Siyabonga Ntshingila

I found myself writing a very serious and cliché ridden New year’s message. Yammering on about crime, violence, optimism, the World Cup, etc. Instead I will cut myself short and say just this — have fun, work hard, do unto others. Most importantly be an active, vigilant citizen. The politicians will not sort this country […]

Conservative rights group AfriForum has made a call for parents to insist on mother tongue instruction from their children’s schools. On the face of it, this is a good thing. It is good for children to be taught in a language they are comfortable in It may even, as Afriforum claims, help children perform better, […]

Time magazine’s Person of the Year award profiles a person, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that “for better or for worse … has done the most to influence the events of the year”. Well, that’s the official line, at least. So why then in a year where Julian Assange made us all sit up […]

Orlando Pirates coach and Dutch football legend Ruud Krol must think he is in some kind of bizarre dream. Reports, radio phone-ins and internet forums have seen him painted as some kind of dead man walking. Which to be fair is not an unusual position for football coaches, except Krol is actually having a good […]

I saw something very shameful today. Plainclothes police officers from the JMPD, well they were in JMPD vehicles while all clad in suspiciously fake-looking football shirts, rained down on a group of mostly foreign men who offer cheap haircuts on the pavement outside the taxi rank at Boulders, Midrand. Tents and tarps were torn down […]

So author Annelie Botes has caused a storm with her recent comments over crime and black people. Now I agree with Mrs Botes on some of her points. Most contact crimes in South Africa are perpetrated by black people. Note I explicitly said contact crimes because the debate over which crimes are more damaging to […]

Joyful news for all our ANC alliance-phobes. Good tidings for those sick to death of ANC incompetence, corruption and maladministration. Hope for those despairing over our so-called monocracy. We’ve been saved. The South African Community Government Union (SACGU) has heard our anguished cries for a party that can actually take on and beat the ANC […]

Four weeks ago, if you had asked Bok supporters what they expected from the 2010 Grand Slam Tour given: 1. A rancid Tri-Nations; 2. An under fire coaching team; 3. Thirteen top internationals missing; 4. Key players at the end of a gruelling season; and 5. The usual game-changing matter of Northern Hemisphere winter conditions. […]

Their intentions may well be scarily misguided, and they certainly have a lesser chance of pulling it off than Province players stopping a rampaging Willem Alberts, but would an ANC Youth League clos-er of the Twitter really be such a bad thing? Let me own up early doors to being a member/user/Twit of the ubiquitous […]

Remember how we used to joke about corruption in “some countries” with the condescending tone of those who consider themselves above such? We’d laugh, half in wonder, half in condescension at talk that police could stop citizens randomly with no apparent offence being committed and search and interrogate them until a bribe was put forward […]

It’s 2010. Eighteen years after South Africa’s re-introduction to international sports and the formal unification of sporting codes in the country. A sponsor writes to the organisation responsible for running the game it has been associated with for a quarter of a century to express its concerns over the seemingly slow pace of transformation and […]

The Braair4Heritage Foundation struck upon a pure gold idea when they conceived of the National Braai Day. That much is certainly pretty obvious. Bribing traffic officers, cutting corners and reinforcing our own prejudices aside, burning slabs of meat on open flames while downing copious amounts of SAB’s finest is that other common trait we all […]