One of the readings that I visited as part of the project I am currently busy with is Professor Mahmood Mamdani’s book ‘Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities’ (2020). The book helps one navigate some of the complex questions that confront us today,What the [...]
As we reminiscence on the closing of the curtain by a cohort of leadership in our country and the World, we are saddened to hear about the passing on of one of Africa’s epitome of leadership, Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu, the former Archbishop of the Anglican Church of the [...]
The Covid-19 pandemic has wrecked havoc to many a human system and ways of life that humanity will emerge beyond it with new behaviours and an altered civilisation. The greatest of human socialisation institutions where norms, values, and mores are transmitted to each other and modelled for the next [...]
The Constitution of South Africa directs that 'in the Republic, government is constituted as national, provincial, and local spheres of government which are distinctive, interdependent, and interrelated. All spheres of government and all organs of state within each sphere must observe and adhere to principles of co-operative government'. Amongst others [...]
The stability of an order is a function of how integrated or complementary its political elite is. Elite consensus on basic values that should undergird a society is as much a prerequisite for a high performance political system as it is a potential guarantor for unresponsive and oligarchic government. [...]
Few policy issues have attracted more attention in an ANC Presidential term than the challenge of protecting the post-1994 gains, as in a Ramaphosa term. The African National Congress has, and through struggle and sacrifice, sponsored the idea of freedom for the majority of South Africans, most of whom are Black, [...]
The governing African National Congress refers to the 1994 political settlement as a 'democratic breakthrough' rather than a year of liberation. In government as a governing party they celebrate 27 April as Freedom Day. Such is the depth of uncertainty on the meaning of South Africa's political settlement to [...]
It is no longer difficult to understand why society seems to have started dreaming of a future without the ANC as a governing party. As unemployment figures grow, crime and criminality are rewarded, public infrastructure is collapsing, disposable income is raided by fuel increases and their attendant inflationary [...]
The South African liberation movement complex, historically led by the African National Congress (ANC), and the opposition complex which is clearly bankrolled by the economic establishment of South Africa anchored by an extractive capitalist class committed to protecting current privileges bequeathed to them by a history of dispossession, are [...]
Our cultural fragility as a people will always be a function of whether it is built and/or based entirely on the memories of the elders whose eldership we embrace. When our tradition and humanity becomes our source of security and our being refuses to go the way of [...]
