Covid 19 has converted us all into armchair immunologists. So here’s a trick question used sometimes to test aspiring medical specialists: “What treatment is offered by ear in an emergency?” The correct answer: “Words of comfort.” At his best, Cyril Ramaphosa reminds me of a trusty doctor. He might have a lousy diagnosis to deliver, [...]
We learnt this week that the South African minister of communications can’t pin the city of Geneva in the state of Switzerland. But what of the state of our own nation as the government displays as many fractures as an orthopaedic ward? In parliament, DA leader John Steenhuisen asked President Cyril Ramaphosa to put country [...]
The rear-view mirror is the preferred reflector for our government. Far easier to remember the apartheid past, in which most members of the governing party were victims, than the dire times that confront SA. But even this litigation of the past has both its distortions and its ironies. Take, for example, the latest piece of constitutional nonsense [...]
Imagine a pow wow in London this week, featuring the heir to the throne Prince William and his self-dethroning brother, Harry, and a cast of international and African worthies. The title of this gathering, “UK-Africa Investment Summit 2020”, of the great and the good, including a clutch of continental leaders, is both virtuous and self-evidently [...]
As we end the first week of the year and enter the brave new world of the third decade of the century (not true for the pedants, as the last decade strictly ends on December 31 2020), note one big thing. According to the 2011 SA census, more than 40% of our 57 million population [...]
In his famous 1928 dissenting opinion in Olmstead vs United States, US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis offered a warning to freedom-lovers everywhere. He wrote: “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their [...]
Away from the Eskom horror show, far be it for me to rain on the “People’s Dialogue” to be launched soon by Herman Mashaba and Mmusi Maimane. However, a weather check may be in order to see whether a shaft of light may yet appear in our current darkness. There is an elephant’s graveyard in [...]
Three discrete encounters in Johannesburg recently reinforced the singular, stark economic darkness that now clouds the hype and hope of the Cyril Ramaphosa “new dawn”. First off, I listened to an acute analysis on the essential problem with our economy and its misdiagnosis by the governing ANC. Moeletsi Mbeki — an analyst of our political [...]
There is the famous story of the British admiral, Lord Nelson, who, when his commander-in-chief tried to signal him to retreat during the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, placed his telescope into his blind eye. Something very similar is going on right now at our moment of national economic peril and our president’s wilful blindness [...]
Panned by his critics as a charlatan and a clown, or as “Donald Trump with a thesaurus”, new UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson moved with a cabinet massacre, within hours of kissing hands with the Queen, to dispel a self-created myth about his style of government. Among millions of words he gifted to commentators in [...]
