Tony Leon reflects on lessons for the US-SA relations in the relationship between Jorge Bergoglio (who later became Pope Francis) and the former president to Argentina Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. A lot of airtime right now is taken with the identity of who President Cyril Ramaphosa appoints as South Africa's new ambassador to the United States. Though, as [...]
As Colin Eglin's centenary passes unnoticed, Paul Mashatile employs Trumpian tactics to undermine institutions others built. The contrast is stark, writes Tony Leon, from principled constitutional craftsmanship to power-hungry opportunism masquerading as progress. Monday, 14 April 2025, marked the centenary of the birth of Colin Eglin. Both this anniversary and the man himself are mostly [...]
In an act of conspicuous national self-destruction, the ANC has set the scene for the ejection of the DA from the GNU, writes Tony Leon. Circa 1899, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, developed the idea of "screen memory". This suggested that one memory can function to hide another, typically, unconscious mental content. Perhaps only psychologists [...]
Logan Roy was the magnificent and monstrous patriarch at the centre of the satirical television masterpiece Succession. In the second episode of its final season in 2023, Roy delivered a killer line to his dysfunctional children, "I love you, but you are not serious people". Absent any amity, indeed amid high levels of acrimony, "you [...]
Gaslighting - which derives its name from a popular 1930’s movie - is a psychological condition denoting a "form of emotional manipulation in which a person aims to have the victim question their judgement, perception and sense of reality by deliberately and systematically feeding false information". In turn, this leads - for the target of [...]
How does an ambassador navigate his way when sent to a country led by a protocol-busting, hard-charging populist and protectionist who ransacks state institutions, tears up international trade agreements and announces, at their inauguration, "we must not import a single nail"? This was precisely the situation I found myself in circa 2009 when I was [...]
Kaput. That's one German word which has migrated into common English usage. It's defined as "ruined, broken, or not functioning". And it fits a lot of things here and in the world right now. Wednesday afternoon's budget, assuming there is one, will reveal the ruin in our public finances; the chronic missed growth, fiscal and revenue [...]
More than 240 years back, when there was an actual war of arms, not words, between America and a European power, famous Scottish economist, Adam Smith, received an alarmist letter from a young MP. British parliamentarian John Sinclair wrote to Smith: "If we go on at this rate, the nation must be ruined (the author emphasising this [...]
Imagine a democratic country where members of the governing party called each other "Comrade"; where its Cabinet members were split between democratic centrists and socialist ideologues. Its high-spending government presided over a low-growth, high-unemployment economy, and it faced headwinds from being over-borrowed in a weakening currency and from external foreign shocks over which it had [...]
"Talk is cheap, money buys the whiskey" is a true and informed adage. And this does not refer to the rise in "sin taxes" on booze likely to be introduced on Wednesday afternoon when Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana unveils his budget in Parliament. Instead, it applies to the cheap talk from various politicians. SA "will not [...]
