A new word, “retcon”, has entered the lexicon, shorthand for “retroactive continuity”. American journalist Lance Morrow explained this week it’s a “literary device in which form and content of a previously established narrative is changed. Retcon retrofits the past plot to suit present purposes.” Retcon is a device for novels (such as when history is [...]
Next month my new book, Future Tense — Reflections on my Troubled Land, will hit the bookshelves here. There was one potential problem in crafting this effort, beyond the agonies of the creative process in general. Writing the book during the first coronavirus lockdown in 2020, beyond the intimations of mortality it induced in us all, posed [...]
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 [...]
The fiscal apocalypse outlined in Wednesday's emergency budget was biblical in proportion and probably could add a new page to the Book of Revelation. Instead of reminding us of the End of Times, which is certainly on the cards as the country careers off the economic cliff face, Tito Mboweni settled for the Book of Matthew. He reminded [...]
When Tito Mboweni rises in parliament on Wednesday afternoon to present his revised budget, the normally emollient finance minister will likely replace his usual beaming smile with a grim rictus. This, after all, in the direst economic circumstances in more than 70 years (cue the Great Depression of the 1930s as an approximate marker on [...]
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 [...]
South Africans desperately seeking some good news are unlikely to find it in the speech in parliament on Wednesday afternoon from Tito Mboweni when he delivers the medium-term budget policy statement. Happier tidings might emerge from the pitch on Saturday afternoon when the Springboks meet England in the Rugby World Cup final at the International [...]
Having ascended to the second-most-important job in politics, he should contemplate this Ratings agencies, taxpayers, investors and hard-pressed consumers will focus laser-attention on the pronouncements of new finance minister Tito Mboweni when he delivers his “maiden” mini-budget speech in parliament this afternoon. But there is nothing virginal about Mboweni’s cabinet status. He returns to the [...]
'Neither Nene nor his credible successor has such fires to light under the embers of our weak economy' Nearly one hundred years ago, Danish physicist and philosopher Niels Bohr wrote that ‘ The opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may be another profound truth’. These past five [...]
