Politicians, business and the media have been squabbling among themselves the whole of the past week. Yes it’s right, no it’s wrong. It’s so unfair, no it’s not. All this fretful introspection was triggered by the cover story in the Economist, headed “Cry The Beloved Country: South Africa’s sad decline”. It argued that South Africa, […]
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
SAPS’ rogue cops hide behind a faltering watchdog
An annual report – be it corporate or government – is less about telling stakeholders what’s happened, than glossing over failures and organisational cankers. When it documents the activities of a paramilitary, the public relations varnish hides the stench of real corpses. The annual report of the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD), tasked with controlling illegal […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The ANC: Standing on the shoulders of pygmies
How inspiring it is to watch one generation building on the achievements of another. In this case, an African National Congress (ANC) government embracing the jurisprudence of secrecy so finely spun by its predecessors, the National Party (NP). One can just imagine the worried frowns in President Jacob Zuma’s cabinet when City Press revealed that […]
Posted inNews/Politics
SA should test presidential wannabes in live debate
The United States presidential debates – dating from 1960 and drawing about 60 million television viewers – are a sober affair, quite unlike the song-and-dance cabaret that President Jacob Zuma locally relies on to lure voters. This week saw first of three debates between Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Though the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Throwing Malema to the prosecutorial wolves entirely justified
Few will seriously doubt that the criminal charges brought against former party youth leader Julius Malema are part of a calculated African National Congress strategy to neuter President Jacob Zuma’s bête noire. And so what? The issue is not whether the process of bringing charges is politically motivated. It is whether the charges are political. […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The slow and steady drift of Nala to nada
Nala is the Sesotho word for prosperity. It is also the sad choice of name for what is now officially South Africa’s most spectacularly failed municipality, the first to have the National Treasury switch off budgetary life support. The state pulling the plug on annual transfers in excess of R200 million was an act of […]
Posted inNews/Politics
President Zuma misses the plot over public anger
There is nothing quite as satisfying as watching a prosperously plump politician slow roasting in difficulties of his own making. Smothered under lashings of public opprobrium following the Marikana massacre, President Jacob Zuma was this week fairly sizzling. It’s all so unfair, was the theme. The African National Congress had done more to improve the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Marikana a marker of profound dissatisfaction countrywide
The explosion that at Marikana mine left 10 dead to union violence and 34 dead to police gunfire oddly caught the government by surprise. It was as if social discontent is not a seething issue in South Africa, surging constantly against the breakwaters of complacency. But it seems that neither the government’s intelligence networks nor […]
Posted inNews/Politics
After 33 years of stability, the labour landscape shudders
The tragic shootings at Lonmin’s Marikana mine is a wake-up call to South Africans who imagined that the hard yards had ended with the advent of democracy. It is also a seismic shock to a labour-relations system that has weathered more than three decades. At the very least, the shooting to death of 34 miners […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The Zuma government is floundering about
For almost a year President Jacob Zuma has been preoccupied with ensuring that he gets a second term at the African National Congress’ elective conference to be held in Mangaung in December. Such single-minded determination would be admirable, had it anything to do with wanting to lead the nation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Zuma is not […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Defining the ‘dom’ in Afrikanerdom
Two dozen white zealots, the self-appointed saviours of the Afrikaner people, have fought a decade-long rearguard action in the Gauteng High Court. Judgment is being given at last but it is perhaps not the looming heavy sentences that will cut most deeply. For it is clear that the Boeremag accused – charged with treason, murder […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Olympic opening: More Little Britain than Great Britain
Glorious traditions, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder. When some chinless member of the British aristocracy was expounding on the ‘glorious traditions’ of the Royal Navy, the riposte – often incorrectly attributed to Winston Churchill, once First Lord of the Admiralty – was, ‘What glorious traditions? The traditions of the Royal Navy […]