Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
Sector-specific licensing regimes, concentration / quota allocation, state-controlled entry (energy, telecoms, healthcare, banking).
The Zuma administration signed a bilateral nuclear-cooperation MOU with Russia (Rosatom) in September 2014 for a proposed 9.6GW fleet of nuclear reactors. Earthlife Africa and SAFCEI challenged the procurement in court; the Western Cape High Court set aside the intergovernmental agreements and Section 34 determinations in April 2017 as unconstitutional and unlawful. The episode is treated by the Zondo Commission as emblematic of state-capture-era procurement irregularities.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.