Posted inEqualityGeneral

Crime, capital and economic apartheid

In the book Blank: Architecture, Apartheid and After (edited by H Judin and I Vladislavic; David Philip Publishers, Cape Town 1998), Lindsay Bremner’s contribution, “Crime and the emerging landscape of post-apartheid Johannesburg” (pp. 48-63) uncovered the roots of racial segregation in the origins of Johannesburg as a gold mining camp in 1886. During the apartheid […]

Posted inEqualityNews/Politics

Privatisation of governance: A multi-stakeholder slippery slope

As the world debates the new set of internationally agreed sustainable development goals, influential politicians, technocrats and captains of industry are humming a common tune. They are busy promoting “public-private partnerships” as the panacea to fix governance failures, and as the silver bullet for the post-2015 agenda. Although, innocuous and even benign sounding, public-private partnerships […]

Posted inNews/Politics

The privatisation of the Zimbabwean state

By Mike Mavura There is consensus that safety, security, justice and the rule of law are core functions of the state as well as basic service delivery, financial and macro-economic management, inclusive growth and job creation, the protection of human-rights protections and so on and so forth. These are state responsibilities stipulated in the constitution […]

Posted inEnvironmentNews/Politics

Turkey: The last green space

In one of its earliest reports on the turmoil that is ripping through Turkish cities, CNN highlighted an apparent paradox: How the anti-government protests that are now being compared to the Arab Spring were sparked by a “trivial” matter: The destruction of Gezi Park in the centre of Istanbul. Gezi Park is the last remaining […]