Monday was April Fool’s Day. We know that because there were some truly bizarre stories on the news diaries which, if you read to the bottom, told you they were April Fool’s stories. It’s a sad state of affairs when, as veteran news editor Ray Joseph once said during a stint on the Saturday Star, you can’t make this shit up.
Category Archives: Columns
President blazes trail on our rickety rails to applause
If there was ever a metaphor for the state we are in, we need look no further that a picture of a rather forlorn president looking out of a Metrorail train on Monday morning. He was stuck, like all the other commuters.
Condemnation is the only thing South Africans are good at
Whataboutery and selective (sham) sincerity are going to be the death of us.
EFF government will be the day a unicorn farts a rainbow
It was a weekend when South Africa’s four super rugby contenders rounded off their pre-season preparations with them all playing each other in super hero outfits in Cape Town. Up north, the Economic Freedom Fighters launched their May 2019 manifesto in Soshanguve.
We’re in for an interesting five months in race to parliament
Next year is going to be dominated by the general elections – and it’s going to get weird, not that it hasn’t been strange already.
What’s with white angst at the word ‘lackadaisical’?
It’s amazing what sets people’s teeth on edge – especially white people. There are many things; power, the price of it or the lack of it, water (both price and lack if you’re in Cape Town), potholes… and now lackadaisical.
BLF straw man should click ‘The Crossing’
We might think that Black Land First leader Andile Mngxitama is a straw man, a failed EFT-looter and a Gupta-bot to boot, but that doesn’t make his utterances, captured on video at a rally last Saturday and then posted for posterity on twitter any the less loathsome.
Concert chaos calls for efficiency, not hand-wringing
I spent Monday going through social media with an increasing sense of horror, reading unvarnished accounts of terror outside FNB stadium in the south of Joburg – ironically just after the Global Citizens’ Concert celebrating the centenary of Nelson Mandela’s birth.
Joburg’s golden legacy seams to be reason for toxic situation we’re in
It’s one of life’s cruellest ironies that the very reason for the creation of Johannesburg – gold – could be its death too.
What the EFF? Outrage in SA gains momentum
This was a great week for South Africa. It might not have felt it at the Zondo Commission up the road in Parktown where some of Juju’s Teletubbies swapped their overalls for ersatz camo, ADT flak jackets and handguns, while the rent-a-mob in red did their best to drown out Pravin Gordhan’s testimony.
Kevin Ritchie 