News/Politics

South Africans have every right to look to the government for an explanation of their handling of the Scorpions and Vusi Pikoli disbandment and dismissal. In both cases the impression that is left is that, regardless of the feelings of the citizens of this country and the findings of the commissions into both issues, the […]

If Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is to be believed, 2009 could be a very tricky year. Forget tricky; it has the potential to be an outright disaster. The sad thing is that this financial mess will probably affect weaker economies disproportionately, even though they had the least to do with […]

The anti-war lobby’s use of Holocaust imagery to protest against Israel’s attack on Gaza is causing a commotion. At a protest I attended outside the Israeli Embassy in London on Sunday, activists waved placards demanding “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza”. One protester held up a home-made banner with a message scrawled in twirly black ink: […]

President Kgalema Motlanthe, in his New Year’s message to the nation, joined the UN Secretary General in calling for the immediate stop to the Gaza attacks. He added, “The sheer savagery of the attacks launched by Israel against the residents of Gaza serves to conceal the fact that underlying this conflict is the reasonable demand […]

I avoided writing a piece about Helen Suzman as so many in Thought Leadership were already climbing on the bandwagon. I admired Ismail Lagardien’s piece on Thought Leadership. He put it very well — and timeously — that there are many unsung woman heroes in the apartheid struggle whose memory or lack of remembrance are […]

Like me many of you must have been delighted to learn that Grace Mugabe has taken the family off to Malaysia for a month’s hard earned rest. After all the “first lady” must be exhausted from having had to spend the entire year in her mansion listening to stories about her countrymen and women dying […]

Today, nine days into a campaign of extermination by Israel, the Gaza strip is the largest open-air prison camp the world has seen. Commentators the world over are outraged by the carnage of the 1.5-million Gazans and the complicity of bourgeois governments in the West. True to form, the US vetoed a UNSC resolution condemning […]

“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, […]

Very many people have expressed their admiration of Helen Suzman since her death — which is fair. I don’t expect people to reconsider their opinions of Ms Suzman. What I really want to do with this post is introduce another perspective on Ms Suzman – as a white person in South Africa, one who benefited […]

An interesting article by Terence Blacker in the Independent recently caught my eye. He maintained that we are living in the Great Age of Panic. Without being able to pinpoint why this would be he suggests that we could be needing that sense of constant panic in order to feel alive. As much as I […]