Gloom and doom, doom and gloom … Increasingly people around me in China are singing the blues because of the global crisis and resorting to vague generalisations (tautology intended) to explain their impoverished state of affairs. “A lot of companies are closing down because of the international crisis”, “many people are losing their jobs …” […]
2008
Posted inGeneral
Two South Africans in Egypt
My wife, Andrea Hurst, and I have just returned from a most informative – and largely enjoyable – trip to (and through) Egypt, and it was unavoidable to reflect on differences and similarities between this Arabic country with its ancient history and our own country, South Africa, in the course of our travels. On arriving […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Zuma, Mbeki and NPA head for Bloem showdown
The National Prosecuting Authority’s appeal against the decision of Judge Chris Nicholson, in favour of ANC president Jacob Zuma, in the Pietermaritzburg High Court will be heard by a full bench of the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein on Friday. Nicholson’s judgment amounted to the granting of an application brought by Zuma on the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The Z factor: Is the real Jacob Zuma emerging?
Jolly. Jovial. Man of the people. This is how presidential hopeful Jacob Zuma has been projecting himself to South Africans. Here and there reality interfered – rape trial, corruption charges – but Zuma kept up the singing and dancing. When asked about policy issues, he would hide behind the usual “ANC collective” excuse: a mere […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Combating Somali piracy … Roman style
In the year 75BC, Gaius Julius Caesar, citizen of the great Roman Empire was sailing on a Roman battle trireme in the Mediterranean when pirates attacked the ship. Caesar was captured and ransomed, as was the practice back then. Legend has it that the great man was not impressed when the pirates decided to bill […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Zimbabwe: Mugabe won’t blink at genocide
When Robert Mugabe undertook his murderous campaign to crush the Ndebele in Matabeleland during the 1980s, the planet should have realised then that here was an African leader who would stop at nothing and no one in his efforts to retain power. And so it has proved: while the pirates off the coast of Somalia […]
Posted inGeneral
Bok ‘08 honours (My view at least)
Comeback Of The Year Adi Jacobs was one of the most contentious selections in PdV’s first squad. Long written off as a lightweight show pony impact player not suited to the grind of Test rugby by those who had forgotten how he made Etienne Botha look good at the Falcons in the early noughties, he […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The ANC does not own liberation history
Allow me to make a bold claim: it was not the ANC that brought us liberation. It was a vehicle that the people used to bring themselves to freedom. Just like the newfound Cope cannot claim to be the defender of the Constitution. The people are merely using it as a vehicle to defend the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
It’s just a bad breed
In Afrikaans “skielik” means suddenly. It is also the name of the cluster of shacks where dirt-poor black people live in the tiny North West hamlet of Swartruggens (literally “black backs”, though that could as easily derive from a topographical feature or any number of species of animal as it could refer to the backs […]
Posted inBusiness, Tech
The mobile office – from Soho to Noho
It’s difficult today to grasp that just 20 years ago most of us were stuck in the same office set-up that had ruled the business world for a century. In this first of a series of excerpts from my new book, The Mobile Office, the argument goes that even the internet was not the real […]
Posted inNews/Politics
CopeYL vs Ancyl: What makes Mda different
All together now, sing “Girls in white dresses and blue satin sashes/ security guards bold and poisoned snakes’ ashes/ SA’s Stalin our president in spring/ these are a few of my favourite things. The kids of today huh? Correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t the whole thrust of the Cope argument that there would […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Why Lekota is a big hypocrite
I’m absolutely amazed at Mosiuoa Lekota’s recent condemnation of a lack of democracy in the ruling African National Congress, as one of the major reasons for his leading role in the formation of the breakaway Congress of the People (Cope), which will contest the 2009 elections against the ANC. We needed a mass-based leftist alternative […]