Anyone perturbed at hearing that almost 1 500 serving officers of the South African Police Service (SAPS) have criminal records – including for murder, rape and assault – can stop fretting. The nation’s top cop has reassured the Western Cape legislature that SAPS is a “good service” staffed by “several committed men and women”. Of […]
News/Politics
Posted inNews/Politics
Bloody nose for Wits BDS activists
It is surely a measure of my willingness to suffer martyrdom for my faith that I was prepared to endure ninety minutes of ghastly squawking at last night’s jazz recital at Wits. The Daniel Zamir Quartet, comprising four Israeli musicians, was to play in the Great Hall, and it was essential that there be a […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The Mandela cult
“Happy is the country that has no history” is a proverb attributed to the French philosopher Montesquieu. In 1994, South Africa — up until then a synonym for backwardness and brutality — was reborn as a democracy. A new epoch dawned. A promised land beckoned. And the man who had come to embody that hope […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
Let them eat cake
This morning I crawled off an overnight flight from Paris, gave thanks for unlimited bandwidth, and started scrolling through Twitter. There I found an opinion piece by Peter Delmar on the Times Live site. I paused to read it because he had obviously been to Paris for a family holiday, just as I had. I […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Native life in South Africa
While watching the stories of people’s shacks being flooded in Cape Town’s informal settlements recently, I thought of Sol Plaatje and his manuscript that was published in 1916, Native life in South Africa. In response to the Native Land Act of 1913 he wrote a book highlighting the consequences of the act as well as […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Mandela: Let’s have less spin doctor and more medical doctor
The African National Congress probably couldn’t care less about the chatter that Nelson Mandela is now a medical zombie, alive but not living. It is widely speculated on social networks that the 95-year-old Madiba will remain in intensive care electronic limbo until his passing can be unveiled to the maximum benefit of the ANC in […]
Posted inNews/Politics
An inconvenient truth about paedophilia
The busting of a large child-porn ring involving prominent South Africans including a private school headmaster unwraps another sordid layer of our society. It wasn’t difficult to put a name and a face to the headmaster in question. It appears that he was a very good and popular headmaster. Putting myself however in the shoes […]
Posted inHealth, News/Politics
Why MSF decided to leave Somalia
By Dr Unni Karunakara Our announcement on August 14 that we were closing all our medical programmes in Somalia sent shockwaves through political and humanitarian communities. It came at a moment when world leaders, for the first time in decades, began making positive noises about a country on the road to recovery and with a […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Liberia’s children can help weed out corruption
By Robtel Neajai Pailey I remember the first time I stared corruption in the face. It was 2010, and I was chairwoman of a Liberian government committee responsible for reforming the awarding of international scholarships. We discovered that a group of 18-year-old boys had forged their national exam records to become eligible for a scholarship […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Does media anaesthetise us to the suffering of the poor?
Last week saw the memorial of the Marikana Massacre unfold on national television, namely on eNCA, which rolled out an entire day dedicated to the miners that died in the massacre. On the surface this appeared to be a noble cause that could be celebrated as the mainstream finally seeing things from the working-class perspective. […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Public Works: Finding small solutions to big problems
The most rash African National Congress electoral promise in 1994 was ‘jobs for all’. Two decades later it must be clear, even to dreamy ideologues, that the state creation of employment is a fraught and challenging task. Key to any attempt at mass job creation – as opposed to the political cronyism and nepotism that […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality, News/Politics
Marikana: When neoliberalism negates human rights
It is one year to the day that the Marikana massacre unfolded on the Wonderkop koppie and was witnessed on national television. The trauma of this spectacle still hangs heavy in the air for many who are unable to make any sense of this heinous occurrence, because there is no making sense of it. There […]