My recent reimmersion into the murky waters of SA politics during the negotiation for the new and very large government of national unity was a reminder of why I quit political leadership in 2007. I have renewed admiration for those who toil at the political grindstone but, politics like acting (and former British prime minister [...]
The funeral on Saturday of Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi in Ulundi, in the heart of rural Zululand, showed that the decrepit and failing state can still muster its pomp and finery and 21 guns to lay to rest one of the most consequential figures in modern South African history. Buthelezi, traditional prime minister to the Zulu [...]
Writing this column from London amid an intense heatwave, the meltdown in the British Conservative Party offers no end of lessons for politicians and polities everywhere. Last Thursday Boris Johnson’s gravity-defying political survivalism was brought crashing down to earth as he was forcibly ejected — “by the herd”, as he dubbed his Tory colleagues — [...]
The Venn diagram, where public health imperatives and political needs intersect, is opaque, if not a mess. It is the meeting point between poor policies and arbitrary decisions. South Africans found plenty to justly criticise about government overreach in the 16 months since the country was first placed under lockdown on March 26 2020. The [...]
Senator J. William Fulbright occupies a place in the political Pantheon reserved for a breed now extinct: he was a Southern Democratic Senator who staunchly opposed the war in Vietnam in the 1960’s and 1970’s. He lost his re-election bid in 1974 for being too out of touch with his conservative voters. But he did [...]
A terror attack on London Bridge before polling day; opinion polls showing the governing Conservative Party on course for a huge parliamentary majority; the deep unpopularity of the Labour Party’s Jeremy Corbyn; and a desire by voters to end the impasse over Brexit. These are key electoral assets for the incumbent Tory prime minister. The [...]
On Monday in London – at separate venues – two heads of state were in action delivering speeches to different audiences in the same city, but their rhetoric was joined by a common incredulity, even cynicism, on whether hard deeds will follow fine words. The speech that grabbed the headlines, helped by the majestic backdrop [...]
Usually, I am a sucker for middlebrow musicals of the Sound of Music and Evita stamp, where you leave the theatre singing, tunelessly but enthusiastically, the showstopper tunes. But last week in London, and aptly on the eve of SA’s Heritage Day, I witnessed a musical event with such great and wider meaning, and performed in such an unusual, [...]
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 [...]
In life the opposite of shame is shamelessness. In public life the antonym of shame is impunity. In both cases, it means you act unbound by the norms of decency, accountability, moral probity and ethics. Consequences for wrongful acts are for dummies and dupes. In a country where shamelessness and impunity are the norm, the [...]
