On Monday , South Africans, wearied and depressed by endless electricity blackouts in the heart of winter, were offered by President Cyril Ramaphosa yet another solution — this time in the form of a “10-point power crisis plan”. Most folk are caught between the hope that this time, against all odds and expectation, the plan [...]
Just hours after President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Monday evening announcement of a “10-point power crisis plan”, educationist and public commentator Jonathan Jansen commissioned an online survey. Jansen asked respondents how confident they were that in respect of the “bold announcements of the president to fix the energy crisis that this time words will become actions?” Of [...]
The death of acclaimed film critic Barry Ronge in early July was a jarring reminder to me of how he held our English 1 class at Wits University spellbound with his wit and articulacy 42 years ago. Ronge’s lecture topic back then was “the theatre of the absurd” — at the time very voguish with its [...]
Writing this column from London amid an intense heatwave, the meltdown in the British Conservative Party offers no end of lessons for politicians and polities everywhere. Last Thursday Boris Johnson’s gravity-defying political survivalism was brought crashing down to earth as he was forcibly ejected — “by the herd”, as he dubbed his Tory colleagues — [...]
“The rest is silence” were the last words of Hamlet shortly before his death and the end of the epic play by William Shakespeare. Could this be the political epitaph for the wounded presidency of Cyril Ramaphosa? Like the Prince of Denmark he is a figure of hesitancy and indecisiveness on one hand and a [...]
At the recent Franschhoek Literary Festival, I watched a fascinating interview with mega-bestselling author (320-million books sold to date) Jeffrey Archer and local radio host John Maytham. The most interesting part of the discussion with the spry-looking 82-year-old author was his description of his daily work routine: at an age when most in his cohort [...]
Meyer Kahn, who died in Johannesburg last week, was described by a close friend and business colleague as “an ordinary man possessed of quite extraordinary abilities”. That handsome tribute to a business leader and former executive chair of SA Breweries, who with CEO Graham Mackay co-piloted SAB (later SABMiller and now merged into AB InBev) [...]
For someone who believes in antique ideologies — from state control of the economy to racial nationalism — Cyril Ramaphosa speaks in very postmodern terms. Postmodernism is the philosophy that there is no scientific or historical truth; and CR certainly peppered his remarks last week on the war in Ukraine with lashings of this concept. [...]
British-American editor and author Tina Brown has just published her new take on the British Royal Family, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — the Truth and the Turmoil, to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee. The irreproachable queen’s third child and most wayward member of the house invited this acidic comment from [...]
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 [...]
