Monthly Archives: December 2021

What Ramaphosa has in common with Nixon, Clinton and Blair

To insert thread through the eye of a needle is the basic, though skilled, accomplishment of every seamstress. In politics, a needle-threader is someone who can pass something through a narrow space between two often diametrically opposite impulses or ideas. In the US, president Richard Nixon was regarded by some as a needle-threader extraordinaire: he [...]

By |2021-12-24T11:29:14+00:00December 24th, 2021|Cyril Ramaphosa|0 Comments

SA no longer has the constitution for our tragic pantomime

In 2004, British playwright Michael Frayn’s award-winning play Democracy achieved both critical and commercial success, despite its seemingly dull premise: German politics in the 1970s. I watched the performance in London at the time, utterly mesmerised as the play toggled between two themes. First, the highly charged political drama — the fall of left-wing West [...]

By |2021-12-09T15:23:19+00:00December 9th, 2021|Cyril Ramaphosa|0 Comments

Today politics says goodbye to a man whose name belies his character

Stanley Baldwin, three times British prime minister in the interwar years, opined on his departure from parliament in 1937, “Once I leave, I leave. I am not going to speak to the man on the bridge and I am not going to spit on the deck.” I have sometimes followed this advice and have very seldom [...]

By |2021-12-08T11:45:17+00:00December 8th, 2021|African National Congress (ANC), Cyril Ramaphosa|0 Comments
Go to Top