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 [...]
Are some countries simply unreformable? This bleak, pre-festive season thought occurs just as Eskom, in the guise of the movie villain The Grinch who Stole Christmas, plunges the country once again into December darkness. Before interrogating some of the known facts hobbling Megawatt Park, it is quite unknown if Cyril Ramaphosa is a serious reformer, [...]
The Ramaphosa presidency is an infant –four months old, and –voters, party, and health willing – still with around 4000 days to go. Hans Rosling, an acclaimed Swedish statistician and professor of international health who died recently, penned Factfulness, a book which objectively seeks to rebut the global pessimism on the world condition and ‘why [...]
The opening weekend of the Fifa World Cup produced no end of surprises, if Eskom load shedding allowed you to view the spectacle. The country of my second allegiance, Argentina (given Bafana’s dismal non-qualification, my home team as it were), was held to an improbable draw by tiny Iceland, which in population terms (337,000 versus [...]
True load-shedding would involve the ANC dumping the dead wood of clueless cadres. Is it a contradiction, in these darkened days and nights of load-shedding, to have a light-bulb moment? Actually, you can - especially if you live, as I do, in the southern suburbs of Cape Town. And this has nothing to do with [...]
