Many sniggered at activist Julius Malema’s underwhelming matriculation results. But that much-derided F he got for woodwork proved to be no impediment in his stellar rise to multi-millionaire status by his mid-twenties. Alas for young Julius, the tax man has since bankrupted him and corruption charges make the future murky. However, the lesson is clear: […]
William Saunderson-Meyer
This Jaundiced Eye column appears in Weekend Argus, The Citizen, and Independent on Saturday. WSM is also a book reviewer for the Sunday Times and Business Day. Follow @TheJaundicedEye.
Posted inNews/Politics
ANC learning all the wrong lessons from Nairobi tragedy
There are lessons for South Africa from last week’s Al-Shabab terror attack on a Nairobi shopping mall. Unfortunately the lessons that this government chooses to draw from the tragedy are all the wrong ones. African National Congress Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe says that the Kenyan attack ‘highlighted the need for tighter immigration laws’. There was also […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Pathetic SABC-TV exposed by Nairobi terror siege
‘Africa’s News Leader’, that’s SABC-TV’s boast. It’s at least as brassy a lie as the Johannesburg metro’s assertion, ‘Joburg: A world-class African city’. The only difference is that the Advertising Standards Authority called out the metro on their misleading claim, while SABC-TV continues to get away with it. However, the Kenyan shopping mall siege, played […]
Posted inHealth, News/Politics, Tech
The dashed dreams of medical quackery
White South Africans harbour numerous carefully nurtured prejudices about their fellow citizens and delusions about themselves. One is that blacks are uneducated and backward, eschewing reason for superstition. Whites, in contrast, are masters of reason, hacking a scientific path through thickets of ignorance. Such assumptions are particularly glaring in health matters. Although the term “witchdoctor” […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Coy Western maidens toy with Zulu culture
Positions Vacant Wanted: 30 000 dancers for an ensemble performance. Requirements: Applicants must be virgins, young and single, as well as willing to dance semi-nude. Remuneration: None. That’s not a classified advertisement likely to lure the modern woman. Indeed, for a dance director in Paris, London or even Salt Lake City, the challenge of finding 30 000 […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Charitable giving: Don’t squander your generosity
This is a generous nation but a country with boundless needs. So there is no shortage of worthy causes competing for attention, spare change or unwanted household goods. While some government funding – too little, often too late – goes to not-for-profits (NPOs) that benefit people, those working with animals get nothing. The plight of […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Pollyanna Phiyega assures the nation it is safe
Anyone perturbed at hearing that almost 1 500 serving officers of the South African Police Service (SAPS) have criminal records – including for murder, rape and assault – can stop fretting. The nation’s top cop has reassured the Western Cape legislature that SAPS is a “good service” staffed by “several committed men and women”. Of […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Mandela: Let’s have less spin doctor and more medical doctor
The African National Congress probably couldn’t care less about the chatter that Nelson Mandela is now a medical zombie, alive but not living. It is widely speculated on social networks that the 95-year-old Madiba will remain in intensive care electronic limbo until his passing can be unveiled to the maximum benefit of the ANC in […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Public Works: Finding small solutions to big problems
The most rash African National Congress electoral promise in 1994 was ‘jobs for all’. Two decades later it must be clear, even to dreamy ideologues, that the state creation of employment is a fraught and challenging task. Key to any attempt at mass job creation – as opposed to the political cronyism and nepotism that […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Shipwrecked by injustice but clinging to the Constitution
Surveys show that barely half of South Africans trust the justice system, despite relatively few personally having been snagged in its maw. So it is a welcome paradox when someone dealt only injustice by officialdom, somehow retains faith in the Constitution. Hollander Thijs van Hillegondsberg and family – wife Patricia Poelmann, joint son Ludo, and […]
Posted inNews/Politics
A family destroyed by bureaucratic bullies
At a stroke past Saturday midnight, Thijs van Hillegondsberg becomes a wanted man. He will be arrested at his Strand home, jailed, tried, likely committed to a Home Affairs detention centre, processed and eventually bundled onto a plane to the Netherlands. This is because Van Hillegondsberg is an illegal immigrant and has been served with […]
Posted inNews/Politics
By hook or by crook, Survivor Bob will carry the day
On Wednesday Zimbabwe goes to the polls. The run-up to the election has been curiously low key and lacklustre, perhaps because everyone already knows the result – President Robert Mugabe will win. Even if he loses, he will win. Such is the foxiness of the world’s third-longest serving dictator, who is shaded in the despot […]