Our constitutional promises and its premises have been flattened into a single unadorned and unqualified concept: the pursuit of “transformation”, writes Tony Leon. With debate raging and court challenges looming on the government’s version of “transformation”, you could be forgiven for thinking that the SA Constitution consists of just one section. On 9 June, President Cyril Ramaphosa [...]
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent encounter at the White House revealed that South Africans have all succumbed to “Trump derangement syndrome” in varying different degrees, writes Tony Leon. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa went to the White House on a “working visit” to meet the US president and nothing much happened. No one in the world, least [...]
Tony Leon explores the unpredictable dynamics and potential outcomes of Wednesday’s high-stakes Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa, examining political tensions, personal chemistry, and the challenges both leaders bring to the table. The great question for Wednesday is which Donald J Trump will show up for his meeting with Cyril Ramaphosa? The second [...]
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 [...]
How does an ambassador navigate his way when sent to a country led by a protocol-busting, hard-charging populist and protectionist who ransacks state institutions, tears up international trade agreements and announces, at their inauguration, "we must not import a single nail"? This was precisely the situation I found myself in circa 2009 when I was [...]
Kaput. That's one German word which has migrated into common English usage. It's defined as "ruined, broken, or not functioning". And it fits a lot of things here and in the world right now. Wednesday afternoon's budget, assuming there is one, will reveal the ruin in our public finances; the chronic missed growth, fiscal and revenue [...]
More than 240 years back, when there was an actual war of arms, not words, between America and a European power, famous Scottish economist, Adam Smith, received an alarmist letter from a young MP. British parliamentarian John Sinclair wrote to Smith: "If we go on at this rate, the nation must be ruined (the author emphasising this [...]
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 [...]
