This is a big month for UFO fans. No, not the metalhead followers of the English hard rock group of the same acronym. One’s talking here about the airheads who believe in Unidentified Flying Objects. First, July 2 was International UFO day. Then Google released a doodle to mark the 66th anniversary of the Roswell […]
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
Helen loves Angie: How politics makes for strange bedfellows
What is not said is often more important than what is. The response of Democratic Alliance (DA) parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko to this week’s cabinet reshuffle is a case in point. Mazibuko welcomed the exit of Communications Minister Dina Pule but found inexplicable the retention of Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Zuma and Obama tango to the Death March
The timing of United States President Barack Obama’s two-day state visit to South Africa was less than ideal. Overshadowing the political arena was a looming, distracting historical backdrop: former president Nelson Mandela’s faltering but determined struggle to live. Both leaders were acutely aware that they had to avoid any perception of insensitivity to the prevailing […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Nelson Mandela: A giant leaves the world to pygmies
“That man is as healthy as a horse and as tough as they come. He’ll live to be a 100.” It was 1978 and prisoner 46664, Nelson Rolihlala Mandela, had just turned 60. The speaker was a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) who, by virtue of international law, was twice […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Sarah Palin has her once-in-a-million-year Hamlet moment
One always knew, as with the averred statistical likelihood of a million chimpanzees with a million keyboards in a million years eventually producing the equivalent of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that it had to happen. Now after a lifetime of effort, former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has at last said something intelligent. Palin, who has […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Mandela’s youthful creation also in extremis
While Nelson Mandela clings precariously to life in a Pretoria hospital, the organisation he helped birth finds itself similarly in extremis. Mandela, however, would find it difficult to recognise in today’s African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) anything that would make him and his co-founders proud. For not only is the offspring an embarrassment to […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Law Society puts on gloss for Parliament’s justice committee
It’s almost 20 years on but many of the “old” South Africa’s anti-democratic habits remain. The ANC, for one, has developed an authoritarian streak similar to that of the National Party and then there are some in the legal fraternity, sworn to defend the new Constitution’s ethos of transparency and accountability, who have retained the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Something rotten in the state of the law
Lawyers love Latin axioms. Not only do these pithy phrases dating to Roman times encapsulate the law’s basic tenets, but also remind we plebs of the lawyer’s learning, which even if we don’t always benefit from as clients, we are likely to have to shell out dearly for. One popular maxim is Quis custodiet ipsos […]
Posted inNews/Politics
SA’s Tripartite Alliance: ‘He loves me, he loves me not…’
It’s on, it’s cootchy-coo. No, it’s off, it’s divorce. Monitoring South Africa’s governing alliance is a bit like watching a low-grade soapie starring a fractious married couple. Or more accurately, an eternally bickering ménage à trois, with two parties always ganging up on the third, but with loyalties shifting constantly. Sometimes it is the African […]
Posted inNews/Politics
White men in black hats teach black men in white hats
White South Africans might scoff and fume but President Jacob Zuma is absolutely right. It’s the fault of apartheid. No, not every social ill – from poverty to child rape – that the president lays at the ancien regime‘s door. After all, with a moderately honest and diligent government these could be overcome, albeit gradually. […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The crown jewels are looking a tad tarnished
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, warned Shakespeare. And as it happens, 2013 is turning out to be a tough year for Europe’s kings and queens. Royalists argue that monarchism’s value lies in the seamless continuity that is provided by inherited office, whereas in other constitutional arrangements political leaders come and go. The […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Jacob who? Mandela takes refuge in the fog of age
For me, the iconic photograph of George W Bush was of the American president reading to a bunch of kindergarten kids. It was conceived as standard pre-election pap, a photo opportunity to show the caring side of the nation’s most powerful man. But as it happened the date was September 11, 2001 and the picture […]