Why are South Africans so good at doing bad things together, but not good things? A lot of people like to say “the rainbow nation is dead, we can never get on”. But every day people are proving that fact wrong. White and black policemen working together, manning the machine guns like brothers, mowing down […]
corruption
Posted inNews/Politics
How far we’ve fallen
By Rafique Gangat As SA’s first career diplomat of colour, I am pained to learn of what is happening to my beloved country. I took part in the painful struggle for freedom and eventually shared in the joy of liberation and democracy in 1994 and since then worked tirelessly to build the new SA. My […]
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Joyce Banda: Not your average president
By Anneke Meerkotter If you do a search of Joyce Banda’s speech on May 18 2012, you will find a range of international media articles with headlines such as “Malawi president vows to repeal gay ban” (BBC, Huffington Post); “Malawi to overturn homosexual ban” (Guardian); “Malawi president to repeal gay laws” (Al-Jazeera) or “Malawi’s Banda […]
Posted inGeneral
Apartheid for better or for worse
I have fallen into the trap myself: become so outraged by government mismanagement that I wanted to beat them with the biggest stick I could: “It is worse than it was under apartheid!” Unfortunately, this is not what “worse than under apartheid” communicates to most South Africans. It is all too easily read as “better […]
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Condoning corruption: The Achilles heel of SA’s democracy
In the dying days of the old National Party regime, when I was still working at the old Africana Museum (now Museum Africa), I was given a first-hand taste of the corruption that was by then running rampant at all levels of government. It was just before the 1992 summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain and […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The ANC must show leadership and reverse patronage and corruption
The reality of post-apartheid South Africa is one that shows the incapacity of the state to deliver services to the poor and marginalised. Service delivery protests are a frequent occurrence throughout the country. At the centre of the protests is a demand that the ANC must demonstrate leadership and decisiveness in fighting patronage and corruption […]
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Corruption: The ANC just has to say no
It’s difficult to get excited about the Congress of South African Trade Unions’ (Cosatu) recent launch of a dedicated unit to combat corruption. Like the proverbial pebble in the ocean, Cosatu’s Corruption Watch will almost certainly sink without a ripple. It will plink down next to the National Anti-Corruption Forum, the Forum Against Corruption, the […]
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1994 to now: How did we get here?
By Balt Verhagen In Who am I? Kopano Matlwa Mabaso chronicles her hopes and bitter disappointments since 1998 when she started high school. This prompted me, a person three times her age, to recount some of my own experiences during the same period when “we were well settled into our new democracy”. Around 1998 I […]
Posted inNews/Politics
SA’s (infuriating) corruption deficit
My friend Boris was distraught. He was clutching R2000’s worth of crumpled banknotes and muttering to himself. The money, it turns out, was a rejected bribe. He had never heard of anything like it: a driving test inspector — a police official! — refusing to sell a licence for cash! “R2000 is a month’s wages!” […]
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Data gaga
By Bright Simons A cynic with an attitude called Aldous Huxley once made some remarks to the effect that experts go on meandering excursions in search of understanding only to discover at the destination that non-experts had been at the same spot all along. One matter that unites development experts and non-experts alike is the […]