In 1981, a young Roman law lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand left the faculty to go to Oxford University as a Vinerian Scholar. This most prestigious legal scholarship is awarded by one of the most prestigious universities in the world "for the best performance in the degree Bachelor of Civil Laws". Only four [...]
Big investor selloff; huge currency decline against the US dollar; a reformist leader hemmed in by populist and corrupt rivals; the former president uses the head of state’s difficulties to launch their fightback; a resource-rich economy is trapped in negative sentiment and low growth and unemployment and poverty ticks upward. If this looks depressingly familiar [...]
Three discrete encounters in Johannesburg recently reinforced the singular, stark economic darkness that now clouds the hype and hope of the Cyril Ramaphosa “new dawn”. First off, I listened to an acute analysis on the essential problem with our economy and its misdiagnosis by the governing ANC. Moeletsi Mbeki — an analyst of our political [...]
There is the famous story of the British admiral, Lord Nelson, who, when his commander-in-chief tried to signal him to retreat during the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, placed his telescope into his blind eye. Something very similar is going on right now at our moment of national economic peril and our president’s wilful blindness [...]
