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/ 11 December 2007
There is a moment when you can sense the power draining away, when a point of no return has been reached and passed. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is facing that moment now in Britain, as a sense of staleness, sleaze and incompetence overwhelms his government.
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/ 27 November 2007
There are two really big problems with the struggle for leadership of the ANC and they are both covered by the deployment of one simple metaphor: the iceberg. Most of what you see is the tip protruding from the water. Much of what matters is below. But the water is very dark and very cold. Few people, if any, really know all that is happening below the surface.
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/ 13 November 2007
At last Mark Gevisser’s long-awaited biography of Thabo Mbeki is out. For a project that began in 1999 and took eight years to complete, the title <i>The Dream Deferred</i> seems especially apt. As a subject, Mbeki is a walking "writer’s block". Not only is he a densely complex person, as the book confirms, but he shimmers in the light, making it all but impossible to have a single thesis to explain the man.
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/ 29 October 2007
Our political culture remains decidedly short of real satire; surely it is a test of the robustness of a democracy: if it can’t take the humorous hits, our political leadership is hardly likely to be willing to answer the difficult questions. Jacob Zuma has sued Zapiro, the cartoonist: What does this tell us about his attitude to public accountability?
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/ 16 October 2007
This is no time for panic, or for manic depression of the sort that Xolela Mangcu displayed in a column last weekend. This is politics, not rugby — so the national state of mind should be governed by clear-headed questions, not by the hyperbole of triumph and disaster. We must keep a sense of perspective.
Columnists should generally resist the temptation to write about themselves. Unless purely comic, the column that begins "I want to tell you about my awful experience on the Guava Fruit Airline the other day" is a self-indulgent expropriation of a public space. But writing about the organisation that one has been employed by for 12 years is I hope forgiveable, especially if it seeks to make a broader point.
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/ 18 September 2007
Weak governments love to bitch and moan, blaming others for their own failings. One month the media, the next the judges. Strong governments get on with the business of governing, reserving their bile for those whose power permits them to frustrate government policy.
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/ 4 September 2007
The notion of having both a president and a prime minister is intriguing. It is also gathering some traction behind the scenes. The question, however, is whether it is attractive because it has genuine merit, or because it provides a way out of the appalling mire in which the African National Congress has immersed itself.
At the very moment when it should be offering a different approach to politics, the SACP has got itself into a right pickle on the money front. With Thabo Mbeki doing his very best King Lear impression — minus the truculent daughters, but replete with one-eyed errors of judgement — SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande is no less on the back foot.
It took the human species about one million years to reach a population of one billion. Nowadays, we add another billion at the rate of every 14 years. Whereas a century ago, only 10% of the population lived in cities, by 2050 it will be closer to 75%. Tens of thousands of people migrate to cities every day. New megacities are sprouting, many of them on coastlines.