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% [...]
I keep a collection — now spilling into multiple volumes of quotations and longer articles, even book extracts — of thoughts and writings I believe have the wisdom and wit to illuminate the context and times in which we live. Many years ago, I read a profound book by David Landes, then emeritus professor of [...]
The opening weekend of the Fifa World Cup produced no end of surprises, if Eskom load shedding allowed you to view the spectacle. The country of my second allegiance, Argentina (given Bafana’s dismal non-qualification, my home team as it were), was held to an improbable draw by tiny Iceland, which in population terms (337,000 versus [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
'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 [...]
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 [...]
'Both Zuma senior and junior are well-known critics of the rating agencies that determine the credit status of the country' Tomorrow Cape Town traffic will be more choked and chaotic than usual as the state flexes its muscles and shows its pomp and finery for President Jacob Zuma‘s State of the Nation spectacle. The street [...]
"Finance minister Pravin Gordhan, stands like Horatio on the bridge trying to hold back the ratings agencies" A FRIEND of mine in London sent me an amazing betting statistic. If you had wagered a paltry £5 on a trifecta of Leicester City winning the Premier League in May, Britain voting for Brexit in June and [...]
