It is one year to the day that the Marikana massacre unfolded on the Wonderkop koppie and was witnessed on national television. The trauma of this spectacle still hangs heavy in the air for many who are unable to make any sense of this heinous occurrence, because there is no making sense of it. There […]
Business
Posted inBusiness, Equality
A world where time replaces money as currency
Isn’t it amazing how a huge money-spinner of a film, made on a budget of millions, obviously in anticipation of making a sizeable profit in moviehouse-attendance and on DVDs, can tap into something that goes diametrically against the grain of its own production rationale? What it taps into, is the latent desire on the part […]
Posted inBusiness
To get South Africa working again fire the DTI
It’s official that South Africa’s growth rate lags badly behind the rest of Africa, with no imminent solution in sight. The New Development plan is supposed to be the knight in shining armour that will rescue us from our predicament. Sure it sounds grand; increasing the number of employed to nearly 12-million, doubling per capita […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment, Lifestyle, Media, News/Politics
What art you talking about?
The 31st of July was the deadline decided on by the South African Department of Arts and Culture (DepARTment) for arts practitioners and institutional responses to a revised White Paper they made available (in very limited fashion) earlier in the same month. There was nothing normal about the process but nothing abnormal either. Because this […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle
Bye-bye 132 000 Chinese tourists
By Michael Jones “I’m sorry, I simply do not see them” is an often-quoted response I hear when talking to high-end South African tourism brands about marketing their products in the China outbound travel market. Strange considering that official government statistics are adamant that South Africa received 132 334 Chinese tourists in 2012 making it our […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Competition Tribunal fails to deliver on mandate
The recent and widely publicised dramatic “unequivocal apology” by the chief executive Murray & Roberts, Henry Laas, for “collusive conduct” during the period leading up to the Soccer World Cup, while well-intentioned, should be viewed in the context that he assumed his position in July, 2011, well after all these “crimes” were committed. The chief […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
The global leadership crisis
The 2008 global financial crisis has exposed the dearth of global leadership, especially in responding to the complexity of multiple global events that characterise our modern existence. The eurozone has been subjected to absurd economic policies that have plunged its economy into deeper trouble. Unimaginative leadership should be blamed for failing to propel the eurozone […]
Posted inBusiness, Media, Tech
Filling in the gaps – understanding white space spectrum
Technological innovation and information communication technologies (ICTs) represent a way for developing world nations to foster economic growth and development, improve levels of education and training, as well as address gender issues within society. Put simply, ICTs help reinforce, converge and integrate all three key pillars of sustainable development, and also support and facilitate the […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
The hidden food security crisis in South Africa
By Refiloe Joala As a nation I believe we have made a concerted effort of doing away with the overplayed notion of an Africa that conjures up images of hungry children with flies around their faces staring blankly into a camera lens. Although in the case of South Africa, one would imagine images of endless […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle
An open letter to Money
Dear Money, We need to talk. I’ve been meaning to write this letter to you for a while, but I got side-tracked and spent a whole lot of time doing other stuff, and then I was busy starting a new agency and so it didn’t happen. But it turns out that open letters are the […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment
Climate change: Red alert in the Anthropocene
It is fitting that “Anthropocene”, the term coined just more than ten years ago by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, denotes the new ecological period, following the end of the Holocene, when humans became the principal force driving changes in the planetary system. I say this because the Holocene (“New Whole”), or stable […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality, Health, Lifestyle
Why we choose materialism – part 2
Because, it is far easier to want a nicer, more expensive outfit than it is to ask ourselves why we can never conceive that we are enough as we are. It is easier to want a better, higher paying job than to ask ourselves what happened to the idealism that had once dominated our youth […]