As the Iran conflict threatens to derail South Africa’s optimistic budget assumptions, the country’s “parasitic state” will once again finds a convenient external excuse for SA’s internal failures, writes Tony Leon. South Africa, along with the world, now confronts a vastly reshaped and malign economic outlook, untethered to previous assumptions etched as recently as the benign [...]
Just as a National Party minister’s comment about pensioners surviving on R20 a month helped trigger the party’s 1981 electoral decline, today’s ANC leaders are making similarly tone-deaf remarks – from booking hotel baths during water shortages to claiming hospital patients choose to sleep on floors. This could prove electorally disastrous for a party now [...]
The late US Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, popularised the "Pottery Barn rule" - named after the American chain store, as a guide to political consequences for strategic decisions, both taken and avoided. It went along the lines of "if you break it, you fix it; if you break it, you own it". This [...]
