Last week, DA chief whip John Steenhuisen announced small changes to the DA’s shadow cabinet. Most notably senior DA MP, and Wilmot James’ unsuccessful leadership campaign manager, David Maynier, was moved from defence to finance; while newcomer, Michael Cardo, was moved to economic development. Gareth van Onselen, a fierce critic of incumbent DA leader Mmusi […]
News/Politics
Posted inNews/Politics
The spectre of apartheid lives on
In a kind of irony only found in the movies, Deputy Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development John Jeffery was invited to speak on the “Rule of Law” before a Cape Town audience on the same day that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir fled South Africa in contravention of a court order. The room was filled […]
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Al-Bashir: Thank goodness for the separation of powers
By Angela Mudukuti After approaching the North Gauteng High Court on Saturday, June 13, on an urgent basis the Southern Africa Litigation Centre (SALC) managed to secure an interim order preventing President Omar al-Bashir from leaving the country pending the finalisation of the matter before court. Yet to everyone’s surprise the South African government allowed […]
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SA foreign policy hits a new low
The astonishing aspect to the diplomatic debacle involving Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is not that this genocidal maniac was allowed to leave South Africa. It was that he was allowed to come here in the first place. Al-Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the […]
Posted inEquality, Media, News/Politics
Take it down USA
Nine African-Americans attending an evening Bible study session at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, US were murdered in cold blood last week. US news outlets say that South Carolina resident Dylann Roof, a young white man, has confessed to the killings. He hasn’t been convicted in a court of law […]
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The al-Bashir saga: Questions about the bottom line on SA’s sovereignty
By Jan Hofmeyr One of the more revealing aspects of this week’s fracas involving Omar al-Bashir’s entry and exit from the African Union Summit in Sandton, is the deep insecurity our government has displayed in asserting its own sovereignty. Faced with a choice between adherence to our constitution, abiding to an international convention to which […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
The June 16s of tomorrow
Yesterday we honoured Youth Day in South Africa, a day when we remember the hundreds of young people who were massacred in 1976 by the apartheid regime for their peaceful protests against a state education system that sought to forever keep them as economic slaves. It took the courage of children to bring the apartheid […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
#RachelDolezal, I cannot escape being black
We live in a world where we are told we can be whatever we want — a doctor, lawyer, astronaut. And black? Recently the Washington branch president of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People was “outed” as being white after posing as black for more than a decade. Black twitter was on […]
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The search for truth and reconciliation in Colombia
By Stephen Buchanan-Clarke Negotiators from both sides of Latin America’s longest running war met in Havana, Cuba, recently. In an encouraging movement towards a final peace agreement, which could help bring to a close a conflict that has claimed an estimated 220 000 lives, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) have […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence, General, News/Politics
South Africa and other orphaning nations (Jani Allan Part II)
Even now, a quarter of a century later, here in Auckland, New Zealand, I have mentioned to other South Africans Jani Allan’s newly released memoir Jani Confidential and they respond, “so what was she doing with that idiot ET (Eugene Terre’Blanche)?” “For God’s sake,” I reply, “give the woman a break”. As Jani Allan says […]
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The shabby sheik stirs up Durban Country Club
Groucho Marx memorably said that he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would be so undiscriminating as to have him as a member. That’s clearly not a life philosophy shared by Schabir Shaik, former financial bagman for President Jacob Zuma and now paroled convict. This week a birdie whispered in my ear that […]
Posted inGender violence, General, News/Politics
Jani Allan: Abuse and disgrace (Part I)
“My mother instilled in me from an early age that sex was the inevitable result of a man getting the better of you.” This is one of the many chuckle-worthy lines in “has been” famous South African columnist Jani Allan’s memoir, Jani Confidential. The book has glittering heaps of these verbal gems, which alone make […]