A week is a very long time these days. In our addiction to new news, we’ve become a society with ADD, The half-life of any given story is a day, if that. Since the story that Oscar Pistorius shot and killed Reeva Steenkamp in the early hours of Valentine’s Day, we have spoken and tweeted […]
Jacob Zuma
Posted inNews/Politics
#Zillegate
Politics is a dirty game. It’s so dirty that no one, absolutely no one can play it and come out smelling like roses. DA leader and Western Cape Premier Helen Zille is learning the hard way. I’m not sure if it’s sheer arrogance, which has characterised DA politics in recent times, or just plain naiveté […]
Posted inGeneral
A surprise honeymoon for the president
President Jacob Zuma is basking in a second honeymoon. To the much-married polygamist, such hedonism will be nothing unusual, but to Zuma the politician – widely excoriated for his failings – it brings welcome relief. For it is the political commentators and analysts, not his line-up of winsome women, who are metaphorically cradling the president’s […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The ‘uneducated’ Zuma…
The notion that a person with no formal education possesses no intellectual faculties and thus must be dismissed as a hapless intellectual zombie is so antiquated and unscientific such that even those who once held it as a basis to oppress Africans are now embarrassed when reminded of such nonsensical views. Seemingly Prince Mashele harbours […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Love thy neighbour, love thy dog
By Nadia Sanger The allegation of being “un-African” continues to be used in multiple ways by political leaders to delimit African identities under the guise of decolonisation. In news reports on President Zuma’s latest allegation against dog ownership and their treatment by black people, are a number of bizarre, and relatively normative, ideas of humans […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Zumangaung
After the release of the National Development Plan (NDP) late 2011, the alliterative 2012 seemed to hold much promise. But it became a year of talk shops. For the first time ever, the national policy and elective conferences of the ANC, SACP, and Cosatu all fell in the same year. There was no implementing the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Insurgents closing in on Zuma, he’ll be gone by 2014
The opposition’s motion of no confidence in President Jacob Zuma coincided with the Shakespearean fall of CIA director David Petraeus. Both Zuma and Petraeus know about modern insurgencies. Petraeus wrote the US Army counterinsurgency strategy handbook when America was losing her wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Zuma, with less success, is trying to fight off […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Why Motlanthe?
The road to Mangaung has revealed a lot, not only about South African politics but our society as a whole. Many seem to be looking outside themselves for solutions to our problems — waiting for a saviour to “fix” things. It’s almost as if we fear being a part of the solution. Or rather, we […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The good ship Msholozi needs Captain Courageous, not Pugwash
Just over three months ago President Jacob Zuma was sailing towards the African National Congress leadership conference with only clear water to be spied ahead of him. Now the good ship Msholozi is battered, yawing from side to side, and its skipper panicked. What happened? After all, a home province membership drive promised KwaZulu-Natal a […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Why SA demands a reluctant Obama
President Barack Obama’s re-election last week reminds us that the embrace of diversity is America’s greatest gift to the world. South Africa, like the United States, is one of the world’s most diverse countries with a similar burden of history of racial separation. This had led some of us in the small cocooned world of […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Compounds, refugees and choosing your words carefully
This week, “compound” joined refugee as an apparently innocuous word that has become the centre of a debate around racism. The circumstances under which they were used are quite different, but both presented our national spin doctors with gift-wrapped opportunities to distract the public and their supporters from real issues of delivery and corruption. In […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Stand aside Zille, Zuma wants to practise on Zapiro
President Jacob Zuma and his legions might be afraid of taking on the formidable table-thumping Godzille, but they’re game for a couple of rounds against the mild-mannered Jewish guy in the corner. The Presidency, clearly subscribers to the military axiom of picking one’s battles, was quick to challenge cartoonist Zapiro, who had just klapped Zuma […]