Monthly Archives: November 2023

The ANC invents a sixth stage of grief

In 1969, Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified the five stages of grief as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Fifty or so years later, Eskom added one more stage, six, to the national misery index through load-shedding, though our government remains stubbornly stuck in stages one (denial) and two (anger). On Monday, we were treated to [...]

In SA, hard and soft power battle against each other

In the degraded discourse around local politics a niche backhander on social media — aimed at dissenting or decamping DA figures that are usually black — is “watch out, you’ll soon be sent to Harvard”. This meme suggests, absurdly, that the official opposition has the magical ability to use Harvard, the world’s pre-eminent and richest [...]

The eerie silence after the weekend’s twin events in Cape Town has been deafening

Due to economic headwinds gusting in the face of the publishers of this newspaper, and the media sector overall, today’s column is the last in a series I’ve written for TimesLIVE Premium and its print predecessor stretching back more than a decade. My columns for Business Day continue through December. I will miss my engagement [...]

Try as he may, Ramaphosa is no Kolisi … or Mandela

I should be grateful to President Cyril Ramaphosa for declaring my birthday on December 15 a public holiday. My day of birth, of course, never featured in his calculation and is unknown to him. But declaring December 15 a public holiday, six weeks after the epic World Cup victory the mighty Springboks reaped on Saturday [...]

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