Jacob Zuma

While US stays on top, the bucking horse of the rule of law throws SA off

Famed 19th-century British constitutional scholar AV Dicey is credited with popularising the concept “the rule of law”. Among its core tenets is that no person is above the law or beyond its reach. Subsequent scholarly warnings that the rule of law is an “unruly horse” have received some recent, alarming updates here and beyond these [...]

‘Nonaligned’, ‘pick up the rand’, ‘president’: when words mean fokol

American dissident and writer James Baldwin once noted you can judge the state of a nation’s educational level by the quality of its political speech. By this metric, and on both measures, SA today scores off the charts. Hot on the heels of the global report (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) revealing that 81% [...]

As we teeter on the brink of the abyss, the silence of big business is deafening

The cavalcade of chaos and crises confronting South Africa right now, with electricity outages a daily grim reminder of our failing state, is probably an excellent moment to roll out the tattered red carpet in Pretoria for the visiting representative of an even more failed enterprise than our own: Russia. The presence in our capital [...]

OK, now for the 10-point credibility plan, Mr President

Just hours after President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Monday evening announcement of a “10-point power crisis plan”, educationist and public commentator Jonathan Jansen commissioned an online survey. Jansen asked respondents how confident they were that in respect of the “bold announcements of the president to fix the energy crisis that this time words will become actions?” Of [...]

Waiting for Ramaphosa goes from Phala Phala party to a black Christmas

The death of acclaimed film critic Barry Ronge in early July was a jarring reminder to me of how he held our English 1 class at Wits University spellbound with his wit and articulacy 42 years ago. Ronge’s lecture topic back then was “the theatre of the absurd” — at the time very voguish with its [...]

Cyril the Silent is reminiscent of National Party ‘reformists’ during apartheid

“The rest is silence” were the last words of Hamlet shortly before his death and the end of the epic play by William Shakespeare. Could this be the political  epitaph for the wounded presidency of Cyril Ramaphosa? Like the Prince of Denmark he is a figure of hesitancy and indecisiveness on one hand and a [...]

There’s more chance of seeing the Easter bunny than relief funds reaching victims

This past weekend saw Christians and Jews celebrate Easter and Passover respectively, two of the principal holidays in both religions’ calendars. Easter of course is the post-crucifixion celebration of the miracle of the resurrection, while Passover celebrates the exodus from the enslavement of pharaoh in ancient Egypt, delivered in part by God visiting 10 deadly [...]

Magnitsky Acts kick in as sanctions against Russia echo apartheid boycott

Just on six years ago, in the depths of the Jacob Zuma era and the ANC’s state capture project, I wrote a column highlighting two powerful phrases originating from South America that had been applied to the kleptocracy emerging in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Both also applied, with interest, to the state of Zuma’s capture of [...]

By |2022-04-11T06:35:15+00:00April 11th, 2022|Jacob Zuma, Russian War, Vladimir Putin, World Politics|0 Comments

SA’s politicians quite simply don’t have enough ‘skin in the game’ to care

Lebanese American polymath Nassim Nicholas Taleb has gifted the world with imperishable ideas wrapped in memorable metaphors. In 2007 he published his ground-breaking book The Black Swan which illustrated the chaos caused by unpredictable, unprecedented events occurring outside the range of predictive probabilities bringing severe consequences in their wake. Some years before its publication, the late US [...]

Power of the courts prevail against SA’s once-most-powerful citizen

“This is the way the world ends”, TS Eliot wrote at the conclusion of his 1925 poem The Hollow Men, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” An apt epigraph for how the Nkandla stand-off ended late on Wednesday evening as Jacob Zuma was arrested and sped off to spend his first night incarcerated. No insurrection, [...]

By |2021-07-09T11:48:49+00:00July 9th, 2021|African National Congress (ANC), Jacob Zuma|0 Comments
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