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 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 [...]
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 [...]
"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 [...]
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 [...]
"Retrospective clairvoyance" was the arch phrase of Clive James for the miraculous ability of pundits (me included) to deduce this week an event that was "inevitable" last week, though it was not actually seen as likely at the time. Thus, the sweeping win of Donald Trump last Tuesday has birthed endless analyses of why it [...]
When Donald J Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president on 20 January 2017, he delivered a dystopian speech on the state of his nation, summarised as "American Carnage". Leaving that event, George W Bush, the 43rd president and last Republican to hold that office before Trump, remarked on his successor's oration: "That was some weird s..t." [...]
"The butterfly effect" explains how a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon triggers a massive storm across Europe. As John Gribbin explains the work of meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who first developed this chaos theory: Some systems are very sensitive to their starting conditions, so that a tiny difference in the initial push you give [...]
Consider an alternate history written for the 29 May elections in South Africa. As a work of historical fiction – based on real characters and actual events – it could include these "facts": The DA leader, the largest opposition party, is banned from participating in the poll; the ANC, the governing party, is accorded unfettered [...]
