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.
Glenn Ashton -
The reconfiguration of the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs has come into sharp focus as local government elections draw closer. The notion of locating traditional affairs at the local government level has detractors and I count myself among them.
The conflation of the two means that patriarchal interpretations of social and developmental priorities will continue to undermine and dispossess women living in those communities.
The battle between...
Dale T. McKinley -
Local government in South Africa, like many of our country’s mining operations, is in deep trouble. The slow but sure exhaustion of mineral-bearing seams, the insufficient and crumbling underground infrastructure and the exploitative extraction-at-all-costs mentality that so negatively characterises our mining sector can all be (metaphorically) applied to that level of government which resides at the coalface of our democracy. The resultant and ongoing crisis, for both, has long been in...
Richard Pithouse -
Life, ordinary life, is meant to follow certain rhythms. We grow, seasons change and we assume new positions in the world. When you have finished being a child you put away childish things and move on to the next stage of life. But there is a multitude of people in this world who cannot build a home, marry and care for their children and aging parents. There is a multitude of people who are growing older as they remain stuck in an exhausting limbo, perhaps just managing to scrape together the...
Jane Duncan -
South Africa is gearing up for its third local government election. In an attempt to break with the authoritarianism of his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, President Jacob Zuma has promised a new approach to these elections, where more responsive candidates are selected that genuinely represent the will of the people.
To this end, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has committed itself to greater community involvement in the selection of candidates. Branch members select candidates who are...
Richard Pithouse -
Whenever they find a reality that doesn’t suit them / they alter it with a bulldozer - Mahmoud Darwish, A State of Siege, Ramallah, 2002.
Mahmoud Darwish, a poet who wrote, especially towards the end of his life, with a real confidence in what he called the butterfly's burden, the social weight carried by delicate beauty, began his life in al-Birwa, a village in Galilee. He was seven years old when his family fled the Israeli military in 1948 and his life was spun between...
Jane Duncan -
In a recent opinion piece entitled 'A threefold crisis, but Zuma is listening', political analyst Adam Habib argued that the balance of power has shifted towards the poor under Jacob Zuma's presidency, leading to the trade union movement and the South African Communist Party (SACP) having more of a say in the affairs of the country. Furthermore, Zuma has proved to be much more responsive to public opinion than his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, in the process paying attention to citizen and...
