On Zuma's watch, growth has halved, the national debt has doubled and another million are unemployed THERE‘S a grim choice confronting the US electorate in November between the two most unpopular candidates in polling history. This caused Harvard history professor Niall Ferguson — one of the most erudite and eloquent people on the planet — [...]
Political gestures can be low-cost or ultra-expensive, harmless or dangerous, provide evidence of sunset on the old order or can morph into a false dawn. Political assassinations are at the extreme end of such symbolism. One hundred and two years ago, the murder in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, famously [...]
It's difficult to capture in a headline the essence of what is going on, and going wrong in South Africa right now. If you were to borrow the title from the world of books, perhaps Beryl Bainbridge's slim 1996 classic of the night the Titanic sank Every Man for Himself, would be a handy summary. [...]
There is merriment on social media, writes Tony Leon, but Zuma is in a deadly serious battle for the economy as he shrugs off election losses and takes SOEs under his control. Memes - those social media images that go viral on the internet - were in overdrive this week to herald the improbable trifecta [...]
Zuma knows where, figuratively at least, all the bodies are buried and who has been caught in the web of intelligence networks he controls For those of us who grew up under the unlamented apartheid regime, racial repression was lashed onto dour Calvinism. This meant that everything from cinemas on Sunday to television (until 1976, [...]
FRIDAY night’s prime-time television performance by President Jacob Zuma, on the back of the devastating Constitutional Court judgment the day before, was something to behold. It is capable of almost endless interpretations, although the path forward remains unclear. Gone was the customary giggle, the chuckle and the rictus. Zuma’s qualified and exceedingly rare apology was [...]
You need a rhino hide to survive at the top in politics. With so many darts, though many are injected with the truth serum, shot at Jacob Zuma, it’s a wonder he’s still walking, never mind standing. But with the equivocal support –backing him but investigating his favoured émigré family the Guptas, from his national [...]
SA has no record at all of any minister ever resigning on a point of principle. So the concept of a 'resignation speech' remains alien to our political culture On November 13 1990, the former deputy prime minister of Great Britain, Geoffrey Howe, rocked the House of Commons in his quiet, measured and, this time, [...]
South Africa's weakening currency means that foreign investors lose money YESTERDAY was Super Tuesday in the primaries of the US presidential election. But for South Africa and our continent, it might be dubbed “Gloomy Tuesday”. And yesterday Barclays Bank, which has been knocking around our neighbourhood on and off for the past 100 years, made [...]
