Tony Leon reflects on the ANC’s unwavering commitment to black economic empowerment (BEE) despite the stark contrast between its ideals and outcomes. Add two ANC faves, indigenisation and transformation, into a Shakespearean soliloquy and the result might be, “To BEE or not to BEE that is the question.” While Hamlet hemmed and hawed with deep-felt uncertainty [...]
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent encounter at the White House revealed that South Africans have all succumbed to “Trump derangement syndrome” in varying different degrees, writes Tony Leon. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa went to the White House on a “working visit” to meet the US president and nothing much happened. No one in the world, least [...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3PA-MT8dCA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NoFl_pxo-Q&list=PL73Gj_So3oSVSq5C7dggvXLVYWcrue6kh
After Tony Leon takes a road trip from Johannesburg to the eastern parts of the Free State he reflects on South Africa’s crumbling infrastructure, and how it reveals a stark contrast between neglect and functional governance, and why there is an urgent need for systemic change. A recent drive from Lanseria Airport outside Johannesburg to Clarens, the [...]
Imagine a democratic country where members of the governing party called each other "Comrade"; where its Cabinet members were split between democratic centrists and socialist ideologues. Its high-spending government presided over a low-growth, high-unemployment economy, and it faced headwinds from being over-borrowed in a weakening currency and from external foreign shocks over which it had [...]
The late US Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, popularised the "Pottery Barn rule" - named after the American chain store, as a guide to political consequences for strategic decisions, both taken and avoided. It went along the lines of "if you break it, you fix it; if you break it, you own it". This [...]
Understandably two sections in the contentious Basic Education Laws Amendment Act relating, respectively, to mother tongue education and schools' rights to set admission policy have sucked most of the oxygen out of the debate on this controversial legislation. There is a lot at stake here, including removing such decisions from the remit of school bodies [...]
Every day, in the choices we make or don't select, we display a degree of dualism or opposing ideas jostling for our attention and selection. Poetically, Walt Whitman's 1892 epic poem on the human condition, "Song of Myself", summed this up neatly: "Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/ (I am large, I [...]
When Donald J Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president on 20 January 2017, he delivered a dystopian speech on the state of his nation, summarised as "American Carnage". Leaving that event, George W Bush, the 43rd president and last Republican to hold that office before Trump, remarked on his successor's oration: "That was some weird s..t." [...]
