This week’s standoff in Nkandla will tell us a lot about who we are as a country. It will speak volumes on where we stand on the rule of law and equal treatment of all citizens, and how even-handed the state and its agencies will be in applying the adage that no-one is above the [...]
'Insert the topic of billionaires in a book title and you have a seller'', is the view of Jeremy Boraine, publishing director at Jonathan Ball Publishers. Indeed. Of the top five bestselling titles in SA right now, three of them deal with that tiny subset of local billionaires, the Afrikaans super-rich. The Stellenbosch Mafia by Pieter [...]
At the ANC national conference in December 2017, which elected Cyril Ramaphosa as president by a tiny margin, the party adopted a resolution that consisted of two mutually destructive elements. On the one hand it resolved that nationalisation of land without compensation “should be one of the methods used by the state to address land [...]
In the heyday of Die Burger newspaper and the National Party (NP) — for which the publication served as both house journal and chief cheerleader — their influence was consequential and often baleful. Posterity attributes to long-time Die Burger editor the late Piet Cillie the quote: “We had to practise apartheid to prove it could [...]
There are several reasons why Venezuelan polymath Moises Naim claims the attention of posterity. He served as the minister of trade and industry in his homeland when that country was the richest in South America. Afterward, he edited prestigious journal Foreign Affairs and along the way was an executive director of the World Bank. In [...]
At the end of May, previously vaccine-starved SA faces a curious paradox: the supply of inoculations against the deadly coronavirus vastly exceeds demand. At least in theory. This strange dilemma is almost entirely explicable because the government, in light of so many demonstrable serial botch-ups on this front, insists on centralising and nationalising the broken [...]
My former parliamentary colleague, Errol “EK” Moorcroft, once offered sage advice on the perils of overpromising and underdelivering: “Least said, soonest mended” was his stance. President Cyril Ramaphosa and his government have a different approach. “Cyril loves big numbers” is the inside view of a National Treasury mandarin. Indeed, a scroll back to Ramaphosa’s “new deal [...]
Eventually, after four years of unchecked recklessness which not even popular US president Dwight Eisenhower could interdict, US senator Joseph McCarthy was undone by one killer question. He provided posterity with the synonym for scapegoating individuals for disloyalty usually involving Communism, and in his case for making often unsubstantiated accusations involving the so-called “Red Scare”. [...]
Local elections anywhere can often lead to false readings of the national picture. Such an error here in the local government polls in 2016 prefigured the national decline of the DA three years later in the general election in 2019. Many will remember how — against all expectation and for what passes as “informed commentary” [...]
Historian CV Wedgwood wrote: “History is written backward but lived forward. Those who know the end of the story can never know what it was like at the time.” Very few, even if not present in the infamous Gupta compound in Saxonwold, won’t know the result of the extraordinary testimony at the Zondo commission, offered [...]
