Drawing on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos call for nations to stop “living the lie,” Tony Leon reflects on South Africa’s contradictions between sovereignty rhetoric and reality – from outsourcing naval exercises to China while claiming independence, to sliding from the world’s top gold producer to 12th place despite record prices. Last year, on a [...]
Former DA leader Tony Leon argues the party faces an existential identity crisis as it navigates between its historic role as effective opposition and its current position as part of the GNU, with its upcoming congress serving as a crucial moment to determine whether the party has been “muzzled” by the ANC or can leverage its [...]
Tony Leon traces a line from the Berlin Wall to Simon’s Town, arguing that South Africa’s choices now side with repression over freedom – risking trade, investment and diplomatic fallout. My late parliamentary colleague Harry Schwarz had a gift for explaining complexity in understandable terms. Many decades after his arrival in 1934 in South Africa [...]
With the rules-based order in retreat, Tony Leon argues SA’s hard-won impeccable moral authority has been squandered once too often. Just as well, given the extraordinary, arguably extra-legal, events over the weekend in Caracas, that South Africa’s ambassador to Venezuela, Lindiwe Maeko, maintained a judicious silence (thus far). Had her predecessor, Ambassador Joseph Nkosi (now in Chad), [...]
