News/Politics

The crowd went into frenzy. Old and young, men and women, all listened attentively as Innocent Batsani Ncube recited his poems. I had listened to Innocent earlier on in the afternoon when he did a short piece on the “R” factor in reference to the just ended elections in Zimbabwe. The “R” referred to Robert […]

Sokwanele [“Enough is Enough”], a Zimbabwean human rights NGO, has a flickr photo album that illustrates, rather graphically, the means that Zanu-PF and its fascist affiliates are using to cling to power. Images copyright Sokwanele The photos in this album are not of extras in Hollywood’s latest “Afritragedy”. Neither are they the spurious efforts of […]

The Australian, a newspaper in, well, Oz, reports that global warming appears to have stopped in 1998, that 2007 saw a 0.7°C drop in temperature, and that sunspot activity suggests we may be entering a period of global cooling again.

Judges have got their knickers in a knot over the Judicial Services Commission Amendment Bill now before the NCOP – so much so that the Judicial Services Commission (“JSC”) made an extensive and detailed submission on the Bill when it was before the National Assembly’s Portfolio Committee on Justice and Constitutional Development last year. However […]

What is it about the situation in Zimbabwe that has produced one of the most severe cases of stick-your-head-in-the-sand-itis that one can imagine? Watching a video on the online New York Times on the refugees streaming into South Africa got me into such a state that tears were running down my cheeks. Of course, as […]

Recently a friend asked me what I, as a former member of the organisation, now make of the ANC Youth League. Her question resulted in me googling the names of my former comrades, who in the early Nineties had been activists in a range of Congress-aligned associations at the formerly named University of Port Elizabeth. […]

I remember a time not so long ago when one could pick up T-shirts in the markets of cities in India and Nepal embossed with a very colourful flag and the words “Free Tibet”. The markets are still there, as is the clothing and the flags, but the word “free” seems largely to have been […]

It was a Friday afternoon in Manesar – about an hour southwest of Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport – and I was filled with dread at the thought of another two days of conferencing. It was day one of a “Global South Dialogue” on access to essential medicines, one of my areas of expertise, and […]

I do not really want to pick a fight with Helen Zille because I do not have the time. But as she has now also attacked me because I criticised her actions around the appointment of the Erasmus Commission, I guess I’ll have to jump in. When President Thabo Mbeki told religious leaders that they […]