Yet another award ceremony, yet another corporate weekend away. So, what shall be my mask this time? The history of power in corporate SA still looms large in the boardrooms of present-day South Africa. The black face needs to be masked by fluency in an institutional culture which, it is assumed, is ahistorical. That is, […]
Business
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
DA march irresponsible
The Democratic Alliance (DA) is continuously letting the democratic project down, and at this rate, the moment could be nearing for an alternative official opposition to replace them. If it is not an epic political fumble like last week’s Agang shenanigan, then it is flip-flopping on sensitive policy issues like the BBEEE blunder some months […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality, General
The real problem with incompetent black graduates
For many, the mercurial politics of corporate South Africa are punctuated by awkwardly silent, contrived spaces of uncomfortable reflection – spaces known as office elevators. Every so often the silence is broken by wide-eyed faces brimming with the heat of new degrees. Ha! It must be February and the new crop for the graduate programme […]
Posted inBusiness, Health
Leave our ‘germs’ alone!
There is a television advertisement aired in South Africa periodically that I find particularly irritating. In it a young mother, baby in arms, walks around her kitchen spraying an aerosol into the air, to a verbal and written promise that the product in question “Kills germs dead!” Besides massacring the English language, the premise that […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality, News/Politics
Flipping the corruption myth
Transparency International recently published their latest annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), laid out in an eye-catching map of the world with the least corrupt nations coded in happy yellow and the most corrupt nations smeared in stigmatising red. The CPI defines corruption as “the misuse of public power for private benefit,” and draws its data […]
Posted inBusiness, Health, Tech
How money is more important than lives in healthcare technology
I saw via Twitter an interesting link on Reuters here about how students have developed a smartphone application with a microscope attachment to diagnose malaria. The article shows a picture of a child at risk somewhere in Africa. Great idea, and one that can go a long way to help people who really need it. […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Latvia and the politics of permanent austerity
In 2008 Latvia was hit by the economic crisis that saw its economy shrink substantially. In the fourth quarter of 2008 alone, Latvia’s GDP slumped by 10.5% compared to the same period in 2007. Prior to the financial crisis, the Latvian economy had been growing rapidly for a number of years. In response to its […]
Posted inBusiness, General, News/Politics
Sanral’s new best friends
Once upon a time, e-tolls galvanised society. Like no other cause before or since, the hatred of e-tolls cut across class, politics and race. They were a superb nation-building tool, something I reflected on here. But things have changed. When e-tolls were finally implemented in early December, the battle was lost. Quite possibly the war, […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Triumph of capitalism: The new world plague
Some time ago, while working on a bigger project concerning contemporary society, I took Slavoj Žižek as my point of departure to raise the question of the state of the “ethical” today. This morning, when I was looking at Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (Routledge 1994) in the context of this project, I noticed a […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Africa’s Achilles heel: Global capitalism
In 2010, during the 50th anniversary of African political independence, I wrote an article which provocatively proclaimed that developmental states remain a pipedream in Africa. There is no consensus on what has constrained the further advancement of our troubled African continent. Could it be, fundamentally, institutions as some have argued or leadership as many have […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
‘Free trade’ and the death of democracy
“Free trade”. The term itself is a trap — a brilliant framing device that neatly neutralises opposition. If you take a stand against free trade you appear to be taking a stand against freedom itself, which is clearly not a tenable position. In fact, in recent decades the term “free trade” has become very closely […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality, News/Politics
Aid in reverse: How poor countries develop rich countries
The idea of international development aid lies at the heart of a tremendously successful PR campaign. The narrative we have been sold claims that aid has been effective at reducing global poverty. Here I will argue that there are three problems with this narrative. First, poverty is not disappearing, despite what we have been told […]