We learnt this week that the South African minister of communications can’t pin the city of Geneva in the state of Switzerland. But what of the state of our own nation as the government displays as many fractures as an orthopaedic ward? In parliament, DA leader John Steenhuisen asked President Cyril Ramaphosa to put country [...]
In 1966, as the US escalated its involvement in the Vietnam War, beleaguered president Lyndon Johnson and his administration denied the surge. Congressman (and later president) Gerald Ford coined the phrase “credibility gap” — the discrepancy between what a politician claims to be the case and the facts of the matter. Columnist Walter Lippmann suggested this [...]
In his famous 1928 dissenting opinion in Olmstead vs United States, US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis offered a warning to freedom-lovers everywhere. He wrote: “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their [...]
This week’s medium-term budget policy statement (MTBPS) is the grimmest and most difficult in a generation. There’s the revenue shortfall, anticipated at about R50bn. The convenient — though perfectly valid — explanation for this huge undershoot is the internal sabotage at the SA Revenue Service by Tom Moyane and his merry men and women. The less [...]
There is a long, ever-lengthening, list of SA-originating business leaders who have achieved huge success and had high impact in boardrooms and markets across the world. Elon Musk and Roelof Botha in the hi-tech field in California (and even outer space in the case of the former); Ivan Glasenberg and Mick Davis in the world [...]
SA’s longest-serving leader of the opposition, Sir de Villiers Graaff, had a handy solution to the numerous crises faced by his United Party. “When in doubt, Div would appoint a committee,” one of his confidantes once told me. That worked until it didn’t and the UP dissolved itself, appropriately perhaps, on a Johannesburg ice rink [...]
Did Cyril Ramaphosa morph in the past few days from Teflon Man - to whom nothing sticks - to Mr Velcro, to whom every stain attaches? Certainly, Bosasa is proving very sticky, and, given the sticky fingers of Gavin Watson and his gang who built their business on corrupting state tenders, that is entirely apt. [...]
A few weeks ago, after a family commemoration, I was sitting at a restaurant in Durban North, the suburb where I was born decades ago. I noticed that our Greek taverna was situated on the corner of Swapo Road and Adelaide Tambo Avenue, neither name immediately evocative for this English-Indian-Zulu suburb. One of our guests [...]
Karl Lagerfeld, the fashion genius at the house of Chanel who died this week in Paris, was described by a peer as "the creator of dreams". Whoever conceived the 2019 ANC election slogan, however, must be living a nightmare right now. To quote the party billboard: "The Power is in Your Hands - Grow SA". [...]
Thursday is the most downcast budget day since the arrival of the ANC in government in 1994. Back then, the international isolation of the departing apartheid regime coupled with the minus growth of the local economy under siege had left the new administration with a bare fiscal cupboard. Indeed, incoming minister Mac Maharaj, a confidant [...]
