Okay, time to draw breath. Where are we at, and what is next? First of all: whatever ulterior political motives may exist, President Thabo Mbeki has made a potent statement against corruption. A new standard has been set, not just for public life and public ethics, but for the government and the African National Congress.
Stephen Ward (the Profumo Scandal). Gordon Liddy and E Howard Hunt (Watergate). Now, you can add the name of Schabir Shaik. Small men, all of them, with their 15 inglorious minutes of infamy. But with big trials and with big consequences that overshadowed their pathetic samples of human fallibility.
"The idea that you are a moderniser just because you can appear on television without a tie is wrong. It is not just about not wearing ties." So said a man called Tim Yeo, a British Conservative Party MP who, along with what seems to be every man and his dog, is a contender to succeed Michael Howard as Tory leader. It is depressing to see how low British politics has stooped.
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/ 21 February 2005
There is a New Establishment for the New South Africa, underwritten by a New Network of Influence. Such networks are, by definition, amorphous. There is no list, no membership application form. Nor can one say that there is a formulaic list of characteristics; it is not a dating agency. Richard Calland explores South Africa’s batting order of political power.
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/ 24 January 2005
The politics of social transformation continue to bedevil South African cricket. Good things are happening, but are not communicated as well as they could be. Instead, turbulence and clumsy words deflect any sense of strategic direction. Much of the time it is hard to detect any common vision for transformation in cricket and its place in wider social transformation.
It is hard not to conclude that 2004 has been a wasted year. Little has changed – and certainly not for the better. Iraq continues to be a bloody mess – but George W Bush has been returned to power. Robert Mugabe still holds power in Zimbabwe. In South Africa, the future of the Deputy President Jacob Zuma remains clouded. Time passes, nothing changes, and the reality again seeps in.
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/ 30 November 2004
The attitude of the Bush administration to the rest of the world encourages a new standard for international relations: blatant, flagrant unilateralism. It is Ali Mufuruki’s chilling phrase — the legality of the means we use to achieve this should be defined by us and nobody else — that captures the essence of this dangerous trend.
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/ 5 November 2004
George W Bush’s return to the White House has profound consequences for the world — not all of them as disastrous as they might appear at first glance, especially for progressive forces and governments. The dangerous men and women around him will regard the election result as nothing less than a ringing endorsement of their attitude to the rest of the world.
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/ 2 November 2004
My fondest political aphorism asserts that "there are only two ways out of politics: death or failure". There is something intrinsic, deep down in the psychological make-up of the politician that drives him or her on … and on and on. When Margaret Thatcher used this exact phrase a year before she was unceremoniously turfed out by the Tory party in Britain, she captured the quintessential blindness of the political animal, writes Richard Calland.
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/ 23 September 2004
Promising transparency is one thing, but the South African government delivering it is quite another. If you want to know what is going on and have the temerity to ask, the chances are that you will simply be ignored. Rather than abide by their constitutional and statutory duty to respond to requests for public information, government agencies prefer to stick their head in the sand and hope the pesky interlocutor will go away.