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 [...]
The late US Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, popularised the "Pottery Barn rule" - named after the American chain store, as a guide to political consequences for strategic decisions, both taken and avoided. It went along the lines of "if you break it, you fix it; if you break it, you own it". This [...]
Understandably two sections in the contentious Basic Education Laws Amendment Act relating, respectively, to mother tongue education and schools' rights to set admission policy have sucked most of the oxygen out of the debate on this controversial legislation. There is a lot at stake here, including removing such decisions from the remit of school bodies [...]
Every day, in the choices we make or don't select, we display a degree of dualism or opposing ideas jostling for our attention and selection. Poetically, Walt Whitman's 1892 epic poem on the human condition, "Song of Myself", summed this up neatly: "Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/ (I am large, I [...]
When Donald J Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president on 20 January 2017, he delivered a dystopian speech on the state of his nation, summarised as "American Carnage". Leaving that event, George W Bush, the 43rd president and last Republican to hold that office before Trump, remarked on his successor's oration: "That was some weird s..t." [...]
I hope that the new government of national unity (GNU) both endures and delivers real change in the lives of many citizens. As one Cabinet minister expressed to me recently, the answer to estimates on its longevity is summed up in the acronym TINA (there is no alternative). Of course, his sentiment is sound, even [...]
"The butterfly effect" explains how a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon triggers a massive storm across Europe. As John Gribbin explains the work of meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who first developed this chaos theory: Some systems are very sensitive to their starting conditions, so that a tiny difference in the initial push you give [...]
Consider an alternate history written for the 29 May elections in South Africa. As a work of historical fiction – based on real characters and actual events – it could include these "facts": The DA leader, the largest opposition party, is banned from participating in the poll; the ANC, the governing party, is accorded unfettered [...]
My recent reimmersion into the murky waters of SA politics during the negotiation for the new and very large government of national unity was a reminder of why I quit political leadership in 2007. I have renewed admiration for those who toil at the political grindstone but, politics like acting (and former British prime minister [...]
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writer, and historian, noted in 2018 in the New York Review of Books that "the encrustations of mythologising and hero worship have gone beyond the point that they can be easily corrected". This phenomenon was neatly summarised in a line at the end of the 1962 Hollywood blockbuster movie, The man who shot Liberty Valance: When the legend becomes fact, [...]
