Covid-19: Hunger is never on lockdown
Food security programmes have attracted greater attention from social investors in recent years. This trend…
C19: Social investors in an economic squeeze
SA’s efforts to contain the spread of the Coronavirus come at a high cost of…
Sin taxes – the over-reach of doing good
Trying for a healthier citizenry by discouraging the use of legal products like sugar, tobacco…
When CSI is the tipping point
If you imagine that CSI can transform SA, then you’re doing it wrong… By Paul…
Verwoerd, Zuma and the Chiefs
By William Beinart It may seem mischievous to suggest that Jacob Zuma’s thinking on chiefs…
Neither miracle nor apocalypse
By Paul Pereira We have experienced neither miracle nor apocalypse in the changes we see…
First they came for the miners…
Martin Brassey SC says that weak-kneed courts are opening the door to expropriation without compensation….
Lynching Mogoeng, burning the church
By Paul Pereira As he addressed a conference on religion, morality and the law in…
WHAM! Media Background Brief – Africa Rising?
SECTIONS (Click to Jump): The Continental Context The global rise of Africa Africa – the…
Red overalls
VIVA RED OVERALLS! VIVA DEMOCRACY! Can we please celebrate red overalls in Parliament? Not…
South African public schools: the good, the bad, the best. Part two
I think we may have forgotten just how divided we were in the past. Under…
South African public schools; the good, the bad, the best. Part one
PUBLIC SCHOOLS: THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE BEST. Talk given at the Tshikululu/IQ business Serious…
Discourse of Disillusion
By Paul Pereira This time next year we may well think we’ve been through the…
Riots: “Police under siege”
By Paul Pereira This week’s burning down of a library in Bronkhorstspruit by protesters angry…
Expats come home – but we need more. South Africa calls…
By Paul Pereira Since 1994, South Africa has suffered a net loss of highly skilled…
Whisper it Softly – Our Schools are Getting Better …
By Paul Pereira This week Minister of Basic Education Angier Motshekga reiterated…
Races mixing it up
Last month’s mourning on the death of former President Nelson Mandela had an almost Diana-esque…
SA’s “Muddle Through” is Okay
A year’s beginning is always a good time for refreshing hope, but realism is key….
Counting Blessings
By Paul Pereira There must be few countries where the discussion about…
The rise of SA’s women entrepreneurs
By Paul Pereira For all the improvements in living conditions, income, health and longevity these…
Companies play ball with NPOs
In this season of giving, it is perhaps encouraging to note that the private sector…
A Plan Fanciful Enough to Consider
By Paul Pereira As South Africa gets ready for a long general election campaign that…
The end of “over-population”
The past two centuries have seen such exponential population growth across the world that the…
Unions in decline
As our trade unions flex their muscles in a year that has been a reminder…
A Healthier Continent Could get Better
Of all the things we can measure when looking at how society is faring, surely…
Our MPs crowd our jails
Nobody likes prisoners and nobody wants to be one. But the state of a country’s…
Today In Fact, 22 October
The end of the World was supposed to happen today in 1844. The followers of…
Unification is slow and difficult
It is 22 years since the reunification of Germany, just under 20 years since South…
Welfare and the Debt Trap
South Africa has built proportionately the world’s biggest welfare state in just 20 years. We’ve…
Globalisation – confounded by success
We humans are a funny lot. Faced with potential catastrophe, we fret that the sky…
Families Foundering in SA
Despite the fairly large drop in crime rates since 1994 (this year’s upward blip notwithstanding),…
Ubuntu Gone Wrong
I have been accused (and rightly so, to some extent) of being too pro-Africa, without…
20 years of transformation
If the chattering classes think the ANC will be cut down to size next year,…
Public schools get better
[Image above courtesy GeoffreyWhiteway/Freerangestock.com] It’s almost a standard shibboleth that how our schools perform will…
The SANDF – leaner, but not meaner…
As the SANDF readies for fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, ghosts…