Thought Leader

The worst thing about limitations on individual freedoms, rights and responsibilities is that they impinge upon your options, choices and decision-making. Take for example the decision to deploy ANC cadres to government, the public service, the public enterprises and the parastatals; this has wrought havoc in your life, making it impossible for you live, work,…

If Eskom is bent, what is it going to take to straighten it out?

South Africa Is Not Well Just Another South African Looking For A Handout In Another Get Rich Quick Scheme Black people are angry. White people are angry. Indian people are angry. Coloured people are angry. Chinese people are angry. It would seem that South Africans of all races are angry. There is so much hate…

There is a huge, and unjustified, prejudice towards homeopathic medicine in contemporary societies, and I suspect that it is driven by the financial interests of what is colloquially known as Big Pharma, of which medical doctors are the involuntary, if not unwitting agents every time they prescribe some or other mainstream medication. Don’t get me…

Dr Gloria Marsay People faced with adversities in developing countries struggle to bridge the gap between education and work. A key challenge for 21st century schools involves serving culturally diverse students with appropriate transferable skill domains, i.e. deep human skills and advanced technical skills essential for economic empowerment in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (#4IR), as described…

The question, what is dominant, human ‘nature’, or ‘nurture’ (culture), has been the motivating force in a debate that has waged since at least the 18th and 19th centuries — for instance in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (see his prize-winning Academy of Dijon essay on the question, whether human morals had improved by, or…

I swore off social media rubbishcapades more than a decade ago. I still have all my records from the early and mid 90s regarding my orders for a social media. I still listen to all my records from the mid and late 90s regarding my orders for a Web 2.0 and a social media. I…

On the way back from a conference in Berlin just before Christmas 2019, I was catching up on movies on Qatar Airlines — a carrier with exceptional leg-space in economy class, so I could sit comfortably, at least — and I managed to select a number of excellent recent films, including Marc Webb’s Gifted (2017)…

Everybody knows the story of the emperor’s new clothes — where a vain emperor contracted two so-called ‘tailors’ to make him a new set of clothes, not knowing that they were con artists. By flattering the emperor about his handsome appearance in the supposedly new clothes, when in fact there was nothing, and assuring him…

When one finds oneself on a busy street in modern Berlin — capital of a reunified Germany since June 20 1991 — it is difficult to believe that it has grown into this city in the course of seven centuries, at least as far as its written history goes. The latter records that in the…