Israel is one of the few countries available for the South African political establishment to burnish their human rights credentials.
For reasons of solidarity and expediency or simple inattention, such gross rights violators as Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Syria –where political protestors are shot dead, imprisoned or gassed with poison respectively, escape both attention and censure.
Thus the […]
‘ The courts, despite some energetic rigging attempts by the majority party, still push back against a delinquent state; civil society, far from being muzzled, is fully throated in its denunciations of state capture and corruption’
Does distance lend enchantment, or just more distance?Writing this column in Tel Aviv, on the day Israel celebrates its 69th […]
Last Sunday heralded the promise of real political change in France and South Africa. Tony Leon analyses the parallels and differences
There’s a pessimistic French expression Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, which translates as the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Two unrelated political events exactly one week ago will- depending […]
If you have liked the presidency of Jacob Zuma so far, you will love the possible future rule of his former wife, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.
And while our Department of International Relations and Co-operation has been mute on the use by the Syrian government of poison gas on its own people, it has found the time […]
Party members, like victims of Stalin who believed in the system, cannot accept movement has lost the plot
In his final tour de force before his death in 2010, the great modern historian Tony Judt described how key victims of Stalin remained — to the bitter end, often unto death — true believers in the system […]
New Finance Minister Malusi Gigabi loves fashion shows and dressing up. Two cabinet posts back, he arrived at the opening of parliament impersonating an SAA pilot.
I thought at the time – given that he was the minister responsible for the disastrously mismanaged national carrier – there was something deeply symbolic in a politician pretending to […]
Whether on his track record he will be an answer to the prayer for a graft-busting president is open to question
Long before he entered Parliament and moved up and down the ladder of power, and now up again, Cyril Ramaphosa was a communist and a trade unionist. Perhaps, as he eyes the glittering prize of […]
Argentina’s opposition achieved the unimaginable. So too can South Africa’s
LAST Sunday, as I stood atop Mount Kent in the Falkland Islands, the icy wind knifed through my heavy-duty jacket with the proverbial ease of the hottest knife through melting butter. And this was still summer in the rocky, desolate island chain over which Great Britain and […]
‘He has brought in the ethically hobbled Brian Molefe, who not so much personifies “state capture” as being emblematic of a willing accomplice of the Guptas’
SAILING around the “uttermost part of the earth”, to borrow a description of Tierra del Fuego, en route to the Antarctic is, midst the roaring oceans, helpful to develop a […]
Jacob Zuma and his clique are ever more fervent in their belief the state will provide even as they prove it cannot, writes Tony Leon
Ken Clarke, the veteran Tory grandee in the historic House of Commons vote triggering Brexit, drew on Lewis Caroll’s fantasy tale to frame his dissent. The former chancellor of the exchequer […]
