South Africa has always had a history of bad race relations, but after 1994 we all held high hopes of improved race relations and tolerance. How wrong we were. The issue is simply that South Africans are selfish. All race groups are! We simply refuse to step into one another’s shoes and try to understand […]
democracy
Posted inNews/Politics
Zimbabwe: The high costs paid for ‘normality’
In photography, time-lapse exposures are a useful mechanism to make imperceptible changes unreel with new clarity before the eye. Similarly, for a journalist, a series of sequential exposures to a situation can make gradual social changes suddenly obvious in a way that microscopic study does not. After a long absence from Zimbabwe, where I used […]
Posted inGeneral
A revolution of restitution
By Sharlene Swartz In President Zuma’s February State of the Nation address, he mentioned nine programmes dealing with restitution and redress that were to receive attention in the coming two to three years. Among these were (1) housing subsidies for those earning under R13000pa; (2) a retooling of the land reform process; (3) a new […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Senegal’s democratic leap forward
“Democracy is constructed like an edifice, freedom by freedom, right by right, until it reaches its snapping point.” When Senegal’s former president Abdoulaye Wade prophetically coined this saying years ago, he definitely didn’t have the 25th of March 2012 in his mind as the day when he would unceremoniously “snap”. The 85-year-old was trounced by […]
Posted inGeneral
The sad state of our nation
There is a “thing” in the air. It’s not quite fear, not quite anxiety, not quite hopelessness, a tension, a deep crack in our society which is threatening to shift the ground we walk on together, separately. We can no longer afford to carry on living side by side, barely able to look at each […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The real cause of our constitutional crisis
By Ian Dewar At the end of the explanatory memorandum to the fully amended Constitution on the info.gov.za website our Constitution is described thus: “This Constitution therefore represents the collective wisdom of the South African people and has been arrived at by general agreement.” Now, nearly sixteen years since its promulgation, there is little evidence […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Please, no God: not in our courts, not in Parliament, not in government
One of the great ironies of organised religions is that their adherents can only live in peace within a secular state. Those states that embrace a faith are usually at war with themselves or at war with others. Where governments adopt religion, they tend to corrupt and pervert that religion until it becomes something almost […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
The ANC’s “second transition”: promise, threat or propaganda?
1 The chain-reaction set off by the release of the ANC policy discussion documents last week, the foundation course for the party’s “second transition”, was to be expected. Headlines and tweets speak of “mining grabs”, “resource nationalism”, a “full scale attack” on the constitution, and the “path to a failed state”. Some say it is […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Malema is out but his message is the in thing
I was at Mbare township’s netball complex on Saturday April 3 2010 for ANC Youth League president Julius Malema’s rally. Mbare is Zimbabwe’s oldest high-density suburb and is also one of the areas that suffered tremendously from the Robert Mugabe regime’s shameful Operation Murambatsvina or Operation Get Rid of Filth, which left thousands of Zimbabweans […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
The unions: For whom do they speak?
When it comes to the Tripartite Alliance, Oscar Wilde’s observation that the proper basis for a marriage is a mutual misunderstanding seems rather apt. ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe has himself used the matrimonial metaphor. When Zuma invites the unions to join the national executive council (as he did this past week), he is extending […]
Posted inGeneral
Enough about race, let’s talk about class
If truth be told, black people are not interested in the confessions of white people who suffer with guilt from the sins of colonialism and apartheid. In the 21st century where both colonialism and apartheid have – depending on how you look at things – been defeated, we don’t want to know of people who […]
Posted inBusiness
An apartheid beneficiary’s guide to the budget
Who is an apartheid beneficiary? Anyone who was classified “white” under apartheid benefited from the system. Do we include their children almost two decades after apartheid was officially abolished? The answer must be yes. It is the moral stance. (German youth were faced with a similar dilemma. It took time. The first generation after World […]