Guardian journalist John Crace coined the killer phrase “aural valium” to describe the desperate-sounding, essentially misplaced, and meaningless, optimism of besieged British prime minister Rishi Sunak. Last Thursday, Sunak’s Conservative Party lost two heartland constituencies to resurgent Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates respectively, suggesting the Tories are on course to a sweeping defeat in next [...]
Headline articles in two influential British newspapers encapsulated the contradictions in the SA story: its boundless promise in one and its disastrous profile in another. One of the most popular UK broadsheets (read serious) newspapers, The Daily Telegraph, published its latest travel awards based on the votes of its readers. SA came out tops as [...]
There will be a lot on the agenda during this week’s visit to Pretoria of German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock. It is worth noting that last February when Russia launched its disastrous invasion of Ukraine, Bearbock’s boss, German chancellor, Olaf Scholtz, described the event as Zettenwende or “a changing of the times”. And in the 17 intervening [...]
Never underestimate the electoral hay ultranationalist leaders harvest by attacking “the West” when their at-risk regimes are imperilled. I recall November 1977 when I was a first-year student at Wits University, observing hardline nationalist prime minister John Vorster deliver a furious speech at the Film Trust Arena in Johannesburg on the eve of the white [...]
I arrived in London on Tuesday, the day of a political revolution. Not that any observer would have noticed from the apparent autumnal normalcy of the bustling UK capital, abuzz with busy shoppers, snarled traffic and crisp weather. But it was a day of extraordinary change. Out went Liz Truss, the shortest serving and most [...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnimqiRSxgs
Business Day’s recent front-page lead story might have tricked some readers into imagining they had stumbled back into a pre-Jurassic political age (“Job reservation is on the cards, government confirms”, February 13). The headline topped an article detailing neither a paean to Pan-Africanism nor a decent stab at promoting the country’s economic wellbeing. Rather it [...]
On the logic that jackals are the best guardians of chickens, this week the minister of small business development, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, offered a stern warning on her website. “As government we have a responsibility to enforce regulatory compliance in the SMME [small, medium and micro enterprise] sector and close businesses that are trading illegally,” she [...]
In 1918, American financial titan and international statesman Bernard Baruch riposted that “anyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts”. More than a century later, in a country and world and corroded social media universe where facts, conjecture, falsehoods and opinions (often unhinged or tethered to an alternative reality) all [...]
There is a delicious irony at the heart of the controversy generated by the half-baked intellectually dubious drivel dished up recently by tourism minister Lindiwe Sisulu. Unless you have been hiding under a rock you will be aware that Sisulu took aim in an IOL jeremiad against her own government, in which she has continuously [...]
