As the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa’s (OSISA) regional conference on southern Africa’s conundrum opened in Johannesburg today, there was little agreement in the conference room. One word – conundrum – kept both speakers and the audience poles apart as they attempted to decipher what the word means in a context of rising debt levels, state bureaucratic ambivalence and a changing outlook on the movement of international finance on the African continent. Speaking at the conference, the United Nations (UN) Independent Expert on Foreign Debt and Human Rights, Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky, said the rapid growth of external debt ratios in several countries requires action for a debt crisis to be avoided. He outlined how current debt sustainability analyses ignore potential returns from investment in human and social capital. Such returns could translate into, for example, spending on primary and secondary education, health services and social protection.