Cyril Ramaphosa

Are Pandor’s Iran comments just ignorance, indifference or wilful blindness?

US President Ronald Reagan is attributed as once wisely noting that: "Politics is simple yet hard to do." Even more so in the international arena, as South Africa's contortions in the United States on the bilateral relationship revealed. Last week, International Relations Minister Naledi Pandor was in the news for two apparently related reasons. Domestically, she [...]

National’ needs to be removed from the party label ‘African National Congress’

Last Friday evening, I attended a dinner in Cape Town addressed by the writer and associate editor of the conservative magazine, The Spectator, Douglas K Murray, and author of the best-seller "The Madness of Crowds". In an interview there with Gareth Cliff, Murray suggested that South Africa's case against Israel on genocide charges before the [...]

Chameleon Cyril adopts different colours over NHI

The death last week of pioneering sociologist Professor Edward Webster occasioned distant memories of my 20-year-old self as a student in his industrial sociology class at Wits University. Eddie as he was universally called, was a Marxist academic, as were many in the faculty - but you did not need to drink his ideological Kool-Aid [...]

The ANC’s moral blindness when it comes to Hamas

Recently in Parliament, in answer to a question by DA MP GR Krumbock, Naledi Pandor, minister of international relations and co-operation, stated that "South Africa does not consider Hamas" - perpetrator of the mass slaughter of civilians in Israel on 7 October, "as a terrorist organisation". In her answer, Pandor claimed that SA’s stance is [...]

There are no straight lines in politics. Voters will get 3 versions of the ANC on 29 May

More than a decade back, I had a memorable dinner in Buenos Aires with a former White House speechwriter for President George W Bush. One of the guests present asked him what it was like to work for the 43rd President of the United States. Bush was famously regarded by voters as being both a [...]

Dial-a-quote Mbalula uncharacteristically silent on Alexei Navalny’s death

If you were doing a mental health check on the state of South African democracy today, schizophrenia could be an accurate diagnosis. On the one hand, never in its 30-year bumpy ride toward the pivotal 2024 election has the outcome been so unclear nor as contested. Evidence of the rude good democratic health here arrived [...]

Ramaphosa’s ‘credibility gap’ now stands as a yawning chasm of disbelief

Last Thursday in the United States, a special prosecutor, Robert K Hur, exonerated President Joe Biden on charges of mishandling classified documents in a report of more than 400 pages. But just nine words of it could mark the epitaph for the president and herald the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Hur (appointed [...]

Faced with a difficult election, the ANC is fuelling a ‘paranoid style of politics’

At the Grammy Awards on Sunday night, pop sensation, an understatement, Taylor Swift became the first honouree to win Album of the Year for the fourth time, eclipsing Paul Simon, Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder in the process. At just 54kgs, Taylor Swift bestrides the world of music today as a modern-day colossus, her concerts [...]

SA’s latest fit of morality sponsored by the ‘bankrupt’ ANC

In 1843, Lord Thomas Macaulay, an English politician and historian, wrote: "We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality." Substitute the ANC government and update it to present times, and you achieve a neat fit for the crowing and posturing of President Cyril Ramaphosa and [...]

Enough with government’s ‘obligatory optimism’

Enver Hoxha was the remorseless Communist dictator who held the Balkan country of Albania in his pitiless grip for just over 40 years from 1944 until his death in 1985. Once, uncharacteristically, in his New Year message for 1967, he did offer his long-suffering country a burst of candour when he advised: This year will [...]

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