‘Even our most objective analysts did not even a month ago anticipate a looming trade war’
South Africa is embroiled in a number of raucous debates – land, inequality, race, Jacob Zuma’s appearance in the criminal dock, Vicki Momberg’s jail sentence and, more recently, how to remember Winnie Mandela.
But in this war of words and flaming […]
There are enough tools to carry out land reform without pulling bricks from of the finely balanced Constitution
Apart from hurling abuse at cheating Australian cricketers, one of SA’s most popular pastimes, politically, is looking through the rear-view mirror. Every anniversary, birth and death, from the great and the good to the great and the bad […]
How might the Steve Smith-led Aussie ball-tampering scandal at Newlands inform some of the key issues affecting the body politic and our economy?
The obvious answer is that even the prime minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, on Sunday described the incident as “completely beyond belief” and called for “decisive action” from Cricket Australia.
Incidentally, this is not […]
Here’s a remarkable and democratically depressing fact: South African voters rarely change their national government.
Under the whites-only franchise until 1989, the National Party won an extraordinary 11 consecutive elections.
Since the advent of full democracy in 1994, the ANC has won five polls on the trot.
The 40-plus percentage points separating the ANC from its nearest opponent, […]
In Malema’s delicate phraseology, “We are going for your white man, we are going to cut your throat”
His view on nationals from the key Brics nations? “Chinese are like Indians. They think they are close to whiteness. When they practise racism, they are even worse than whites.”
Of course this bilious and crude ethnic stereotyping, coupled […]
More than 250 years ago the second US president offered a slice of wisdom that might just resonate this week with SA’s fifth democratic president. It certainly informs the praise and criticism of Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration, now less than a month old.
In 1770, John Adams, arguing in defence of soldiers in the Boston massacre, before […]
But there are some early and welcome signs that his presidency will find ways to deal with it
Last Wednesday, on the flight back to Cape Town from Johannesburg – the tail end of a long haul journey which commenced two days before in Sydney, Australia – I bumped into an old political acquaintance.
Pravin Gordhan, the correctly […]
FW de Klerk once said, “Australia’s greatest problem is that it has no great problem- nobody can say that about South Africa.”
While South Africa in the past few days lived up to VI Lenin’s aphorism ‘there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen ‘– I found myself faraway “Down Under”.
I witnessed first-hand, […]
Theresa May supremely in control of her country and party and the Brexit process; Angela Merkel, the indispensable leader of the western world, cruising to a resounding win in the German election; Donald Trump on course to blow up the US economy or to impeachment; Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma odds-on favourite to succeed her namesake as South […]
For the purpose of a new book which I have been commissioned to write‚ I have recently delved into the origins of the term ‘political correctness.’
Instinctively‚ perhaps congenitally‚ I am incapable of being ‘politically correct’. By this I mean subscribing or authoring opinions which hew to orthodoxy‚ however at variance with the facts on the […]
