When a group of members of the South African Communist Party’s central committee start advocating a ”third way” — even describing themselves as ”the third wayers”, at least among themselves — then you know that the party is ideologically at a loose end.
It’s a big year for elections — and pre-elections — from Africa to Europe and the United States. France creaks at the seams, yet Nicolas Sarkozy, the French mirror to George W Bush’s neocon agenda and the man most likely to fan the flames of social unrest, leads the opinion polls ahead of the April 21 ballot.
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/ 27 February 2007
So dominant are Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that it is easy to forget New Labour’s forefather — Neil Kinnock, party leader from 1983 to 1992. As South Africa faced its emergency in 1987, Kinnock pulled the British Labour Party back from its own abyss. It had just lost its third election to Margaret Thatcher and would lose one more to the Tories, in 1992, in an agonisingly close campaign.
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/ 23 February 2007
Is it arrogance, complacency, fecklessness, dishonesty, disingenuousness or self-delusion that leads the ANC to insult our intelligence with its defence of the Progressive Business Forum (PBF)? Or a dismal combination of all of the above, asks Richard Calland.
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/ 19 February 2007
Credit where it is due: one ‘c’ was better than none. Thabo Mbeki’s third-last State of the Nation speech passed the “crime test”, but failed the corruption one. As an avid reader of the <i>Financial Times</i> himself, Mbeki would have noted that the influential newspaper led page 2 last Saturday with the story that the South African president had responded to pressure to speak strongly on the threat of crime.
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/ 13 February 2007
Beneath the radar of much political reportage and commentary, Parliament is conducting a constitutional review that is likely to have profound implications for the quality and robustness of South Africa’s democracy. An ad hoc committee chaired by veteran ANC MP and human-rights law professor Kader Asmal must make recommendations on the future of the state institutions supporting democracy.
At first, there could be no mention of the ”C” word. Not Crime, but Corruption. To talk of it was to commit an act of irredeemable political incorrectness: this was the mid-Nineties and the heady heyday of the Mandela era — the democratic liberators, paragon of all virtue — masking the less congenial strands of the ANC’s diverse underground history.
If it can reasonably be defined as a political philosophy or rhetorical brand that sticks up for the common person against the elite, why is it that “populism” is so widely denigrated? When American liberals speak of Hugo Chávez as a populist, it is not a term of endearment.
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/ 12 September 2006
Last Monday, in the middle of the Kennedy Road informal settlement where he lives, S’bu Zikade, the leader of Abahlali baseMjondolo — the shack dwellers’ movement of Durban — made speech in which he reminded the people who live there that the rights in the Constitution are ”for us, and not just the rich people”.
<i>Pity the Nation</i>. The title of veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk’s seminal 1990 book, subtitled <i>Lebanon at War</i>, is resonant again. After a difficult period of reconstruction — having finally attracted a steady flow of export business and tourism, and having rebuilt its infrastructure and social cohesion — Lebanon once again looks into the abyss.