While Cyril Ramaphosa traded shame and fury in Parliament over SA’s jobs catastrophe, three of the world’s foremost historians gathered in Franschhoek to offer the kind of honest reckoning our leaders refuse to have with themselves, writes Tony Leon. Two sobering insights were offered last week on the state of SA Inc. Last Tuesday, the Quarterly [...]
Two leaders, two continents, one embattled defiance – Keir Starmer and Cyril Ramaphosa are clinging to power, but while Britain’s crisis is political, South Africa’s cuts far deeper, writes Tony Leon. “When the herd moves, it moves,” Boris Johnson ruefully remarked when his Conservative Party forced his exit as UK prime minister in July 2022, just two [...]
On the 30th anniversary of South Africa’s Constitution, a UCT lecture reflecting on the country’s dwindling Jewish minority offers a telling measure of whether the constitutional promise of minority rights – made in Parliament on 8 May 1996 – is being honoured for all South Africans, writes Tony Leon. In places and events, both obvious and [...]
Tony Leon examines how newly appointed South African ambassador Roelf Meyer faces the near-impossible task of reconciling South Africa’s racial transformation policies with Donald Trump’s administration’s fierce opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. Consequences will follow the appointment of Roelf Meyer by President Cyril Ramaphosa as SA ambassador to the US. Though one of them [...]
Israel’s journey from David Ben-Gurion’s founding vision of being a “light to the nations” to Itamar Ben-Gvir’s controversial death penalty bill targeting Palestinians has sparked unprecedented opposition from Jewish diaspora communities who fear the country’s democratic foundations are being eroded by extremist politics, writes Tony Leon. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the State of [...]
While R1.5 trillion has been promised at President Cyril Ramaphosa’s investment conference, South Africa’s actual capital formation has plummeted from 20 to 14% of GDP, suggesting that real investment – like Natie Kirsh’s R500 billion business empire built in America – requires genuine structural reforms and competitive markets, not just pledges, writes Tony Leon. “Cyril loves [...]
The ANC’s rose-tinted view of its struggle-era alliances is preventing South Africa from learning the hard lessons that could actually liberate its people from unemployment and institutional decay, writes Tony Leon. For devout Hindus, the waters of the River Ganges cleanse believers of sin and help achieve liberation (moksha). In the secular South African realm, the [...]
South Africa’s foreign ministry has squandered the diplomatic capital built during the Mandela era, replacing strategic thinking with impulsive gestures and transforming the country from a respected global mediator into an increasingly isolated fringe player, writes Tony Leon. It’s a stretch to use words and phrases such as “thoughtful” or “long-term strategy” or even “principled consistency” [...]
Drawing on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos call for nations to stop “living the lie,” Tony Leon reflects on South Africa’s contradictions between sovereignty rhetoric and reality – from outsourcing naval exercises to China while claiming independence, to sliding from the world’s top gold producer to 12th place despite record prices. Last year, on a [...]
With the rules-based order in retreat, Tony Leon argues SA’s hard-won impeccable moral authority has been squandered once too often. Just as well, given the extraordinary, arguably extra-legal, events over the weekend in Caracas, that South Africa’s ambassador to Venezuela, Lindiwe Maeko, maintained a judicious silence (thus far). Had her predecessor, Ambassador Joseph Nkosi (now in Chad), [...]
