Shortly after Cyril Ramaphosa’s narrow victory , a senior opposition MP offered a vivid metaphor wrapped in a back handed compliment to the new ANC president. “It’s like a piece of driftwood which you grab with both hands in a stormy sea after a shipwreck”, my informant suggested. Ten years after the Jacob Zuma tsunami [...]
President bangs on about unity, but it is he himself who infected a party that is falling further apart by the day Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has warned South Africans who display symptoms of lysteriosis, a dread disease caused by bacterium found in soil, water and vegetation, to seek urgent medical assistance. But this outbreak, [...]
Party politics aside, what is best for us as citizens? This time a decade ago, when the ANC was defenestrating its then all-powerful president Thabo Mbeki, I was an ocean away in the ice and snow which encased Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Being gifted with a five-month fellowship at the university's John F Kennedy [...]
Black Friday arrived on these shores in triplicate last week. First there was the chaotic retail therapy which saw smashed shopping mall windows, crashed e-commerce websites and big bargains as South Africans went shopping. Second there was Robert Mugabe's inglorious end as the 93-year-old despot gave way to a 75-year-old successor with, to be diplomatic, [...]
Robert Mugabe’s inglorious end this week after decades of tyranny defied the outcome to which Thomas More gave voice over 500 years ago. Mugabe like More is Catholic but, unlike the latter, he was no saint. And the Zimbabwean military disproved the More prophesy sola more tyrannicida est –‘death is the only way to be [...]
South Africa faces multiple disasters: a combination of reckless misgovernance and now, with the worst drought in living memory, the Hand of God thrown in for good measure. On the subject of the divinity, the old saw "Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad" has been given a uniquely modern South African [...]
In 1967, US author Allen Drury wrote a book on apartheid South Africa entitled A Very Strange Society. Fifty years later, and two-plus decades into our post-apartheid story, we have added several new chapters to our national tragedy, though that title remains very contemporary. The strangest part started just shy of 10 years ago: at [...]
If the US constitution resembles a durable oak, ours is like a bonsai tree With the horrific gun-killings in Las Vegas, it might seem trite to mention one of the great TV series of the past decade, The Sopranos. But sometimes escapism beats deadly reality. And that mould-breaking psychodrama mixed the humdrum New Jersey suburban [...]
Two versions of her speech at Gibs, in text and orally, show little regard for dire state of public accounts. Presidential hopeful Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s recent speech at a high citadel of capitalism — the Gordon Institute for Business Science — caused much controversy. In her actual remarks Dlamini-Zuma bemoaned the "dissonance" between the government and [...]
Our security services and minister are fast friends with their Russian counterparts. Just on Monday the two countries signed a co-operation agreement on "cyber security" The Sherlock Holmes story The Silver Blaze gave us the famous tagline of "the curious incident of the dog in the night". The curiosity in that tale of the kidnapping [...]
