Gaslighting - which derives its name from a popular 1930’s movie - is a psychological condition denoting a "form of emotional manipulation in which a person aims to have the victim question their judgement, perception and sense of reality by deliberately and systematically feeding false information". In turn, this leads - for the target of [...]
How does an ambassador navigate his way when sent to a country led by a protocol-busting, hard-charging populist and protectionist who ransacks state institutions, tears up international trade agreements and announces, at their inauguration, "we must not import a single nail"? This was precisely the situation I found myself in circa 2009 when I was [...]
Kaput. That's one German word which has migrated into common English usage. It's defined as "ruined, broken, or not functioning". And it fits a lot of things here and in the world right now. Wednesday afternoon's budget, assuming there is one, will reveal the ruin in our public finances; the chronic missed growth, fiscal and revenue [...]
More than 240 years back, when there was an actual war of arms, not words, between America and a European power, famous Scottish economist, Adam Smith, received an alarmist letter from a young MP. British parliamentarian John Sinclair wrote to Smith: "If we go on at this rate, the nation must be ruined (the author emphasising this [...]
Imagine a democratic country where members of the governing party called each other "Comrade"; where its Cabinet members were split between democratic centrists and socialist ideologues. Its high-spending government presided over a low-growth, high-unemployment economy, and it faced headwinds from being over-borrowed in a weakening currency and from external foreign shocks over which it had [...]
"Talk is cheap, money buys the whiskey" is a true and informed adage. And this does not refer to the rise in "sin taxes" on booze likely to be introduced on Wednesday afternoon when Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana unveils his budget in Parliament. Instead, it applies to the cheap talk from various politicians. SA "will not [...]
Eminent American historian Timothy Snyder wrote in the introduction to his short book On Tyranny, "History does not repeat itself but it does instruct." The subtitle of his work, Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, is helpful in navigating the current crisis which has engulfed SA-US relations, now at their worst point since 1986. In I986, the [...]
"Trump derangement syndrome" is a political condition whose etymology is traced to the late conservative commentator and psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer. He defined it, first in respect of another Republican president, George W. Bush, as "the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency - nay – the very [...]
The well-known jurist, Mr Justice Fikile Mbalula, has rendered judgment. Opining from the X (previously Twitter) division of the High Court on Monday, in the matter of a contractual dispute between two parties (Cyril Ramaphosa in his capacity as president of SA, and John Steenhuisen, on behalf of the DA), Mbalula J., held: "Clause 19 does [...]
Does South Africa and its government have a growth strategy? This simple but fundamental question consists, of course, of two parts. And no easy answers. First the "growth" part. Libraries of books and gridfuls of electrons underline why economic growth is the fundamental basis for all other arenas of public goods, from human upliftment (and its [...]
