An independence advocacy group believes that a growing number of the party’s MPs and leaders in the province support autonomy or secession
Gwede Mantashe
Posted inNews/Politics
Popular psychology for SA’s politically frustrated
Forget the Rorschach test. There’s no need to peer at inkblots to divine psychological conditions. The ANC government is a living breathing Petri dish, incubating almost every cognitive deviance to have graced a psychiatrist’s couch. Let’s start with multiple personality disorder. Or could it rather be mirrored-self misidentification, the delusion that the person in the […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Time for the media to catch a wake-up over the EFF
It’s easy to forget that 94 out of every 100 voters in the May general election did not choose the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). Were one dependent only on the South African media, one would easily come away with the impression of that statistical reality being reversed. For such is the media enchantment with the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
‘Hitler got it right’ goes multiracial
A posting by Rene Smit, an obscure ANC party worker in the Western Cape, quickly went viral when it emerged that it sang the praises of Adolf Hitler for killing off the Jews and intimated that had been retro-actively justified by the behaviour to date of those Jews who survived. The post featured a picture […]
Posted inNews/Politics
ANC learning all the wrong lessons from Nairobi tragedy
There are lessons for South Africa from last week’s Al-Shabab terror attack on a Nairobi shopping mall. Unfortunately the lessons that this government chooses to draw from the tragedy are all the wrong ones. African National Congress Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe says that the Kenyan attack ‘highlighted the need for tighter immigration laws’. There was also […]
Posted inNews/Politics
With an ‘oppositionist’ Cosatu, who needs a DA?
ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe is not so happy with the “oppositionist” posture that Cosatu and some unions within the federation take when dealing with the ruling party. The veteran former unionist surely feels that “as comrades with same revolutionary parent (read goal), let us talk gently and say our opprobrium behind closed doors, not […]
Posted inNews/Politics
FNB’s Steve the answer to the ANCYL’s PR woes
The election of Pope Francis by a conclave of cardinals in the Vatican, the African National Congress Youth League’s NEC being dissolved by the ANC and the Oscar Pistorius shooting incident have been dwarfed into insignificance again this week as “recordings” of “Steve” from beeb Bank to FNB customers are played and replayed on 94.7 […]
Posted inNews/Politics
‘Ramphele, an agent of the imperial ghost’
The imperial ghost is alive and kicking. The big, bad, ugly angel of darkness is gearing-up to roam the streets of South Africa and has apparently found itself an unlikely host … Mamphela Ramphele. The imperial ghost, as you might know is sometimes based in the US, sometimes the UK and sometimes the European Union. […]
Posted inGeneral
Blade Nzimande, the new Juju
Communism, as formulated by Germans Marx and Engels in their industrialised continent far from the African situation, is seminally Eurocentric. When the South African Communist Party was founded by white, middle class manufacturers and merchants, disproportionately Jewish, Soviet leaders felt blacks weren’t yet advanced enough for Communism. During the 1921 Rand Revolt, the communists were […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Mantashe, Mulder and other Africans
‘Race’* is an overused concept in South African discourses that frequently hides more than it reveals. Therefore, it remains imperative to scrutinise the particular historical context in which ‘race’ is wielded. When we discern how ‘race’ is applied to maintain or expand power, we can resist attempted reactivations of the apartheid template and disrupt ‘whiteness’ […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Playing the victim: Malema’s survival strategy
ANC Youth League president Julius Malema and company have the ruling party exactly where they want it to be – i.e. they have got the ANC to mete out the harshest punishment possible. To their credit, I’m sure the ANC itself knows exactly where Malema wants it to be. It has become clear that Malema […]