A funeral attended by presidents past and present. It is Senator Edward Kennedy’s final farewell held at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Boston. A milieu has come full circle in American politics. The “new king” presides over a ceremony rich in symbolism, a king spiritually descended from the noble line of Camelot. America is […]
Jon Cayzer
Jon was an Edward S. Mason Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government from 2010 - 2011, and holds a Masters Degree in Public Administration. He was awarded the Gundle South African Public Service Fellowship.
Jon is the speechwriter to Democratic Alliance Leader, Helen Zille.
He has also served as the speechwriter to the leader of the official opposition, private secretary to elder statesman, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, and, briefly, as the Head of Ministry of Transport and Public Works in the Democratic Alliance-led Western Cape Provincial Government.
He spent time at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation in London in 2011 working on the Faith and Globalisation, and Faiths Acts programmes. In 2000 he worked as a consultant policy writer for the then Democratic Party.
Twitter: jonthekaizer
Posted inNews/Politics
What drove the Aids holocaust?
A genocide which has claimed more lives than Adolf Hitler’s gas chambers: the 20th century African holocaust. Who is to blame this time? What devil lurks in the background wreaking such ruin on our people? The answer is plain and simple — party politics. A chapter in the long Aids death march has come to […]
Posted inNews/Politics
‘Green shoots’ of recovery?
On cue, at 12h25, just five minutes before President Jacob Zuma was due to give an economic briefing at Tuynhuys, the wind picked up in the parliamentary precinct and it started to rain. Cold drops in spring. Was the grey, leaden sky, I wondered, a portent from the gods about ill economic news? Had the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Zille zeitgeist?
“Premier appoints all male cabinet”, “All male cabinet is a betrayal of women” ranted the headlines in May. I am writing, of course, of the headlines in Britain’s newspapers when Margaret Hilda Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter, appointed an all-male cabinet thirty-years-ago. When Helen Zille was to do exactly the same in May of this year, […]
Posted inGeneral
When the young die
In the last two weeks two young talented men, both in their thirties, have tragically died: Stephen Gately, the former Boyzone singer, aged 33, and Garth Stead, the brilliant Cape Town photographer, aged 37, who literally painted images of lyrical beauty with his Nixon camera. Sadly, it appears that Garth died by his own hand. […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The media invented Malema
Julius Malema is fast becoming a national treasure: the pantomime’s grand dame of South African politics. He is also, unwittingly, a fabulous source of national unity: he draws us all altogether in mirth, condemnation and embarrassment. Yet, I am convinced the media have, largely, invented Malema’s personae with our connivance. It is a shame that […]
Posted inGeneral
Who loves the abuser?
Could I abuse someone? This is a question I have repeatedly asked myself recently after reading the voluminous blogs on this site about abuse and its many grotesque manifestations: child abuse, rape and violence against women, to name a few. As someone who has been physically and mentally abused, it is not an easy question […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Obama’s nobility clinched the Nobel
Barack Obama, to be candid, probably clinched the Nobel Peace Prize when he secured the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination last year. He has proved that words, not just actions, have power to heal in the television age. His elegant and powerful cadences have reverberated not just across that “arsenal of democracy” called America, but the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The darkness ‘makes us interesting’
At an el fresco lunch, on a warm summer’s day in Cape Town a few years back, I reminded Margaret Thatcher of when a former junior minister had vindictively described former Conservative leader Michael Howard as having “something of the night about him”. “That’s what makes us interesting as human beings dear” she replied with […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Yes they can! SA’s opposition-led government takes shape
Today President Jacob Zuma will, again, formally unveil his latest party trick: the presidential “hotline”. Our president, we know by now, has the magician’s knack of drawing the eye away from the trick. Should a fraction of his talent for getting himself out of trouble be deployed in some wider national purpose, South Africa would […]
Posted inGeneral
Angels, demons and Benedict’s ambrosia
In the same week that the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict is to visit Britain, the Roman Catholic Church continues to be embroiled in scandal. In a provocative gesture, the Vatican lashed out that sex abuse is rife in other religions as it seeks to contain a paedophilia scandal which has cost the American church […]
Posted inGeneral
The Dalai Lama will trump China — soon
China’s ban this week on tourists to Tibet — in the run-up to a Cold War era style military parade — will further strengthen the resolve of supporters of the Dalai Lama and, at first glance, the unrelated Chinese pro-democratic movement. Every time they restrict Tibet’s freedom, they, ironically, bring freedom’s day closer. In […]