On Saturday evening, I attended a private dinner at the Cape Town residence of one of the new members of the GNU cabinet. There was nothing unusual about the event - the host and guests were old friends, politically close and each had played some role in forming SA’s first genuine coalition cabinet. It is [...]
Next month my new book, Future Tense — Reflections on my Troubled Land, will hit the bookshelves here. There was one potential problem in crafting this effort, beyond the agonies of the creative process in general. Writing the book during the first coronavirus lockdown in 2020, beyond the intimations of mortality it induced in us all, posed [...]
In a now vanished age, May 2010, I went to the movies on a Saturday evening in Recoleta, Buenos Aires. The upmarket Cine Village multiplex attracted an audience of well-heeled Portenos (locals of the city) and resident diplomats such as me. Before the main feature, a cheesy commercial for a local insurance company was screened. [...]
Tuesday’s Business Day newspaper had a tableau of front page stories which threaded together a useful guideline of the state we are in and, more precisely, the state of the state itself. The Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) Commission is hunting down the blackness or otherwise of leading empowerment vehicles, which apparently, courtesy of the [...]
In parliament on Wednesday, finance minister Tito Mboweni will star in an update of “Mission Impossible”. This is his self-appointed task of “closing the mouth of the hippopotamus”. Or reducing the gap between government revenue and expenditure without choking off any prospect of economic growth. It is not that Tito lacks a sincere and serious [...]
The fiscal apocalypse outlined in Wednesday's emergency budget was biblical in proportion and probably could add a new page to the Book of Revelation. Instead of reminding us of the End of Times, which is certainly on the cards as the country careers off the economic cliff face, Tito Mboweni settled for the Book of Matthew. He reminded [...]
When Tito Mboweni rises in parliament on Wednesday afternoon to present his revised budget, the normally emollient finance minister will likely replace his usual beaming smile with a grim rictus. This, after all, in the direst economic circumstances in more than 70 years (cue the Great Depression of the 1930s as an approximate marker on [...]
Comparing two different polities, especially with different demographics, history and economies, can be fraught and error-ridden. Writing in Politicsweb recently, RW Johnson dismissed as “very silly” attempts to find “alleged SA analogies” in sovereign and leadership comparisons “as if everything that happens in the world needs to be translated into what it means for SA”. [...]
This week’s medium-term budget policy statement (MTBPS) is the grimmest and most difficult in a generation. There’s the revenue shortfall, anticipated at about R50bn. The convenient — though perfectly valid — explanation for this huge undershoot is the internal sabotage at the SA Revenue Service by Tom Moyane and his merry men and women. The less [...]
