As Colin Eglin's centenary passes unnoticed, Paul Mashatile employs Trumpian tactics to undermine institutions others built. The contrast is stark, writes Tony Leon, from principled constitutional craftsmanship to power-hungry opportunism masquerading as progress. Monday, 14 April 2025, marked the centenary of the birth of Colin Eglin. Both this anniversary and the man himself are mostly [...]
In an act of conspicuous national self-destruction, the ANC has set the scene for the ejection of the DA from the GNU, writes Tony Leon. Circa 1899, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, developed the idea of "screen memory". This suggested that one memory can function to hide another, typically, unconscious mental content. Perhaps only psychologists [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
A core task of an ambassador is to put the best gloss abroad on challenging aspects on the home front. True to this idea, on the eve of his departure to the United States as ambassador-designate, Ebrahim Rasool said of the fragile GNU here, and the exclusion of Jacob Zuma's MK Party from it: "There [...]
https://youtu.be/yr593l7apNI
For 29 days in June, South Africa was gripped by a political drama. eNCA goes behind closed doors to uncover the make-or-break moments that forged the government of national unity. https://www.enca.com/shows/29-days-june-annika-larsen-special-report
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." [...]
