Eight months since the current plague emerged from Wuhan, China, we face disrupted lives, shattered livelihoods, a wrecked economy and more to come. This unhappy picture, though, has one silver lining for those who believe in grown-up solutions and global responses to an international crisis such as the novel coronavirus – described as a “once-in-a-century [...]
The fiscal apocalypse outlined in Wednesday's emergency budget was biblical in proportion and probably could add a new page to the Book of Revelation. Instead of reminding us of the End of Times, which is certainly on the cards as the country careers off the economic cliff face, Tito Mboweni settled for the Book of Matthew. He reminded [...]
As South Africans endure the seventh week of home imprisonment, the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic is, to borrow from the song in The King and I, “a puzzlement”. First puzzle is our new overlord, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. She seems to imagine that viral microbes possess an intelligence wing. And while several of her fellow ministers, [...]
Last November, before an international audience gathered in Cape Town, I conducted an interview with former president FW de Klerk. One of the issues I canvassed with him was his take on the age-old issue of whether it is historical forces or individuals who change the course of history, or some combination of both. Cyril [...]
At first blush, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu and our dethroned former president, Jacob Zuma, have zero in common. The one presides over one of the most successful economies in the world, the other drove ours into a ditch. Zuma is a staunch ally of the Palestinian cause; Netanyahu has made a career out [...]
On Saturday night in Berlin, the capital of chic modernity in Europe and of its largest economy, throngs celebrated the 30-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the most menacing and divisive symbol of the Cold War. On November 9 1989, Berlin was ground zero of the four-decade battle between the liberal market [...]
In the furies of social media, it is worth a reminder that obituary writers declaring the death of political parties often turn out to be premature. Or even dead wrong. In 1994, at the dawn of our democracy, many death notices were penned for the Democratic Party, which had a dreadful election on the back [...]
“Imagine,” a Western diplomat from a leading investor nation in SA told me recently, “If we had said during the struggle for democracy here: ‘It’s not our business’.” “And if we had added to this that the future of South Africa cannot be determined by outsiders, least of all by those from the West. “There [...]
Karl Lagerfeld, the fashion genius at the house of Chanel who died this week in Paris, was described by a peer as "the creator of dreams". Whoever conceived the 2019 ANC election slogan, however, must be living a nightmare right now. To quote the party billboard: "The Power is in Your Hands - Grow SA". [...]
Thursday is the most downcast budget day since the arrival of the ANC in government in 1994. Back then, the international isolation of the departing apartheid regime coupled with the minus growth of the local economy under siege had left the new administration with a bare fiscal cupboard. Indeed, incoming minister Mac Maharaj, a confidant [...]
