While South Africa faces xenophobic blowback from its African neighbours, the ANC’s Nomvula Mokonyane spent Africa Day in Moscow – a telling snapshot of a party whose foreign policy is mired in Cold War nostalgia, writes Tony Leon. Nomvula Mokonyane, ANC deputy secretary-general, fronts the party’s foreign policy and heads its international engagements. This week on [...]
While Cyril Ramaphosa traded shame and fury in Parliament over SA’s jobs catastrophe, three of the world’s foremost historians gathered in Franschhoek to offer the kind of honest reckoning our leaders refuse to have with themselves, writes Tony Leon. Two sobering insights were offered last week on the state of SA Inc. Last Tuesday, the Quarterly [...]
Tony Leon examines how newly appointed South African ambassador Roelf Meyer faces the near-impossible task of reconciling South Africa’s racial transformation policies with Donald Trump’s administration’s fierce opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. Consequences will follow the appointment of Roelf Meyer by President Cyril Ramaphosa as SA ambassador to the US. Though one of them [...]
While R1.5 trillion has been promised at President Cyril Ramaphosa’s investment conference, South Africa’s actual capital formation has plummeted from 20 to 14% of GDP, suggesting that real investment – like Natie Kirsh’s R500 billion business empire built in America – requires genuine structural reforms and competitive markets, not just pledges, writes Tony Leon. “Cyril loves [...]
News24’s On the Record summit revealed a country heavy on tactics but lacking the strategic vision and political will to make the hard policy trade-offs—from labour market reform to BEE changes—needed to break free from its self-imposed “Bermuda Triangle” of high unemployment, low growth, and scarce investment, writes Tony Leon. Jürgen Habermas, the brave liberal German intellectual, [...]
The ANC’s rose-tinted view of its struggle-era alliances is preventing South Africa from learning the hard lessons that could actually liberate its people from unemployment and institutional decay, writes Tony Leon. For devout Hindus, the waters of the River Ganges cleanse believers of sin and help achieve liberation (moksha). In the secular South African realm, the [...]
The death of scenario planner Clem Sunter prompts Tony Leon to reflect on how South Africa has abandoned strategic thinking for ideological rigidity, backing Iran’s murderous regime while the “Big Gorilla” United States reminds the world where real power lies. Clem Sunter, who died last month, was rightly memorialised as a pioneering thinker who elevated the hopes [...]
Drawing on Boris Johnson’s wisdom about knowing when to leave politics, Tony Leon examines how John Steenhuisen and Helen Zille’s strategic departure creates both electoral opportunities and complex challenges for their successor, who must balance GNU participation with sharpened opposition to the ANC’s policy failures. A long time back, in July 2006, I read an article by [...]
Drawing on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos call for nations to stop “living the lie,” Tony Leon reflects on South Africa’s contradictions between sovereignty rhetoric and reality – from outsourcing naval exercises to China while claiming independence, to sliding from the world’s top gold producer to 12th place despite record prices. Last year, on a [...]
Tony Leon traces a line from the Berlin Wall to Simon’s Town, arguing that South Africa’s choices now side with repression over freedom – risking trade, investment and diplomatic fallout. My late parliamentary colleague Harry Schwarz had a gift for explaining complexity in understandable terms. Many decades after his arrival in 1934 in South Africa [...]
