Some years back I was invited to Emperors Palace, Kempton Park, to address a business conference. It took prodigious feats of imagination to remember that this glitzy casino had, in its previous life as the jerry-built and misnamed “World Trade Centre,” been the venue for the constitutional negotiations which birthed a democratic South Africa. Outside [...]
Three recent events compel attention and suggest the narrow path South Africa treads between possible salvation and collapse. We don’t have the luxury to follow advice from Yogi Berra, the famed US baseball catcher, who said: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Two of the events occurred on the same [...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnimqiRSxgs
The comparisons between FW de Klerk, the last white president of SA and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, are striking beyond their roles as “midwives from tyranny to a new politics”. This is what British politician and veteran anti-apartheid campaigner Peter Hain writes in his obituary for De Klerk, who died aged 85 in [...]
FW de Klerk’s death last week saw an explosion of commentary, with gazillions of electrons and acres of newsprint exhausted on his contested legacy. It all traces back to one fateful day nearly 32 years ago. At about 1pm on Friday, February 2 1990, then co-leader of the now-vanished Democratic Party (DP) Wynand Malan hosted [...]
FW de Klerk shaped many of the country's recent political contours. Yet like the proverbial prophet, by November 2019 on the afternoon of our last get-together, he enjoyed little honour in his own land. On the one hand, he was reviled by the governing party for being the "last apartheid president". He was also, to [...]
To mark the 30th anniversary of FW de Klerk’s earth-shaking speech to parliament on February 2 1990, veteran journalist Tim du Plessis sent me an inquiry. “Can you describe”, he asked, “where you were and what you felt when you heard the news?” My answer – on the one speech ever delivered in parliament which [...]
Parliament's approval of land expropriation without compensation could set SA on a slippery slope while Theresa May's Brexit nightmare continues Is SA, inexorably, on the slide-path to a destination named Venezuela or Zimbabwe? On Tuesday, this parallel was top of mind for some when parliament voted — after just 86 minutes of debate — to adopt [...]
Having ascended to the second-most-important job in politics, he should contemplate this Ratings agencies, taxpayers, investors and hard-pressed consumers will focus laser-attention on the pronouncements of new finance minister Tito Mboweni when he delivers his “maiden” mini-budget speech in parliament this afternoon. But there is nothing virginal about Mboweni’s cabinet status. He returns to the [...]
Unlikely a place as England might be for a political earthquake, it is perhaps the setting for a great unravelling In July 1961, in London's West End, a new musical play debuted to critical and commercial success. Entitled Stop the World - I Want to Get Off , it was set in a circus. Last [...]
