News/Politics

Evil Santa Claus Andrew Mitchell is in the process of training the British public to accept international aid as a force that discriminates rather than helps. Can this be reversed before the UK’s aid budget skips Africa altogether? Mitchell is the UK’s International Development Secretary and insists that the UK’s donation of £64 million to Pakistan […]

They say paranoia is just being in possession of all the facts. Clearly the minister of state security knows more than I do — he accuses us of “war talk” in relation to the secrecy bill. What? Not just that but we apparently have engaged in “personal attacks on members of the ad hoc committee […]

I was not going to write a follow-up to my previous post but was compelled to by an email response from a “friend”. This “friend” managed to spoil my thorough enjoyment of Koos Kombuis’s Lisa se Klavier. His email made me think quite a bit about why he wrote the email, what my response would […]

Professor Steven Friedman in an article in Business Day says that the media has it wrong about secrecy law’s victims and that the failure of the media to analyse the bill accurately may be the only reason it has received so much attention. He basis this, primarily, on the following : “Media coverage of the […]

I read with horror the reports of more gang rape in the DRC over the past weekend. Many women and young men were raped by soldiers (of a form), with guns and violence that will impact on them for life. Many of these soldiers are themselves young men, who have grown up in a world […]

We have been here before. The third major public-service strike since 1994 is upon us. During the first major public-service strike since democracy, in 1999, trade unions suffered a significant defeat with government’s unilateral implementation of wages. But in 2007, public-service unions turned the tables on government conducting an unprecedented strike, and building an unlikely […]

I had the rather dubious pleasure of attending a discussion on the matter of the proposed media appeals tribunal and protection of information at the University of Johannesburg last night. Let me warn you from the outset: if you want intelligent, honest and frank discussion, do not go to these events. Just don’t. “Honest” discussion […]

I like Zapiro. I like that his cartoons are irreverent, provocative, incisive, humorous and hyperbolic; that no matter how ostensibly offensive, they are almost always perfectly on point. And I like that they piss powerful people off. But not this week. A first for me, I find Friday’s M&G cartoon disappointing, its message inaccurate and […]

Zuma’s cross-border getaways seem a bit like those of a kid in a dysfunctional family. He just wants sleepovers in order to escape from all that stressful conflict at home.