While R1.5 trillion has been promised at President Cyril Ramaphosa’s investment conference, South Africa’s actual capital formation has plummeted from 20 to 14% of GDP, suggesting that real investment – like Natie Kirsh’s R500 billion business empire built in America – requires genuine structural reforms and competitive markets, not just pledges, writes Tony Leon. “Cyril loves [...]
News24’s On the Record summit revealed a country heavy on tactics but lacking the strategic vision and political will to make the hard policy trade-offs—from labour market reform to BEE changes—needed to break free from its self-imposed “Bermuda Triangle” of high unemployment, low growth, and scarce investment, writes Tony Leon. Jürgen Habermas, the brave liberal German intellectual, [...]
The ANC’s rose-tinted view of its struggle-era alliances is preventing South Africa from learning the hard lessons that could actually liberate its people from unemployment and institutional decay, writes Tony Leon. For devout Hindus, the waters of the River Ganges cleanse believers of sin and help achieve liberation (moksha). In the secular South African realm, the [...]
Just as a National Party minister’s comment about pensioners surviving on R20 a month helped trigger the party’s 1981 electoral decline, today’s ANC leaders are making similarly tone-deaf remarks – from booking hotel baths during water shortages to claiming hospital patients choose to sleep on floors. This could prove electorally disastrous for a party now [...]
Drawing on Boris Johnson’s wisdom about knowing when to leave politics, Tony Leon examines how John Steenhuisen and Helen Zille’s strategic departure creates both electoral opportunities and complex challenges for their successor, who must balance GNU participation with sharpened opposition to the ANC’s policy failures. A long time back, in July 2006, I read an article by [...]
South Africa’s foreign ministry has squandered the diplomatic capital built during the Mandela era, replacing strategic thinking with impulsive gestures and transforming the country from a respected global mediator into an increasingly isolated fringe player, writes Tony Leon. It’s a stretch to use words and phrases such as “thoughtful” or “long-term strategy” or even “principled consistency” [...]
Drawing on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos call for nations to stop “living the lie,” Tony Leon reflects on South Africa’s contradictions between sovereignty rhetoric and reality – from outsourcing naval exercises to China while claiming independence, to sliding from the world’s top gold producer to 12th place despite record prices. Last year, on a [...]
Former DA leader Tony Leon argues the party faces an existential identity crisis as it navigates between its historic role as effective opposition and its current position as part of the GNU, with its upcoming congress serving as a crucial moment to determine whether the party has been “muzzled” by the ANC or can leverage its [...]
With the rules-based order in retreat, Tony Leon argues SA’s hard-won impeccable moral authority has been squandered once too often. Just as well, given the extraordinary, arguably extra-legal, events over the weekend in Caracas, that South Africa’s ambassador to Venezuela, Lindiwe Maeko, maintained a judicious silence (thus far). Had her predecessor, Ambassador Joseph Nkosi (now in Chad), [...]
Following Sunday’s deadly attack on Jewish celebrants at Bondi Beach during Chanukkah, Tony Leon examines how inflammatory rhetoric and binary slogans around Israel and Jewish identity are fuelling real-world violence, calling for more nuanced discourse before words turn deadly. “Antisemitism is a light sleeper”, a friend of mine in Sydney, Australia, wrote after Sunday’s horrifying and murderous [...]
