Reading director general of government communications Phumla Williams’s defence of SA’s desirability as an “investment destination of choice” reminded me of the rejoinder of Upton Sinclair. In 1935 this American Pulitzer Prize-winning author and political activist wrote: “It is difficult to get a person to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding [...]
Workers Day, May 1 2022, offered South Africans sharply contrasting images of President Cyril Ramaphosa and leader of the official opposition John Steenhuisen. Ramaphosa had a double indignity heaped on him at a rally at Royal Bafokeng Stadium in Rustenburg, North West. The obvious injury to presidential pride was his forced removal from the keynote [...]
Today, barring a huge upset, Emmanuel Macron will be re-elected president of France. However, if polling was always accurate President Hillary Clinton would be in her second term in the US and the UK would be still a leading member of the EU. The election in France revolves in part on how toxic the embrace [...]
This past weekend saw Christians and Jews celebrate Easter and Passover respectively, two of the principal holidays in both religions’ calendars. Easter of course is the post-crucifixion celebration of the miracle of the resurrection, while Passover celebrates the exodus from the enslavement of pharaoh in ancient Egypt, delivered in part by God visiting 10 deadly [...]
Are you an optimist or a declinist? Or to use the old cliché, do you see the bottle as half full or half empty. The lens we use to view events can inform our decisions. That, at any rate, is the view of SA’s economic cheerleader, Adrian Gore, founder and head of the Discovery medical [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
