In my new book, Future Tense - Reflections on My Troubled Land, a chapter entitled "Rogue Diplomats" deals with a certain breed of our ambassadors - a fairly long and depressing list of eminences and excellencies who were brought home after their shenanigans here rendered moot their diplomatic functioning overseas. On the list is our one-time [...]
Next month my new book, Future Tense — Reflections on my Troubled Land, will hit the bookshelves here. There was one potential problem in crafting this effort, beyond the agonies of the creative process in general. Writing the book during the first coronavirus lockdown in 2020, beyond the intimations of mortality it induced in us all, posed [...]
I was in New York the day after the November 2004 US presidential election. George W Bush’s re-election — by a far wider margin than the polls had predicted — was of immediate interest. However, it was a column by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof, published that day in the New York Times, that set out for [...]
Cyril Ramaphosa’s day on Monday was appreciably better than the ones preceding it. He could go on national television, the risibly termed “family conversation’” as a late day Father Christmas. He was flushed with excitement after his visit to Johannesburg Airport to receive a million batches (a small fraction of our need) of the long [...]
January 26 revealed stark contrasts for two nationalist leaders as their countries and the world enter the second of perhaps endless years of the coronavirus pandemic. However, there was something a little arch about African nationalist Cyril Ramaphosa’s virtual appearance that day at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Davos Dialogues. He railed against what he [...]
It’s one of life’s cosmic mysteries. How did SA — amid the virulent deadly second wave of the coronavirus — manage not to have a comprehensive vaccine procurement and rollout plan? On Thursday, health minister Zweli Mkhize announced a “breakthrough” in securing 1.5-million doses of the Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine from India. But the brutal truth [...]
Watching, online, the moving memorial service at Wits in tribute to its late academic leader and latter-day parliamentarian, Belinda Bozzoli, induced an element of time travel. It was 1978 and Bozzoli, my Industrial Relations 1 lecturer, was at the time the most radical (and feminist) person in authority I had yet encountered. It was not, [...]
“Putting the moron into oxymoron” struck me as the right lens to view the latest restrictions and beach closures announced on Monday by President Cyril Ramaphosa. Still, he is the messenger — here and in so many instances — for the whims, prejudices, non-scientific and often evidence-free diktats of co-operative governance and traditional affairs (Cogta) [...]
In a now vanished age, May 2010, I went to the movies on a Saturday evening in Recoleta, Buenos Aires. The upmarket Cine Village multiplex attracted an audience of well-heeled Portenos (locals of the city) and resident diplomats such as me. Before the main feature, a cheesy commercial for a local insurance company was screened. [...]
Tuesday’s Business Day newspaper had a tableau of front page stories which threaded together a useful guideline of the state we are in and, more precisely, the state of the state itself. The Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) Commission is hunting down the blackness or otherwise of leading empowerment vehicles, which apparently, courtesy of the [...]
