For more than a decade, mobile retail occupied a very narrow, highly profitable but insignificant niche involving small-ticket items like ringtones and wallpaper. Unstructured and fragmented, the industry doddered around in extended infancy, suffering reputational challenges along the way due to the unscrupulous practices of some merchants who largely escaped accountability. Hit by a tsunami […]
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Posted inGeneral
No space for bullshit
By Andrew Verrijdt I recently read an article in an important research journal that left me quite perturbed. The article was about how hypnosis can help us channel the wisdom of our ancestors that exists beyond time and space. The staggering implications of this were too much for me, and I promptly went to bed. […]
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Zim’s new constitution?
By Musa Kika So finally there’s news from Harare. The second draft of the new constitution was submitted to parliament and the not-so-united government of national unity this month. For over a decade we have tried to come up with a new constitution that reflects the people’s will and replaces the 1979 Lancaster House Constitution, […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Africa on track for millennium goals
The African continent’s progress in achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 has gathered pace and credibility over the past few years. Africa continues to make incremental progress on the majority of the eight development goals aimed at improving social and economic conditions in the world’s poorest countries, which all 193 UN member […]
Posted inNews/Politics
How networking is transforming politics
The study of networks and its widening influence on international relations and global governance has grown incrementally over the past two decades. This as a result, out of an area of research that began, somewhat sceptically, to critically engage the ever evolving concept of the “state” within a 21st century context. Although defined differently depending […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Mandela’s legacy a threat
By Lukhona Mnguni Those of us who are born in July are growingly becoming either miserable or jealous over Madiba. There is hardly a fuss about anyone’s birthday but that of Nelson Mandela’s in July. However, this is not really the main point of protest over this Mandelafication of the month of July. It is […]
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A dick too far?
Given how crudely offensive it was, the reaction to the Zapiro “dick” cartoon has been surprisingly muted. No doubt, this is in part due to everyone being “penised-out” in the wake of the Brett Murray affair. After all, what more is there to say on the subject? Another reason, perhaps, is that at least Murray’s […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Dear Jonathan ‘Balls of Steel’ Shapiro
By Lukhona Mnguni I by no means wish to call you balls, even though many out there wish to call you such. Just that one of the Mail & Guardian journalists felt it appropriate to say you have “balls of steel” upon seeing the cartoon that got tongues wagging. You did after all unambiguously call […]
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Why the ANC will rule till Jesus comes
Perhaps you believe our democratic settlement was merely a ruse to get the old white regime to hand over power. When our living legend, Nelson Mandela, finally crosses the ultimate great divide, the whites will at last be driven into the sea. Perhaps you believe the TRC was a trade-off, and the Constitution an elite […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Keeping Africa’s growth up, poverty down
These are uncertain times for the global economy. The recovery in the US remains sluggish, the debt crisis in Europe is unresolved and more alarmingly, there are signs of a slower growth in China. The global economic crisis, which started in 2007, has not spared the African continent. According to the 2012 African Economic Outlook […]
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White males, naked capitalism and ending economic apartheid
The country watches transfixed as the ANC creaks and groans like a wooden ship trapped in Antarctic ice. The ANC has long kept the lid on things, like some benevolent dictator might have done. But now the ship threatens to break apart. There goes the life boat. People cling to its splintered timbers hoping these […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
ANC spaza xenophobia
I took a taxi a few days ago and listened to a conversation between two women and the taxi driver. They were talking about the mushrooming of foreign business owners in the township. The taxi was driving into Alexandra, which has seen an increase in Pakistani and Somali businesses recently. Almost every corner house has […]