Jacob Zuma once famously blamed Jan van Riebeeck for creating South Africa’s problems.
On Monday, the nation watched a chaotic marathon meeting where the most glittering metro prize of all, Johannesburg, slipped from the ANC’s grasp. Now the president can go even further back in our colonial history to cast about for his party’s woes.
To borrow […]
‘She posted the biggest win of any party in any city’
Last Wednesday, with their pens in thousands of polling stations across South Africa, the voters delivered a stunning klap to the ruling ANC.
These local polls won outsize international attention, from affirming editorials in The New York Times to the front page of London’s Financial Times.
As […]
SPARE a thought for Jacob Zuma, president of the sharply diminished ANC, who presided last week over his party’s worst election result since 1994. His controversial homestead in Nkandla is now in a municipality controlled by his provincial nemesis, the Inkatha Freedom Party.
It doesn’t get any better when he goes to work: In Pretoria, where […]
The DA leader faces a stiffer electoral test than his predecessors did, writes Tony Leon
On a visit to London last month, a British friend of mine had a meeting with the leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA), Mmusi Maimane.
My friend advised that he was impressed with Maimane, but embarrassed that he kept calling him ‘Moses’.
In […]
Durban – The upcoming local government elections are probably the most important since 1994, former Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said on Wednesday.
“I think although this is a local government election, given the backdrop against which it’s happening from Nenegate, through to the multiple crises of governance and the mushrooming of corruption, it is the […]
Shamefulness is a by-product of decency. Hlaudi Motsoeneng, who hiked his own salary into the stratosphere, clearly suffers from the opposite condition
Synchronicity is the concept pioneered by psychologist Carl Jung who held that events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship, but apparently are meaningfully related.
Ben Trisk, the enterprising CEO of Exclusive […]
POLITICAL theorist Hannah Arendt gifted to posterity great insights into power and a compelling phraseology.
Report on the Banality of Evil to Men in Dark Times, she had a rare ability to describe humanity’s descent into authoritarian evil. Her study of the most pervasive iniquities of the 20th century, published shortly after the Second World War, […]
Speech by Tony Leon to the DA Federal Congress, Port Elizabeth, Sunday, May 10 2015: “The Power of an Idea”
As I was saying at the last DA Congress I spoke at exactly eight years ago yesterday, before I disappeared from your midst-
All is not lost if courage remains. We can make South Africa great. […]
