With the decision of Cricket SA to force all Protea players to “take the knee” and Quinton de Kock’s stance not to bend, the issues of free speech and the right of individual dissent now spillover from the Twittersphere to the playing fields. But the issues at the heart of this have a long history, [...]
“You cannot fatten a pig on market day.” This adage from British politics resonates here and now in the dismal run-up to polling day on November 1. The implication is that unless you have a track record of delivery, or even basic decency established well ahead of voting day, you are unlikely to reap the [...]
A milch cow is defined by the Collins English dictionary as “a source of easy income”. In SA, governments at the national and local levels find that source in middle-class taxpayers and ratepayers — usually the same people. But now the milch cow is variously exhausted, overburdened or fleeing to foreign fields. In addition to the [...]
There were symbols aplenty, and some ghosts from glories past, at the ANC local government manifesto launch on Monday evening. In ancient Rome, “augury” was the practice of interpreting omens from the observed behaviour of birds. Two days ago in Tshwane there was no shortage of auguries in the ruling party bash. First was the [...]
Why do governments pursue policies contrary to their own interests? That paradoxical question was at the heart of Barbara Tuchman's 1984 popular history, The March of Folly. In her panoptic sweep from the wooden horse at Troy to the quagmire of US folly in Vietnam, she noted: "Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government [...]
Last Thursday, as my column, “Do the ANC’s small disasters signal the large collapse?", for our sister publication Business Day was in the works, I had no idea an event in parliament would provide another example of my thesis. In the Business Day column, I catalogued the serial chapters of ineptitude and crass negligence, from unpaid staff and tax [...]
Schadenfreude — taking pleasure in the misery of another — is not regarded as a civic or social virtue. Still, it was difficult for SA’s long-suffering citizens — long reconciled to the ineptitude and crassness of the governing ANC — to suppress some delight knowing many of the sins our political overlords have visited on [...]
A millennium or so ago, sometime between the first and second centuries, the Roman poet Juvenal asked a question that resonates now in troubled SA. “Quis custodiet Ipsos custodes?” or “Who will guard the guards themselves?” remains key, especially for a country which, on the one hand, celebrates its constitution and, on the other, finds [...]
Cascading corruption, sky-high unemployment, and state incompetence. This daily diet of misery is now so mundane and common that what once induced shock and outrage in us is shrugged off. We have, as South Africans, learnt to normalise the abnormal. Last Sunday, readers were treated to the front-page headline of “Spy boss ‘took R112m’ ” [...]
Last Thursday, while driving in the English countryside, various authoritative voices on BBC Radio Four provided a counterpoint to the heavy traffic. The topic was, of course, Afghanistan, and the experts speculated that the capital city, Kabul, was in danger of encirclement at some future point, “perhaps even on the anniversary of 9/11”, in view of [...]
