A search of South African government websites for an expression of sympathy on the weekend assassination of six civilian hostages, who were killed by Hamas under the tunnels of Rafah in Gaza, yields a nil return. Cogent explanations for the dearth of empathy - or its partial application - must go beyond the normal claims of [...]
Timing in life and politics is everything. So, spare a thought for new Trade, Industry and Competition Minister Parks Tau. He arrived on Tuesday in Washington DC, as head of a government-business delegation seeking to engage Congress and the White House on retaining our Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) privileges and mitigating the fallout from [...]
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 death last week of pioneering sociologist Professor Edward Webster occasioned distant memories of my 20-year-old self as a student in his industrial sociology class at Wits University. Eddie as he was universally called, was a Marxist academic, as were many in the faculty - but you did not need to drink his ideological Kool-Aid [...]
Recently in Parliament, in answer to a question by DA MP GR Krumbock, Naledi Pandor, minister of international relations and co-operation, stated that "South Africa does not consider Hamas" - perpetrator of the mass slaughter of civilians in Israel on 7 October, "as a terrorist organisation". In her answer, Pandor claimed that SA’s stance is [...]
In 1843, Lord Thomas Macaulay, an English politician and historian, wrote: "We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality." Substitute the ANC government and update it to present times, and you achieve a neat fit for the crowing and posturing of President Cyril Ramaphosa and [...]
