You might be a little embarrassed by Cyril Ramaphosa’s new role as Putin’s parrot, blandly repeating all the Kremlin lines and lies allegedly justifying Moscow’s unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country and firing deadly missiles at hospitals, theatres and shopping centres. Or you might wonder, beyond the imagined links of “struggle solidarity”, why SA in [...]
On February 24, when Vladimir Putin rolled his tanks into Ukraine and violently breached the sovereign border and territorial integrity of an independent state, I received a message from a friend. “Mark this date,” it read. “Today, like 9/11, something profoundly shifted in the world and its consequences will be huge.” Writing in the Financial Times [...]
I rubbed my eyes when scanning Monday’s weekly newsletter by Cyril Ramaphosa -thinking perhaps I had mistakenly chanced upon the English version of Pravda or Izvestia. Ramaphosa and his “comrades” might lash out at DStv for cutting us off – one of the very small mercies from the merciless Ukraine war — from the beam of Kremlin propaganda [...]
Russia drove its tanks and fired its missiles over the international rule book this week and launched an unprovoked attack on neighbouring Ukraine, unleashing a new war in Europe. Who wins the award for the most fatuous and fantastical depiction of the now red-hot Cold War? It is an overcrowded field, but the clear winner [...]
Lebanese American polymath Nassim Nicholas Taleb has gifted the world with imperishable ideas wrapped in memorable metaphors. In 2007 he published his ground-breaking book The Black Swan which illustrated the chaos caused by unpredictable, unprecedented events occurring outside the range of predictive probabilities bringing severe consequences in their wake. Some years before its publication, the late US [...]
Business Day’s recent front-page lead story might have tricked some readers into imagining they had stumbled back into a pre-Jurassic political age (“Job reservation is on the cards, government confirms”, February 13). The headline topped an article detailing neither a paean to Pan-Africanism nor a decent stab at promoting the country’s economic wellbeing. Rather it [...]
In the 2016 US presidential election, American satirist and mainstream conservative PJ O’Rourke endorsed Hillary Clinton with a magnificent backhander: “I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It’s the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she’s way behind in second place. She’s wrong about absolutely everything, [...]
On the logic that jackals are the best guardians of chickens, this week the minister of small business development, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, offered a stern warning on her website. “As government we have a responsibility to enforce regulatory compliance in the SMME [small, medium and micro enterprise] sector and close businesses that are trading illegally,” she [...]
In 1918, American financial titan and international statesman Bernard Baruch riposted that “anyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts”. More than a century later, in a country and world and corroded social media universe where facts, conjecture, falsehoods and opinions (often unhinged or tethered to an alternative reality) all [...]
There is a delicious irony at the heart of the controversy generated by the half-baked intellectually dubious drivel dished up recently by tourism minister Lindiwe Sisulu. Unless you have been hiding under a rock you will be aware that Sisulu took aim in an IOL jeremiad against her own government, in which she has continuously [...]
