The South African economy will be on life support this year with an anaemic 0.3% projected growth, according to this week’s SA Reserve Bank forecast. More jobs and livelihoods will bleed, the tax base will erode and many businesses will die. Hilary Joffe writing in Business Day on Friday noted ‘’even in the worst of [...]
On September 6 1966, in the assembly chamber of parliament in Cape Town, a deranged messenger, Dimitri Tsafendas, stabbed and killed apartheid prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd. Minutes later then defence minister, and later prime minister and then president, PW Botha, stormed across from the other side of the house to confront the sole member of [...]
On Wednesday I bumped into a veteran journalist just back from the ANC's 55th national conference at Nasrec, Johannesburg. He described his five days at the event as “hellish” — everything endlessly delayed, impenetrable ANC jargon in place of plain speech, zero attention to crucial policymaking and pervasive chaos and unruliness. Happily, spared such a [...]
On Monday , South Africans, wearied and depressed by endless electricity blackouts in the heart of winter, were offered by President Cyril Ramaphosa yet another solution — this time in the form of a “10-point power crisis plan”. Most folk are caught between the hope that this time, against all odds and expectation, the plan [...]
