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 [...]
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 [...]
“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, [...]
In my new book, Future Tense - Reflections on My Troubled Land, a chapter entitled "Rogue Diplomats" deals with a certain breed of our ambassadors - a fairly long and depressing list of eminences and excellencies who were brought home after their shenanigans here rendered moot their diplomatic functioning overseas. On the list is our one-time [...]
I was in New York the day after the November 2004 US presidential election. George W Bush’s re-election — by a far wider margin than the polls had predicted — was of immediate interest. However, it was a column by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof, published that day in the New York Times, that set out for [...]
At first blush, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu and our dethroned former president, Jacob Zuma, have zero in common. The one presides over one of the most successful economies in the world, the other drove ours into a ditch. Zuma is a staunch ally of the Palestinian cause; Netanyahu has made a career out [...]
“Never make predictions, least of all about the future,” was the wise advice of Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn. The same might be said of political slogans and phrases, some of which barely survive contact with the real world. As Theresa May limps through her last days as prime minister of Great Britain, and the fight [...]
More than 250 years ago the second US president offered a slice of wisdom that might just resonate this week with SA’s fifth democratic president. It certainly informs the praise and criticism of Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration, now less than a month old. In 1770, John Adams, arguing in defence of soldiers in the Boston massacre, [...]
But there are some early and welcome signs that his presidency will find ways to deal with it Last Wednesday, on the flight back to Cape Town from Johannesburg – the tail end of a long haul journey which commenced two days before in Sydney, Australia – I bumped into an old political acquaintance. Pravin Gordhan, [...]
FW de Klerk once said, “Australia’s greatest problem is that it has no great problem- nobody can say that about South Africa.” While South Africa in the past few days lived up to VI Lenin’s aphorism ‘there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen ‘– I found myself faraway “Down Under”. I [...]
