Reading director general of government communications Phumla Williams’s defence of SA’s desirability as an “investment destination of choice” reminded me of the rejoinder of Upton Sinclair. In 1935 this American Pulitzer Prize-winning author and political activist wrote: “It is difficult to get a person to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding [...]
Workers Day, May 1 2022, offered South Africans sharply contrasting images of President Cyril Ramaphosa and leader of the official opposition John Steenhuisen. Ramaphosa had a double indignity heaped on him at a rally at Royal Bafokeng Stadium in Rustenburg, North West. The obvious injury to presidential pride was his forced removal from the keynote [...]
Today, barring a huge upset, Emmanuel Macron will be re-elected president of France. However, if polling was always accurate President Hillary Clinton would be in her second term in the US and the UK would be still a leading member of the EU. The election in France revolves in part on how toxic the embrace [...]
Are you an optimist or a declinist? Or to use the old cliché, do you see the bottle as half full or half empty. The lens we use to view events can inform our decisions. That, at any rate, is the view of SA’s economic cheerleader, Adrian Gore, founder and head of the Discovery medical [...]
On February 24, when Vladimir Putin rolled his tanks into Ukraine and violently breached the sovereign border and territorial integrity of an independent state, I received a message from a friend. “Mark this date,” it read. “Today, like 9/11, something profoundly shifted in the world and its consequences will be huge.” Writing in the Financial Times [...]
I rubbed my eyes when scanning Monday’s weekly newsletter by Cyril Ramaphosa -thinking perhaps I had mistakenly chanced upon the English version of Pravda or Izvestia. Ramaphosa and his “comrades” might lash out at DStv for cutting us off – one of the very small mercies from the merciless Ukraine war — from the beam of Kremlin propaganda [...]
Russia drove its tanks and fired its missiles over the international rule book this week and launched an unprovoked attack on neighbouring Ukraine, unleashing a new war in Europe. Who wins the award for the most fatuous and fantastical depiction of the now red-hot Cold War? It is an overcrowded field, but the clear winner [...]
Lebanese American polymath Nassim Nicholas Taleb has gifted the world with imperishable ideas wrapped in memorable metaphors. In 2007 he published his ground-breaking book The Black Swan which illustrated the chaos caused by unpredictable, unprecedented events occurring outside the range of predictive probabilities bringing severe consequences in their wake. Some years before its publication, the late US [...]
In the 2016 US presidential election, American satirist and mainstream conservative PJ O’Rourke endorsed Hillary Clinton with a magnificent backhander: “I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It’s the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she’s way behind in second place. She’s wrong about absolutely everything, [...]
“As by fire” is the evocative phrase from the New Testament book of 1 Corinthians, which was recently used by Jonathan Jansen as title for his apocalyptic take on the “end of the South African university”. When fires swept through the houses of parliament on January 2, I had many thoughts — literary, historical and [...]
