By wisely turning away from the baubles of premiership, the DA leader avoided splitting the party leadership Last week in London I attended a dinner with some starring members of the British political establishment. The entire menu of conversations covered Brexit, and that was a day before Theresa May was ambushed by the European Union [...]
Leaders who create the right conditions to keep millionaires find that all of their residents – not just the wealthy ones – are richer for it Writing about the super-rich in South Africa is hardly the formula to win plaudits from the politically correct or the army of virtue-signalling trolls who inhabit the Twittersphere and [...]
What has our burning topic du jour, ‘expropriation without compensation’ to do with the price of bread? Or, less obviously, with the cost of bread-making machines? Clearly, if the Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) fantastical policy prescriptions of wholesale property confiscations, state ownership of banks and the destruction of the private sector came to pass [...]
Like the Roman emperor, those who do the dance of opposites need more than a wall of mirrors to guard against stabbings in the back A few days ago I viewed the ruins of the palace of the emperor Domitian on the Palatine Hill opposite Rome’s famous Colosseum. Our informative guide provided no end of [...]
The fiasco around the rapid ousting of Cape Town mayor Peter Marais 17 years ago also differs from the damaging drawn-out imbroglio The DA is in turmoil. The party leadership attempts to fire its Cape Town mayor, who is both coloured and a populist, though also someone who has migrated across the party political map. [...]
How might the Steve Smith-led Aussie ball-tampering scandal at Newlands inform some of the key issues affecting the body politic and our economy? The obvious answer is that even the prime minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, on Sunday described the incident as “completely beyond belief” and called for “decisive action” from Cricket Australia. Incidentally, this [...]
President bangs on about unity, but it is he himself who infected a party that is falling further apart by the day Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has warned South Africans who display symptoms of lysteriosis, a dread disease caused by bacterium found in soil, water and vegetation, to seek urgent medical assistance. But this outbreak, [...]
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. [...]
'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 [...]
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, [...]
