French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once mused: "If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat." This thought is useful to interrogate the recent flurry of announcements from President Cyril Ramaphosa. A win? Start with the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act (BELA) "win" of mid-December 2024. On the day of [...]
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 [...]
In 1908, Winston Churchill was first appointed to the British cabinet. He would go on to star at the centre of power, on and off, for another 50 years. Later, recalling his first summons to high office by Prime Minister HH Asquith, he wrote: "When offering me Cabinet office in his government in 1908, he [...]
Was it the heat in Thabazimbi on Sunday or, perhaps, he was stung when his party provincial secretary in KwaZulu-Natal labelled him "weak"? Whatever the cause, by the usual "aural valium" standard of many of Cyril Ramaphosa's remarks, his attack on the process which led to a settlement of the contentious Basic Education Laws Amendment [...]
According to a survey of historical scholars published by US News and World Report, American President Warren G Harding (29th president 1921-1923) was rated the sixth worst since the office was established in 1789 by founding father George Washington (rated third best). Harding had many strikes against him during his short tenure, but one of [...]
https://youtu.be/yr593l7apNI
"Retrospective clairvoyance" was the arch phrase of Clive James for the miraculous ability of pundits (me included) to deduce this week an event that was "inevitable" last week, though it was not actually seen as likely at the time. Thus, the sweeping win of Donald Trump last Tuesday has birthed endless analyses of why it [...]
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 [...]
On Saturday evening, I attended a private dinner at the Cape Town residence of one of the new members of the GNU cabinet. There was nothing unusual about the event - the host and guests were old friends, politically close and each had played some role in forming SA’s first genuine coalition cabinet. It is [...]
A search of South African government websites for an expression of sympathy on the weekend assassination of six civilian hostages, who were killed by Hamas under the tunnels of Rafah in Gaza, yields a nil return. Cogent explanations for the dearth of empathy - or its partial application - must go beyond the normal claims of [...]
