Thought Leader

There are currently more than 65-million refugees and displaced persons in the world. It is one of the biggest human rights crises of our time, and deserves as much media attention as possible. But what refugees don’t need is to have their plight reduced to a fashion statement. “Refugee chic.” On Friday, there was a…

By Patricia Erasmus It is a lawyer’s worst nightmare — having to watch your client die. But this was the reality for our staff when an Ethiopian man was brought to us in the final stages of double renal failure. As he lay in the parking lot of our offices, disorientated, weak and struggling to…

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…