Thought Leader

By Michael Nassen Smith The BEE drum has been beaten many times before on both the right and the left on South Africa’s political spectrum. A recent piece on PoliticsWeb penned by John Kane-Berman gave what has become a standard liberal right critique of BEE. I think Berman is right to bemoan the influence of…

Thabo Mbeki for a long time used to set and drive the public socio-political discourse agenda in South Africa. Journalists would excitedly wait for his regular newsletter and general musings. After Mbeki was dethroned, we entered an interregnum where political discourse largely oscillated between affairs concerning the person of Jacob Zuma and an extended obituary…

“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…

Development policy in post-apartheid South Africa has traditionally focused on the debate over the superiority of either state-controlled or market systems. Like many other developing world countries before it, South Africa expected that globalisation and the replacement of traditional industries by modern sectors would become a panacea for economic development in our country. Based on…