On Monday , South Africans, wearied and depressed by endless electricity blackouts in the heart of winter, were offered by President Cyril Ramaphosa yet another solution — this time in the form of a “10-point power crisis plan”. Most folk are caught between the hope that this time, against all odds and expectation, the plan [...]
The death of acclaimed film critic Barry Ronge in early July was a jarring reminder to me of how he held our English 1 class at Wits University spellbound with his wit and articulacy 42 years ago. Ronge’s lecture topic back then was “the theatre of the absurd” — at the time very voguish with its [...]
Back in 1970, in the whites-only general election, the United Party (UP) campaigned with a poster: “Want TV? Vote UP!” My progressive teenage set ridiculed the official opposition for such a marginal message, given the miseries of apartheid. However, in that poll, for the first time in six elections, the UP actually gained seats off [...]
In the heyday of Die Burger newspaper and the National Party (NP) — for which the publication served as both house journal and chief cheerleader — their influence was consequential and often baleful. Posterity attributes to long-time Die Burger editor the late Piet Cillie the quote: “We had to practise apartheid to prove it could [...]
In parliament on Wednesday, finance minister Tito Mboweni will star in an update of “Mission Impossible”. This is his self-appointed task of “closing the mouth of the hippopotamus”. Or reducing the gap between government revenue and expenditure without choking off any prospect of economic growth. It is not that Tito lacks a sincere and serious [...]
We learnt this week that the South African minister of communications can’t pin the city of Geneva in the state of Switzerland. But what of the state of our own nation as the government displays as many fractures as an orthopaedic ward? In parliament, DA leader John Steenhuisen asked President Cyril Ramaphosa to put country [...]
In 1966, as the US escalated its involvement in the Vietnam War, beleaguered president Lyndon Johnson and his administration denied the surge. Congressman (and later president) Gerald Ford coined the phrase “credibility gap” — the discrepancy between what a politician claims to be the case and the facts of the matter. Columnist Walter Lippmann suggested this [...]
In his famous 1928 dissenting opinion in Olmstead vs United States, US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis offered a warning to freedom-lovers everywhere. He wrote: “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their [...]
This week’s medium-term budget policy statement (MTBPS) is the grimmest and most difficult in a generation. There’s the revenue shortfall, anticipated at about R50bn. The convenient — though perfectly valid — explanation for this huge undershoot is the internal sabotage at the SA Revenue Service by Tom Moyane and his merry men and women. The less [...]
There is a long, ever-lengthening, list of SA-originating business leaders who have achieved huge success and had high impact in boardrooms and markets across the world. Elon Musk and Roelof Botha in the hi-tech field in California (and even outer space in the case of the former); Ivan Glasenberg and Mick Davis in the world [...]
