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 [...]
“As by fire” is the evocative phrase from the New Testament book of 1 Corinthians, which was recently used by Jonathan Jansen as title for his apocalyptic take on the “end of the South African university”. When fires swept through the houses of parliament on January 2, I had many thoughts — literary, historical and [...]
With the decision of Cricket SA to force all Protea players to “take the knee” and Quinton de Kock’s stance not to bend, the issues of free speech and the right of individual dissent now spillover from the Twittersphere to the playing fields. But the issues at the heart of this have a long history, [...]
Why do governments pursue policies contrary to their own interests? That paradoxical question was at the heart of Barbara Tuchman's 1984 popular history, The March of Folly. In her panoptic sweep from the wooden horse at Troy to the quagmire of US folly in Vietnam, she noted: "Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government [...]
Last Thursday, as my column, “Do the ANC’s small disasters signal the large collapse?", for our sister publication Business Day was in the works, I had no idea an event in parliament would provide another example of my thesis. In the Business Day column, I catalogued the serial chapters of ineptitude and crass negligence, from unpaid staff and tax [...]
A millennium or so ago, sometime between the first and second centuries, the Roman poet Juvenal asked a question that resonates now in troubled SA. “Quis custodiet Ipsos custodes?” or “Who will guard the guards themselves?” remains key, especially for a country which, on the one hand, celebrates its constitution and, on the other, finds [...]
Last Thursday, while driving in the English countryside, various authoritative voices on BBC Radio Four provided a counterpoint to the heavy traffic. The topic was, of course, Afghanistan, and the experts speculated that the capital city, Kabul, was in danger of encirclement at some future point, “perhaps even on the anniversary of 9/11”, in view of [...]
There are many reasons to mourn the absence from the public space, and in some of our lives, of Jonathan Ball, the outsize SA publisher who died prematurely of cancer at 69 in early April. Ball was a consummate and brave book publisher, a combination of coruscating wit and curmudgeonly opinions, and a paid-up member [...]
The Venn diagram, where public health imperatives and political needs intersect, is opaque, if not a mess. It is the meeting point between poor policies and arbitrary decisions. South Africans found plenty to justly criticise about government overreach in the 16 months since the country was first placed under lockdown on March 26 2020. The [...]
