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 [...]
The recent arrests of Prince Andrew and President Yoon, along with a US Supreme Court ruling against Trump, signal a global reassertion of the rule of law. Tony Leon reflects whether it is a similar case in South Africa. “That Was the Week That Was”, the title of a 1960s British satirical revue, sprang vividly [...]
Just as a National Party minister’s comment about pensioners surviving on R20 a month helped trigger the party’s 1981 electoral decline, today’s ANC leaders are making similarly tone-deaf remarks – from booking hotel baths during water shortages to claiming hospital patients choose to sleep on floors. This could prove electorally disastrous for a party now [...]
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 [...]
South Africa’s foreign ministry has squandered the diplomatic capital built during the Mandela era, replacing strategic thinking with impulsive gestures and transforming the country from a respected global mediator into an increasingly isolated fringe player, writes Tony Leon. It’s a stretch to use words and phrases such as “thoughtful” or “long-term strategy” or even “principled consistency” [...]
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 [...]
Former DA leader Tony Leon argues the party faces an existential identity crisis as it navigates between its historic role as effective opposition and its current position as part of the GNU, with its upcoming congress serving as a crucial moment to determine whether the party has been “muzzled” by the ANC or can leverage its [...]
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 [...]
With the rules-based order in retreat, Tony Leon argues SA’s hard-won impeccable moral authority has been squandered once too often. Just as well, given the extraordinary, arguably extra-legal, events over the weekend in Caracas, that South Africa’s ambassador to Venezuela, Lindiwe Maeko, maintained a judicious silence (thus far). Had her predecessor, Ambassador Joseph Nkosi (now in Chad), [...]
