Thought Leader

By Balt Verhagen In Who am I? Kopano Matlwa Mabaso chronicles her hopes and bitter disappointments since 1998 when she started high school. This prompted me, a person three times her age, to recount some of my own experiences during the same period when “we were well settled into our new democracy”. Around 1998 I…

My friend Boris was distraught. He was clutching R2000′s worth of crumpled banknotes and muttering to himself. The money, it turns out, was a rejected bribe. He had never heard of anything like it: a driving test inspector — a police official! — refusing to sell a licence for cash! “R2000 is a month’s wages!”…

By Bright Simons A cynic with an attitude called Aldous Huxley once made some remarks to the effect that experts go on meandering excursions in search of understanding only to discover at the destination that non-experts had been at the same spot all along. One matter that unites development experts and non-experts alike is the…