John Steenhuisen

Yikes! The moonshot pact is run from a pizza shop basement

As a Brics scene-stealer, it was hard to beat the offstage and out-of-the-sky antics of Pretoria’s absent friend, Vladimir Putin. Apparently on Wednesday a plane crash in Russia killed Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, once known as “Putin’s chef”. His death exactly two months after his short-lived mutiny against the Kremlin proves anew the adage [...]

The multiparty coalition needs cool heads and a spirit of compromise

Last week’s opposition get-together at Emperor’s Palace (previously World Trade Centre) in Kempton Park provided fodder for both cheerleaders and cynics about prospects for a post-ANC future in South Africa. For the sceptics, there was plenty of evidence that this “sideshow”, to quote our esteemed president, will not move the voting dial much in 2024. [...]

‘Moon pact’ talks a worthwhile gamble

Some years back I was invited to Emperors Palace, Kempton Park, to address a business conference. It took prodigious feats of imagination to remember that this glitzy casino had, in its previous life as the jerry-built and misnamed “World Trade Centre,” been the venue for the constitutional negotiations which birthed a democratic South Africa. Outside [...]

From Turkey to SA nationalism is key to retaining power

Imagine a country where, due to the president and his party’s actions and policies, the currency crashes to a record low of 20 to the dollar; where neglected infrastructure and building projects beset by corruption cause damage and death; and the president’s bromance with Vladimir Putin leads to a flight of funds by foreign investors [...]

‘Nonaligned’, ‘pick up the rand’, ‘president’: when words mean fokol

American dissident and writer James Baldwin once noted you can judge the state of a nation’s educational level by the quality of its political speech. By this metric, and on both measures, SA today scores off the charts. Hot on the heels of the global report (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) revealing that 81% [...]

Shades of Waterkloof: let’s talk about that Russian ship on Cape shores

Back in 1973, the New York Times master columnist and resident conservative flag bearer in a hyper-liberal establishment newspaper popularised the acronym “MEGO”. It derives from the first letters of the editor’s phrase, “My Eyes Glaze Over”. It was, he advised, an editorial put-down of a worthy but crushingly dull article. But he noted it [...]

Presidential sounds of silence are fuelling the fire engulfing SA

Workers Day, May 1 2022, offered South Africans sharply contrasting images of President Cyril Ramaphosa and leader of the official opposition John Steenhuisen. Ramaphosa had a double indignity heaped on him at a rally at Royal Bafokeng Stadium in Rustenburg, North West. The obvious injury to presidential pride was his forced removal from the keynote [...]

Hypocrisy rules as politicians jostle for power in our cities

This week the seismic tremors measured north of nine on the political Richter scale as the once impregnable ANC found itself under a heap of rubble with one citadel after another falling to its opponents. Still, even after the tectonic plates shifted so decisively under the  giant’s feet, there were some upsides for the country’s [...]

SA won’t prosper while it bends its knee to Cliff-hanging cancel culture

With the decision of Cricket SA to force all Protea players to “take the knee” and Quinton de Kock’s stance not to bend, the issues of free speech and the right of individual dissent now spillover from the Twittersphere to the playing fields. But the issues at the heart of this have a long history, [...]

By |2021-10-27T06:41:02+00:00October 27th, 2021|Elections, John Steenhuisen, Opinion|0 Comments

It’s a pity the DA posters have overshadowed the real election issues

“You cannot fatten a pig on market day.” This adage from British politics resonates here and now in the dismal run-up to polling day on November 1. The implication is that unless you have a track record of delivery, or even basic decency established well ahead of voting day, you are unlikely to reap the [...]

Go to Top