When the economy is spluttering at 1% growth it is time to put on the hair shirt, not to go on a drinking binge Visionary leadership is much commented on these days precisely because of its absence. It has almost disappeared from public life and politics, here and everywhere. When you think of Winston Churchill [...]
Two versions of her speech at Gibs, in text and orally, show little regard for dire state of public accounts. Presidential hopeful Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s recent speech at a high citadel of capitalism — the Gordon Institute for Business Science — caused much controversy. In her actual remarks Dlamini-Zuma bemoaned the "dissonance" between the government and [...]
Our security services and minister are fast friends with their Russian counterparts. Just on Monday the two countries signed a co-operation agreement on "cyber security" The Sherlock Holmes story The Silver Blaze gave us the famous tagline of "the curious incident of the dog in the night". The curiosity in that tale of the kidnapping [...]
'South Africa is the Mugabes' destination of choice for depositing wayward sons and for minor shopping needs and medical procedures' Be graceful for small mercies, to adapt a phrase. Two Sundays ago 20-year-old Gabriella Engels was, along with two other unnamed women, allegedly assaulted by Zimbabwe's Grace Mugabe. In the presence of the Zim power [...]
'South Africa is the Mugabes' destination of choice for depositing wayward sons and for minor shopping needs and medical procedures' Be graceful for small mercies, to adapt a phrase. Two Sundays ago 20-year-old Gabriella Engels was, along with two other unnamed women, allegedly assaulted by Zimbabwe's Grace Mugabe. In the presence of the Zim power [...]
President’s enemies in the ANC probably decided not to hand opposition parties the gift of an indebted leader Like pupils at a Montessori School, all the dramatis personae in last week’s long-running parliamentary no-confidence saga — the eighth such motion to date in an eight-year presidency — against Jacob Zuma could award themselves a gold [...]
Meanwhile, Putin reduces the reputations of Zuma’s SA and Trump's US to the level of his kleptocratic regime About 120 years ago, my paternal grandmother, Tamara Drusinsky – then a babe in arms – left Russia for Constantinople, and eventually arrived with her family in SA More recently, when President Vladimir Putin visited Parliament in [...]
For students of American politics, there are at least three reasons to remember the late U.S. Senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater. First, as the Republican presidential nominee back in 1964 he posted one of the most catastrophic losses in modern American politics. Incumbent president Lyndon Johnson demolished him by the extraordinary margin of 22.58% of [...]
US President Donald Trump has strong local competition for the award which columnist David Brooks recently bestowed on him. He declared that the erratic leader of the free world as ‘ the all-time record holder of the Dunning-Kruger effect.’ In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger – two academic psychologists at Cornell University – described [...]
'Present at the Creation' was the title of US Secretary of State Dean Acheson's autobiography. As the US's chief diplomat between 1949 and 1953, he inaugurated and witnessed key events that shaped our world after the end of the war against Hitler and the commencement of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet [...]
