As a society we must all resist and reject the temptation to accept that the violent protests and political killings that seem to occur all the time during the local election years is the new normal. It should not be! The time has come to take responsibility, show leadership and engage through all our stakeholder […]
News/Politics
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Brexit: Should ‘ordinary people’ be taking a decision as big as this?
By Abigail McDougall Between last night and this morning an “I’m in for Britain” poster popped up in the window of my upper-middle-class neighbours. This display of support for Remain is rather gutsy for Kenilworth, Warwickshire, where Leave posters are in many windows and I’ve had Leave propaganda raining through my mailbox for weeks. It […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality, News/Politics
Black economic empowerment is not black economic empowerment
By Michael Nassen Smith The BEE drum has been beaten many times before on both the right and the left on South Africa’s political spectrum. A recent piece on PoliticsWeb penned by John Kane-Berman gave what has become a standard liberal right critique of BEE. I think Berman is right to bemoan the influence of […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality, General, News/Politics
It’s a simple choice: Are we going to make South Africa great?
Last week I wrote about racism in our public discourse and I was accused of merely describing the problem and negating the role of politics in fixing our economy. Well, here is a stab at a solution: – Every South African corporation with a national footprint should employ one intern aged 20-29 for every 10 […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The investigation into the ‘dangerous’ Mr Trollip
Economic desperation is never far below the surface in a country where unemployment, depending on how it is defined, is nudging remorselessly towards 40%. Like hunger in a predator, desperation defines the lives of the estimated 9 million looking for work. It causes teachers to kill rivals in competition for jobs being illegally auctioned off by […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence, News/Politics
Je suis Orlando, then je suis KwaThema
If indeed we are one with the victims of the Orlando shooting, then surely we ought to be one with the victims of various violations and victimisation in our own communities. Or not? Since Sunday I have tried to get a sense of what this attack was about. Was it about a terrorist act, or […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
We are rebuilding an economic apartheid instead of dismantling it
In the mid-1980s South Africa’s prime overdraft rate went to 25%, inflation rocketed to 20.9% and the apartheid government abolished the financial rand exchange rate system in 1983 as international banks refused to renew credit lines for South Africa. The world was punishing South Africa for being a pariah, a scum state, violating the fundamental […]
Posted inGender violence, General, News/Politics
From Columbine to Orlando: Why bother having children?
The most harrowing book I have read is the one I have just finished, the recently published memoir-journal, A Mother’s Reckoning, by Sue Klebold, parent of Dylan Klebold, one of the two teenage murder-suicide shooters of the Columbine school massacre in 1999. Though tragic, it is unfortunately not that uncommon for parents to deal with […]
Posted inEquality, General, News/Politics
Decolonising course content. Whatever does that mean?
Discussions around “curricula decolonisation” are notoriously unfruitful and unstructured. There are two principal reasons for this. The first is that these discussions occur in a jargon which is vague and imprecise. The second, leading on from the first, is that the subject matter under discussion inherits this vagueness and imprecision. One is tempted, then, to […]
Posted inNews/Politics
US terror alert: SA must nurture its allies, not rebuff them
South Africa for a long time boxed beyond its weight in the international relations arena. No longer. It’s become the diplomatic ingénue on the block, fumbling and stumbling from one diplomatic blunder to another. After two decades of African National Congress ambiguity regarding SA’s role in the world, we are now outwitted, outfought and outclassed […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Why cartoons are linked to human freedom
There is a very obvious reason why cartoons are inseparably linked to human freedom. And here I don’t mean the Walt Disney variety, or indeed any cartoon film, although they are clearly connected to “artistic freedom” insofar as one’s creativity sets the bounds for the imagination as source of the construction of such films. What […]
Posted inNews/Politics
‘We haven’t failed, someone is deliberately making us fail’
President Jacob Zuma is using all the wiles of a spoilt child trying to get his parents to buy a coveted toy. Except that this particular desired bauble – a new presidential jet with all the bells-and-whistles – will cost around R4 billion. And that’s a price tag to be picked up not by affluent and […]