Decades back, the Sunday newspapers boasted large comic supplements featuring everyone from Prince Valiant to Batman. One weekly cartoon was called "Spot the Difference". It sported a two-panel drawing each of which looked, at first blush, identical to the other. But in fact, the second panel contained some subtle differences from the first drawing. The job [...]
Uncosted, untested, and – arguably – unconstitutional, our consensus-loving President Cyril Ramaphosa signed into law last week the National Health Insurance Act. "Whether you like it or not" is the new eve-of-poll presidential mantra. One can only look in wonderment at how the state – over three decades – has ravaged and pillaged practically every [...]
For a good dose of inflated rhetoric, dodgy statistics and magical thinking, check out the ANC's 2024 election manifesto. The last section of the document, dealing with international relations, takes grandiosity to new heights, even as South Africa plunges to new lows of foreign interest. Recently, former finance minister Trevor Manuel underlined how far we [...]
The late Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, who led the official opposition in Parliament from 1979 until his resignation in 1986, was critical of my term of office in the same position. At the time of my own resignation, years later in 2007, he suggested that my political and parliamentary style was "pure Westminster". The debate on what [...]
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writer, and historian, noted in 2018 in the New York Review of Books that "the encrustations of mythologising and hero worship have gone beyond the point that they can be easily corrected". This phenomenon was neatly summarised in a line at the end of the 1962 Hollywood blockbuster movie, The man who shot Liberty Valance: When the legend becomes fact, [...]
After the fog of war lifted from the industrial-scale slaughter which characterised the killing fields of the First World War, which ended in 1918, a psychoanalyst offered an acute observation. Sometimes, he suggested, the difference whether a soldier was awarded a medal for gallantry or was executed for cowardice, "depended in which direction the person [...]
The political history of South Africa during the apogee of apartheid in the 1960s and early 1970s is well canvassed, even if interpretations remain deeply contested. Less attention is paid to the cultural dimension of living under a dour state-imposed Calvinism – no television, no Sunday sport or entertainment, and a draconian censorship regime which [...]
Last week's death of social psychologist Daniel Kahneman, 90, was commemorated by economists across the world even though he never studied economics even as an undergraduate. But he did win the 2002 Nobel Prize for economic science. Puzzles, biases and paradoxes were core to Kahneman's insights. In fact, he, along with his lifetime collaborator Amos [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
