South Africans celebrate the enigmatic historical figure of Shaka Zulu, the military revolutionary who rose from illegitimacy to be a unifying monarch who used alliances and the occasional judicial assassination to build a Zulu powerhouse on South Africa’s east coast in the 1800s. Ironically, while Shaka’s use of military power, diplomacy and patronage succeeded at […]
Jacob Zuma
Posted inEquality, Gender violence, Media, News/Politics
The Remember Khwezi protest has shone a spotlight on our society’s patriarchal nature
In the last chapter of The Kanga and the Kangaroo Court, author Mmatshilo Motsei starts her concluding remarks by quoting Sello wa Loate: [w]e need to re-evaluate our value system as a society. The highly competitive environment we have created and the resultant conflict and pressure on different sections of our society make post-apartheid black […]
Posted inNews/Politics
‘We haven’t failed, someone is deliberately making us fail’
President Jacob Zuma is using all the wiles of a spoilt child trying to get his parents to buy a coveted toy. Except that this particular desired bauble – a new presidential jet with all the bells-and-whistles – will cost around R4 billion. And that’s a price tag to be picked up not by affluent and […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Zapiro, monkeys and red herrings
Editorial cartooning must be one of the most difficult jobs out there. Not only must the cartoonist be technically adept when it comes to caricature, he or she also has to find the humour in situations that often, on the surface, aren’t especially funny. Day in and day out, cartoonists have to generate ideas and […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Zuma washes his hands of a looming crisis
To state that South Africa is spinning towards a serious crisis is not hyperbole. There are many factors causing this, including failed governance and delivery, but at its nub it is triggered by greed and powered by a ruthless determination to subvert our democracy and the mechanisms that protect it. This is not yet the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
SA’s number one VVIP deserves an upgrade
The department of defence has an irrevocable obligation to buy what its minister describes as “a VVIP” jet. That means an aircraft for a Very Very Important Person. But jump to no conclusions as to who this VVIP is. It is not the man who is referred to by his scurrying minions as “Number one”. […]
Posted inNews/Politics
South Africans’ sneering antipathy to Trump is misplaced
The sneering antipathy and moral condescension of seemingly the entire South Africa towards Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for the United States presidency, makes me chuckle. We are, after all, the nation that elected Jacob Zuma – a man who is as morally dubious and certainly far less competent than Trump – to […]
Posted inNews/Politics
On Workers’ Day, it’s Anarchy vs Chaos
Certain common word usages literally get my blood boiling. Okay, that one was on purpose. Slate’s great podcast, Lexicon Valley, discusses all kinds of language-related topics, like the evolution of swearing, the etymology of the word “dude”, how children acquire language. They make it a principle to stay away from superior judgments on so-called incorrect […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Live by the legal sword, die by it
Recourse to the courts is often the first refuge of the scoundrel with deep pockets. A deliberately protracted judicial process can be used by the wealthy to delay, to avoid, to obfuscate, and to bully their adversaries into submission. It’s an approach that has worked well for various South African rogues, embezzlers, crooks and unsavoury […]
Posted inNews/Politics
While the ANC factions manoeuvre, SA drifts in limbo
A national crisis is always best resolved quickly. Investors and voters both react negatively to political paralysis and institutional dysfunction. And since protracted uncertainty begets instability, it’s mostly better to find a quick patch and keep the momentum going than it is to embark on an agonising and usually elusive search for the “best” solution. […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Time to ditch SA’s failed Moral Regeneration Movement
Universal brotherhood. World peace. Nuclear disarmament. And to this beseech-the-fairies wish list of above, you can add the concept of moral re-armament in South Africa. All laudable but irretrievably doomed objectives. What brought this to mind was the weekend speech by Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor, in which she noted that assassinated SA Communist […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Time for Zuma to go
By Motsumi Maubane The perception that the Gupta family has a hold on President Jacob Zuma, in my mind, constitutes high treason and a serious threat to our national security for this would compromise our constitutional democracy and sovereignty of our South African state. Essentially it would mean the family has usurped executive authority from […]