White South Africans might scoff and fume but President Jacob Zuma is absolutely right. It’s the fault of apartheid. No, not every social ill – from poverty to child rape – that the president lays at the ancien regime‘s door. After all, with a moderately honest and diligent government these could be overcome, albeit gradually….
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, warned Shakespeare. And as it happens, 2013 is turning out to be a tough year for Europe’s kings and queens. Royalists argue that monarchism’s value lies in the seamless continuity that is provided by inherited office, whereas in other constitutional arrangements political leaders come and go. The…
For me, the iconic photograph of George W Bush was of the American president reading to a bunch of kindergarten kids. It was conceived as standard pre-election pap, a photo opportunity to show the caring side of the nation’s most powerful man. But as it happened the date was September 11, 2001 and the picture…
For the past two decades Afrikaners have been struggling to find a new identity. Specifically, one beyond the cliché of Boertjie as a thickset, thick-skulled, knuckle-dragging, racist Neanderthal whose simple pleasures in life are slugging Klippies-and-Coke and dancing lang arm around the braai. That is, when the Baas is not otherwise engaged dragging errant farm…
Oscar Pistorius is an inspirational icon whose fierce love for his woman inadvertently had nightmarish consequences. That’s what the cloyingly vociferous fans on his website would have us believe. Oscar Pistorius is an ego-on-stilts with temper issues which, due to his arrogance, inevitably resulted in violence. That’s what his detractors punt on social media sites…
Despite a stonewalling legal establishment, the issue of attorney misconduct is hard to fudge. The reality is that South Africa’s law societies place member interests above transparency, appear to discipline members inconsistently, and are indifferent to international benchmarks. A few weeks back this column touched on the latitude granted to the professions to regulate themselves…
The debacle involving elite South African forces in the Central African Republic, culminating in their hasty withdrawal this week, is a reminder that more often than not the military “solution” provides anything but resolution to a problem. One does not have to delve back far to find that optimistically embarked upon campaigns often deliver endings…
Politicians and officialdom are not known for their grasp of nuance. This makes for inadvertently amusing acronyms to give us the occasional giggle. We have had such gems as Boss, the apartheid era’s Bureau of State Security, Saps, the hapless police force that shot dead 34 at Marikana, and Wasps, the Worker and Socialist Party,…
Ordinary old people do ordinary old jobs. Doctors, lawyers, nurses, accountants, teachers and even – God help us – journalists and estate agents, “follow professions”. The very phrase has intimations of responding to a religious calling. These aren’t the famous “wukkers” of South African trades’ parlance. Elevated above the herd, the manner in which these…
The African National Congress is inclined towards self-defeating behaviour. Nowhere has this political schizophrenia been as glaring as in the government’s inability to deliver a sound basic education. The right to education is a cornerstone of the Freedom Charter, the founding document of the modern ANC. Appropriately so, since there is a surfeit of research…
