The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
The relationship between democracy and governance and the realisation of socio-economic rights is an important issue for debate. SACSIS seeks to understand this relationship and identify issues that act as barriers to pro-poor democracy.
Richard Pithouse -
Last week Inigo Gilmore’s documentary, South Africa’s Dirty Cops, was screened on British television. It deals with the torture and murder that have become common at the hands of the South African police and includes an examination of the two most high profile cases of political violence on the part of our police in recent years – the murder of Andries Tatane in Ficksburg in April 2011 and the Marikana Massacre in August last year.
The scale of the Marikana Massacre, in...
Frank Meintjies -
The public has watched with amazement the unseemly squabble between members of the Mandela family. There is likely to be, going forward, similar squabbling between political parties over the legacy of Mandela. They will scramble to mobilise his legacy as part of their bid to increase popular support.
We have already seen the two big parties lock horns over who has the right to cite Madiba’s sayings and invoke his actions during campaigning. Mandela’s own party would like the...
Fazila Farouk -
United States (US) President, Barack Obama’s trip to South Africa is a contentious issue that has animated media reporting and provided the necessary ammunition to fire up a debate that pits left against right.
On the one hand, we have the South African Communist Party, Cosatu and some of its affiliates, as well as student and Muslim organisations demanding answers from the US president for a foreign policy agenda that keeps the world trapped in a state of paranoid fear, while on the...
Dale T. McKinley -
Here’s a sobering fact: none of us, whether in South Africa or in most any other democratic country for that matter, really knows what our government security-intelligence agencies (‘spooks’ for short) are up to; and, that is exactly the way the spooks want to keep it.
That’s why the recent actions of Edward Snowden - a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the United States CIA and employee of various defence contractors who worked at the government’s...
Glenn Ashton -
Perhaps the greatest single failure of governance in the new democratic dispensation is situated at the local government level. While some improvement has occurred, the lives of far too many citizens, especially those in small towns and rural areas, remain fundamentally unchanged. Desperate migrants from rural areas to the urban heartlands are also seriously compromised, competing directly with better-equipped, more skilled economic refugees from elsewhere on the subcontinent.
The term...
Michael S. Wilson -
So many things have been written about, and discussed by, Professor Chomsky, it was a challenge to think of anything new to ask him: like the grandparent you can’t think of what to get for Christmas because they already have everything.
So I chose to be a bit selfish and ask him what I’ve always wanted to ask him. As an out-spoken, actual, live-and-breathing anarchist, I wanted to know how he could align himself with such a controversial and marginal position....
