It was Gauntlett, apparently, who determined that, in order to save Zuma legally, he would have to wound him politically Long ago when British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was under political siege, he shrugged off cascading crises around him with the phrase, “A week is a long time in politics.‘‘ Decades later, when Conservative cabinet [...]
Iowa is very different from the rest of the US. With an ever-shrinking white majority in the country as a whole, this state is over 91% pale On Tuesday when you found all your DStv news channels clogged with news from Iowa, blame it on a largely unknown former governor of the US state of [...]
Thabo Mbeki’s detractors await his defence of real areas of controversy around his rule — literally the A to Z, from AIDS to Zimbabwe, writes Tony Leon BACK at the dawn of the last century, readers of The Strand Magazine in London lined up in droves to buy the next instalment of the latest Sherlock [...]
“The obligatory optimism of a socialist society”. That was the working description penned, years back, by Albanian prize winning author Ismail Kadare on life and literature under the tyrant’s heel of the ultra-authoritarian Enver Hoxha. Just last week, here at home and at the start of our twenty first year of constitutional democracy, we received [...]
Mashaba practises the old-fashioned method of “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” Who benefited from Jacob Zuma‘s extraordinary, still unexplained, decision to go through three finance ministers in five days in mid-December? Apart from the market mavens and/or financial gamblers who shorted the rand, we received at least one answer on the upside in [...]
IN FOUR days of market turmoil, political crisis and apocalyptic moments, there were ironies aplenty, alongside a lot of gallows humour. Born-again Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan personifies the greatest of them. In a matter of days, he has replaced the shortest-lived and weakest finance minister in the country’s history, Desmond van Rooyen, to become the [...]
No good blaming PW or apartheid for this unhappy mess, it is of far more recent origin and largely self-created South Africa, as it ends 2015, a year we would probably rather forget, faces an economic crisis as serious as the political train wreck of 30 years ago, in 1985. Then President PW Botha famously [...]
Contrary to the popular song by Andrew Lloyd Webber, there has been much to cry about in Argentina. Bad economics, worse governance and a populist president are three headline-grabbers from across the South Atlantic. President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner gave, figuratively, the middle finger to international investors and did in Spanish over there from a position [...]
So much wealth and wellbeing was squandered by bad governance and even worse economic policies THIS month three years ago I had an interesting encounter with one of the most senior members of our government. I had just returned from my stint as SA ambassador to Argentina, and I was asked for my views on [...]
"Populism flourishes on conspiracy theories, conjuring up sinister forces seeking to undermine people’s interests" IN AN essay published in late September in The New York Review of Books entitled "Fear", US novelist Marilynne Robinson accused certain extremist strands in contemporary American Christianity of being "unchristian" in that they peddle a noxious cocktail of "ignorance, intolerance [...]
