On Sunday night President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered the performance of his career to date. The 90-minute delay beforehand did threaten to eclipse the announcement, but in the end the man lampooned for having no backbone had a TV moment that was second only to Nelson Mandela in 1992.
Category Archives: Columns
Sane-tise to keep from catching the mania contagion
La Dolca Vita took a body blow earlier this week after the Italian government extended its novel Coronavirus Covid 19 quarantine of part of the north of the country to the entire nation. You can say what you like about the Italians, there have been no half measures; the schools were closed, then the big soccer fixtures were played but to empty stadia, finally there was a lockdown on movement until April 4.
Coronavirus – not something to be ‘sneezed at’
Plagues and pestilence are no laughing matter – they’re certainly not to be sneezed at – but it’s difficult not to wonder if there isn’t just a hint of hysterical giddiness (and hypocrisy) about the Coronavirus sweeping the globe.
‘Boy editor’ Shaun Johnson was an icon of South African journalism
He might have written his name in lights in this newspaper group, but his work extended far beyond that; as a precocious young journalism student drafting the business plan for what would become The New Nation, doing pioneering training work on the Weekly Mail on his return from Oxford where he’d been a Rhodes Scholar and even doing radio journalism on the legendary Capital 604 radio station.
Those in power choose to remain powerless to lift SA from poverty
The mayor of one of South Africa’s biggest metros joined a march by the residents of one of Eskom’s biggest defaulters – against the cash-strapped power utility this week.
Why this is not simply a Cyril spring
We are living in incredible times. One day we’ll be able to look back and ask ‘where were you when…’ about the events of the last two months.
We dare not forget, we dare not trivialise the suffering under apartheid
Apartheid was a crime against humanity. It is not measured solely by the body bags of Sharpeville, Soweto, Boipatong or all the others, but because of the fact it dehumanised millions of South Africans across generations for the benefit of a minority, aided and abetted by the many collaborators within and without the Bantustans.
‘Hammer and tongs’ and the consequences on social media
Last week’s storm in the Twitterverse of a video showing a naked man going at it hammer and tongs with a woman in a yellow dress atop a desk in a Sandton office seems to have subsided.
Load shedding sheds light on our divisions
The throbbing of generators has become the white noise of the lived reality of South Africa’s affluent suburbs, a bizarrely more comforting accompaniment to the early morning discordance of burglar alarms. In the townships, it’s the stench of burning rubber and armed militias around the illegal reconnections at Eskom substations.
Should rapists be chemically castrated?
League president Bathabile Dlamini, who isn’t perhaps a natural standard bearer for gender sensitivity, wants rapists jailed, denied parole and – and chemically castrated.
Kevin Ritchie 