News/Politics

By Tim Bester The sexual adventures of the rich and powerful have always been the focus of public fascination when these are aired in the public domain. These peccadilloes make for good and lurid copy in our newspapers. The most recent of these, involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Arnold Schwarzenegger, are good examples. And they have […]

Hallo, Jon, how are you? From riches to rags, you say? I empathise! I decided to write to you on an impulse. I don’t know you personally, I have never met you, but what the hell. I’m a columnist, too, and, as you know very well, column writing is a dangerous job, especially these days. […]

Osama bin Laden is not dead. There is good reason why his body was cremated and tossed into the ocean. As we all know, or should know, this was not only to insult devotees of certain segments of the broader Islamic faith; it was to ensure there was no DNA trace. No proof. What was […]

There’s a problem with the tense of a popular, communist freedom song which goes “my father was a garden boy, my mother was a kitchen girl, that’s why I am a communist, a communist, a communist”. Sometimes “socialist” is used instead of “communist”. In this song garden boys and kitchen girls are relegated to the […]

By Craig McKune As we sent this week’s front-page story — on how to rip off the government through state leasing — to the printers, a successful BEE property developer called us. “I just want to give you a bit of perspective,” he said, before reading out a list of state leases in commercial buildings: […]

‘Coconuts’, ‘sellouts’ and ‘tea girls of the madam’ are all part of a deliberate closing down of political space. The next step is to punish such transgressors with physical violence.

You do not go into politics, especially at local level, to be rich. It is only when you are rich, especially at a spiritual and moral level, that you should go into politics. The problem with South African politics, especially in organisations like the ANC, is that people who run for office see politics as […]

When Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai recently announced Zimbabwe’s parliamentary elections scheduled for 2011 would be postponed to 2012 or even 2013, many Zimbabweans must have breathed a deep sigh of relief. Relieved because the bloodshed which accompanies every election would be put off for a bit longer. And the rapidly mounting number of political activists […]

By Aidan Eyakuze It didn’t last very long, did it? In January, Africa celebrated the successful referendum in which the South voted for independence. Four months later, Abyei, a region nestled between the North and South Sudan was violently “seized” by the North, risking war with the South. Between the vote for secession and the […]

Helen Zille’s letter to City Press editor Ferial Haffajee on News24 raises interesting new possibilities for the DA. Zille writes, “The DA is the new UDF.” The letter is a response to a News24 column (“How the ANC lost the coloured and Indian vote”) by Haffajee, a former Mail & Guardian editor. In her piece, […]