Tony Leon reflects on lessons for the US-SA relations in the relationship between Jorge Bergoglio (who later became Pope Francis) and the former president to Argentina Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. A lot of airtime right now is taken with the identity of who President Cyril Ramaphosa appoints as South Africa's new ambassador to the United States. Though, as [...]
In an act of conspicuous national self-destruction, the ANC has set the scene for the ejection of the DA from the GNU, writes Tony Leon. Circa 1899, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, developed the idea of "screen memory". This suggested that one memory can function to hide another, typically, unconscious mental content. Perhaps only psychologists [...]
Logan Roy was the magnificent and monstrous patriarch at the centre of the satirical television masterpiece Succession. In the second episode of its final season in 2023, Roy delivered a killer line to his dysfunctional children, "I love you, but you are not serious people". Absent any amity, indeed amid high levels of acrimony, "you [...]
Imagine a democratic country where members of the governing party called each other "Comrade"; where its Cabinet members were split between democratic centrists and socialist ideologues. Its high-spending government presided over a low-growth, high-unemployment economy, and it faced headwinds from being over-borrowed in a weakening currency and from external foreign shocks over which it had [...]
"Talk is cheap, money buys the whiskey" is a true and informed adage. And this does not refer to the rise in "sin taxes" on booze likely to be introduced on Wednesday afternoon when Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana unveils his budget in Parliament. Instead, it applies to the cheap talk from various politicians. SA "will not [...]
Eminent American historian Timothy Snyder wrote in the introduction to his short book On Tyranny, "History does not repeat itself but it does instruct." The subtitle of his work, Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, is helpful in navigating the current crisis which has engulfed SA-US relations, now at their worst point since 1986. In I986, the [...]
"Trump derangement syndrome" is a political condition whose etymology is traced to the late conservative commentator and psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer. He defined it, first in respect of another Republican president, George W. Bush, as "the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency - nay – the very [...]
The well-known jurist, Mr Justice Fikile Mbalula, has rendered judgment. Opining from the X (previously Twitter) division of the High Court on Monday, in the matter of a contractual dispute between two parties (Cyril Ramaphosa in his capacity as president of SA, and John Steenhuisen, on behalf of the DA), Mbalula J., held: "Clause 19 does [...]
Does South Africa and its government have a growth strategy? This simple but fundamental question consists, of course, of two parts. And no easy answers. First the "growth" part. Libraries of books and gridfuls of electrons underline why economic growth is the fundamental basis for all other arenas of public goods, from human upliftment (and its [...]
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once mused: "If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat." This thought is useful to interrogate the recent flurry of announcements from President Cyril Ramaphosa. A win? Start with the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act (BELA) "win" of mid-December 2024. On the day of [...]
