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 [...]
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% [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
“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 [...]
When I was leader of the opposition, I once compared the job with its certain punishments and uncertain prospects as “making bricks without straw”. Sometimes there were opportunities to reach and targets to hit, but equally the very basics for construction were often missing. From a now vanished age, late United Party MP and opposition [...]
The late former leader of the parliamentary opposition, Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, once said that to do his job “you need iron in the soul”. That phrase provides the title for an interesting book I read recently on the leaders of the official opposition here, authored by Unisa academic Alex Mouton. An even bleaker prospect was [...]
