Imagine a democratic country where members of the governing party called each other "Comrade"; where its Cabinet members were split between democratic centrists and socialist ideologues. Its high-spending government presided over a low-growth, high-unemployment economy, and it faced headwinds from being over-borrowed in a weakening currency and from external foreign shocks over which it had [...]
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once mused: "If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat." This thought is useful to interrogate the recent flurry of announcements from President Cyril Ramaphosa. A win? Start with the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act (BELA) "win" of mid-December 2024. On the day of [...]
"The butterfly effect" explains how a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon triggers a massive storm across Europe. As John Gribbin explains the work of meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who first developed this chaos theory: Some systems are very sensitive to their starting conditions, so that a tiny difference in the initial push you give [...]
British statesman Roy Jenkins wrote of the life and career of French soldier-leader Charles de Gaulle that “compared with his companions on the world stage [De Gaulle] had mostly to play a poor hand from a weak seat”, adding that “he behaved in a way which, seeking grandeur, invited ridicule, yet always escaped it. He was [...]
Writing in the Financial Times this week, Sarah O’Connor confessed: “I hate big numbers. Or rather I hate it when big numbers are used to impress or bamboozle rather than to make sense of the world.” This struck a chord when I recalled a senior maven at our National Treasury advising: “Cyril [Ramaphosa] loves big [...]
The cavalcade of chaos and crises confronting South Africa right now, with electricity outages a daily grim reminder of our failing state, is probably an excellent moment to roll out the tattered red carpet in Pretoria for the visiting representative of an even more failed enterprise than our own: Russia. The presence in our capital [...]
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 [...]
The trouble with changing the Constitution is that it opens the Pandora's Box of populism Last week, South Africa endured a terrible, awful and simply bad few days. Problem is that our troubles are now arriving, to channel Shakespeare, ‘not as single spies but in battalions.’ Emerging market contagion was the start of it, currency [...]
Fearful kakophony drowns business voice, writes Tony Leon. 'Who do I call when I want to speak to Europe?" Apparently, Henry Kissinger never uttered this great quip attributed to him, on the impossibility of receiving a coherent and unified response from the EU. But the line is useful shorthand right now, with local substitution, to [...]
