At the height of America’s postwar supremacy in the 1950s, which birthed the baby boomer generation and saw the US standard of living soar, the country’s 34th president was emblematic of its elevated national mood and international standing. President Dwight D (“Ike”) Eisenhower – Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during the war – and thereafter [...]
The biggest loser in Wednesday’s election was an institution, not a party or any leader: the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC). Heedless of 25 years’ experience, it contrived to combine, in the words of Helen Zille, incompetence with “ineffable smugness”: double voting due to indelible ink that wasn’t; voting stations that were meant to open [...]
The recent Easter weekend coincided with the intensification of campaigning for the upcoming general elections. The double advantage of a large audience and the ennoblement of the speakers with the blessings of a higher authority created a magnet for politicians to harangue congregations across the country. There were no reports of any of the political [...]
In 2014 Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens went to Moscow. He was in search of an answer to the question why Vladimir Putin was, in the teeth of his weak economy and restive populace, doing such apparently risky things as invading neighbouring Crimea and threatening the states in Russia’s “near abroad”. The best response he [...]
On Monday night, in the real world and in one of its cultural capitals, Paris, 800 years of French history and an icon of Christianity dating to the Middle Ages, went up in smoke. While the lasting damage inflicted by the fire that devastated Notre Dame Cathedral is being assessed, the global shock and horror [...]
Did Cyril Ramaphosa morph in the past few days from Teflon Man - to whom nothing sticks - to Mr Velcro, to whom every stain attaches? Certainly, Bosasa is proving very sticky, and, given the sticky fingers of Gavin Watson and his gang who built their business on corrupting state tenders, that is entirely apt. [...]
A few weeks ago, after a family commemoration, I was sitting at a restaurant in Durban North, the suburb where I was born decades ago. I noticed that our Greek taverna was situated on the corner of Swapo Road and Adelaide Tambo Avenue, neither name immediately evocative for this English-Indian-Zulu suburb. One of our guests [...]
I once compared being leader of the opposition to making bricks without straw. You desire to change things or shift opinion, but objectively lack an essential ingredient to do so. Tony Blair on the comparison said: “When I was leader of the opposition I started the day with ‘what can I say’; now that I [...]
“Imagine,” a Western diplomat from a leading investor nation in SA told me recently, “If we had said during the struggle for democracy here: ‘It’s not our business’.” “And if we had added to this that the future of South Africa cannot be determined by outsiders, least of all by those from the West. “There [...]
Thursday is the most downcast budget day since the arrival of the ANC in government in 1994. Back then, the international isolation of the departing apartheid regime coupled with the minus growth of the local economy under siege had left the new administration with a bare fiscal cupboard. Indeed, incoming minister Mac Maharaj, a confidant [...]
