Monthly Archives: December 2015

IN FOUR days of market turmoil, political crisis and apocalyptic moments, there were ironies aplenty, alongside a lot of gallows humour. Born-again Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan personifies the greatest of them. In a matter of days, he has replaced the shortest-lived and weakest finance minister in the country’s history, Desmond van Rooyen, to become the [...]

No good blaming PW or apartheid for this unhappy mess, it is of far more recent origin and largely self-created South Africa, as it ends 2015, a year we would probably rather forget, faces an economic crisis as serious as the political train wreck of 30 years ago, in 1985. Then President PW Botha famously [...]