The mother’s anger has somehow been treated like a sinful indulgence, as though women are supposed to respond with a smile in the face of provocation.
Presumably out of the best of motives, World Bank’s investors have put money into a company whose behaviour looks like it is fleecing the poor.
There is a refreshing honesty in Belamant’s statements outside the court. “We’re not a government: we are a company. We work for profit,” he said.
If Moyane’s motive was not to improve the service or its business of tax collection, we have to ask what his real motives might be.
Qwelane’s utterances are at last being examined legally to decide whether his insistence on his right to “free expression” has caused harm.
The court has instructed government to consider how projects would contribute to climate change.
It is like a tall drink of cool water on a sweltering day seeing our MPs do what they are mandated (and paid) to do.
The inquiry is a reminder that democratic mechanisms are there, to be used by South Africans to drag some kind of accountability out of the executive.
As the South African state has become more authoritarian, it has also increasingly come to believe that the law is there to be bent to its own ends.
Nowhere else is it so evident that the ANC is its own opposition – and probably its own worst enemy.