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 [...]
A year ago today, Cyril Ramaphosa was inaugurated as SA president, taking over a country on the verge of a nervous, indeed general, breakdown after the rampaging excesses and gross delinquencies of the Jacob Zuma administration. Leaving aside the highly inconvenient fact that Ramaphosa was the number two man at the helm for more than [...]
The rancorous tone of the election campaign here, even before its official start, suggests many readers might prefer to take a spin in a Land Rover driven by Prince Philip than endure three more months of political noise. Expect it to get even louder and nastier. Bill Clinton, at one time a vote-winner of note, [...]
Even if you could believe the anti-corruption pledge in the document, its lists would be politically anorexic Snippets from the recently launched ANC election manifesto conjured up the famous quip of Dorothy Parker about a spectacularly bad book: “This is not a novel to be tossed away lightly. It should be thrown away with great [...]
Late on Tuesday evening last week, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s "new dawn" morphed into a red twilight as night fell on two hugely instrumental documents, of which he was, by dint of bitter irony and in more hopeful times, a key architect. In his ill-prepared announcement that section 25 of the constitution will be amended, without [...]
When it comes to ‘representivity’ among its leaders the ruling party does not exactly walk its talk Perhaps in his briefing folder for last week’s Brics summit in Sandton, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had an article from The Times of India datelined July 23 2011. It is headlined “Durban is largest ‘Indian city outside [...]
Novelist Alan Hollinghurst describes a young biographer in search of his elderly late subject’s legacy. He writes of someone who ‘was asking for memories, too young himself to himself to know that memories were only memories of memories’. Two recent South African deaths and their respective memorialisations –just weeks apart in the past month – [...]
Ramaphosa’s early exit from London last week was a rude reminder of a fundamental political truth It ranks as a great cosmic irony. Cyril Ramaphosa’s debut on the world stage as president is interrupted by the suppurating standoff in the far northwestern corner of his local empire. No doubt Ramaphosa would have preferred to have [...]
