Despite always being cloaked in the fine threads of statesmanship, the State of the Nation address (Sona) is actually party political workwear. It exists to advance the narrow interests — the year ahead — of the leader concerned. That’s true whether the leader is Jacob Zuma, Barack Obama, or David Cameron using the queen as…
The African National Congress’s centenary has not been the unalloyed propaganda opportunity it hoped for. The 100th birthday has mostly served to sear in the public mind the contrast between the ANC’s glorious past and its grubby present, as well as a rather grim-looking future. Its leaders had assumed a year-long drumming upon the ANC’s…
Political parties seethe with factional intrigue and jockey for position. As a result, party leadership is like a tightrope walk. The challenge is to retain cohesion by keeping mavericks leashed, while not stifling contrarian views that are not only inevitable, but can actually revitalise the party. With this against the tricky reality that unlike chief…
In 1915 Turkish authorities killed half a million Armenians in what most scholars — but unsurprisingly, not the Turks — agree was a genocide. Next week, the French senate is poised to pass a law that makes it a criminal offence to deny that this was genocide, to be punished with a maximum fine of…
Despite the jealous jeers from detractors at the sidelines, the African National Congress is deservedly proud of the centenary it is celebrating. It marks a remarkable achievement – the ANC’s existence as Africa’s oldest surviving political movement, as well as one of the longest in existence worldwide. From its nascence as a tiny struggle vanguard,…
‘Tis the season past of warm and fuzzy feelings to all. Or so the corporates would have us believe, as they do their annual festive fandango of pinching our cheeks with one hand and our wallets with the other. After all the fake bonhomie, the heart sings when a business behemoth that spends mega-millions on…
This week a 35-year-old South African drug trafficker, Janice Linden, was executed in China by lethal injection. That China should dare apply its own laws on its own territory has unleashed in South Africa a whirlwind of misplaced outrage and platitudinous sanctimony. The Inkatha Freedom Party termed the execution ‘unfortunate’ — which it undoubtedly was…
The internet is the new kaffeeklatsch, a digital clearinghouse of fact, hearsay, humour, folksy wisdom and calculated maliciousness, all in prodigious quantity. The viral email, in turn, is the whisper behind cupped hand of old – rippling with lightning speed through the global village. And, just occasionally, an inspired idea does the rounds. One such…
Why is it that every civilian tasked with overseeing of the SA Police Service transmogrifies into Rambo? Successive national commissioners and ministers have within days of appointment perfected gunslinger swaggers and begun laconically promising that cops will ‘shoot first’ and ‘shoot to kill the bastards’. The exception, Nathi Mthethwa, undoubtedly the best police minister that…
A belligerent government claims victory. A defiant coalition of media and civil society organisations vows that it will seek legal recourse. The decision to ram through parliament the so-called ‘secrecy Bill’ on what has been dubbed Black Tuesday – the vote was brought forward by a day in a futile attempt to avoid embarrassing comparisons…
