discover $5 winners, $10 winners and the occasional ticket worth far more.

On a good day, we’d find hundreds of dollars’ worth of prizes that had been thrown away by people who spent every week dreaming of a windfall but somehow couldn’t identify one when it was literally sitting in their hands.

Yet even that level of self-sabotage paled in comparison to what happened when jackpots got really big.

There were the frantic jackpot days when people convinced themselves they had to buy their tickets early or they’d end up with the ‘bad’ numbers.

Maths has never been my strongest subject, but I’m pretty sure probability doesn’t care whether you bought your ticket at 8am or five minutes before closing.

Try explaining that to someone who’d been queueing since breakfast because they were convinced all the lucky numbers would be gone by lunch.

Lottery players are optimists by nature, but some treated random number generation like a Boxing Day sale, as if the winning numbers were sitting in a pile out the back and the early birds got first pick.

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There were customers who regularly confessed to accidentally running their multi-million-dollar dreams through the washing machine, leaving us to deal with mangled paper pulp and hoping the barcode scanner could somehow read a shredded ticket.

Nothing says ‘future millionaire’ quite like painstakingly piecing together a lottery ticket on the counter with sticky tape.

Then there was the syndicate drama. Office pools and family syndicates caused endless chaos.

Working the register meant listening to people argue over whether Cousin Bruce really paid his $5 contribution to the big rollover draw or watching someone try to sneak into a winning group after the numbers were announced.

There were also the regulars who became fiercely protective of ‘their’ terminal or the exact machine that printed their ticket.

If another customer stepped up to that particular register and won a small prize, they’d act as though their entire future had been stolen right out from under them.

Western Australians have a particularly intense relationship with lotto.

Maybe it’s because Perth doesn’t have pokies outside the casino. Maybe it’s Lotterywest’s near-mythical status. Maybe it’s the promise that every ticket somehow helps the community.

Whatever the reason, jackpots seemed to grip Perth in a way few other things could, turning otherwise sensible people into believers who genuinely thought the winning numbers might sell out.

And it’s big business. In 2025-26, Lotterywest returned more than $1billion to the community through grants and prizes.

Lotterywest, which has been around since 1933, has pulled off one of the great marketing tricks of modern Australia: persuading people that buying a lottery ticket is both gambling and community service.

We happily line up for a shot at instant riches while telling ourselves it’s all for a good cause.

So what did I learn from all of this? That the real product wasn’t a lottery ticket.

It was hope. Hope sold everywhere, but it sold especially well in Midland. 

This was a suburb where people joked: ‘What do you call a Midland girl in a white tracksuit? A bride.’

It was the sort of place where you couldn’t really call yourself a Perth local until you’d been barked at by the local icon Mad Dog while minding your own business.

But behind all the jokes was a community full of people who wanted something better.

Hope that next week would be different. Hope that debts would disappear. Hope that work would become optional. Hope that luck would finally call your number.

For a few dollars, a lottery ticket let people imagine a different life. Not forever. Just until the numbers came out.

Every week, they bought the dream all over again. Every now and then it paid off.

Most of the time, though, the dream cost more than it paid.

Which is why, looking back, I would have spent that weekly Slikpik money buying Vanguard ETFs instead.

Had I invested $7.40 a week rather than chasing Division One, I’d have tens of thousands of dollars more today.

Not quite a lottery jackpot but unlike Lotto, I’d actually be guaranteed to win.