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.
Saliem Fakir -
Somebody coming from Mars would be forgiven for thinking that the era of black rule is rife with corruption and nepotism.
The white world would have been thought of as being better if one is to believe that its history was always populated with saints. History though. is infrequently remembered for what it is, seldom uncovered for all of its diversity and always selectively appropriated. Short memory, too, is the enemy of history -- and there is lots of it going around.
When it comes to...
Richard Pithouse -
The rebellions in the ANC against Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma have broken the hermetic seal that had been tightly wound around electoral politics by the dominance of the ANC since 1994. It is not yet clear which social forces will be able to manoeuvre most effectively on this new and, for the moment, more open terrain. It is possible that once a deal is brokered between the ambitions and principles of the unruly mix of corrupt crony capitalists, conservative patriarchs, liberals, social...
John Reynolds -
Is it not ironic that we may soon have to call on Thabo Mbeki to be the 'mediator' in the political fall-out between the ANC and the break-away faction led by Lekota and Shilowa?
Of course, we should be concerned by the nastiness of the fall-out, but we shouldn't be surprised. Like in all families – which very often political parties become – arguments and break-ups tend to take a more vicious form precisely because they are more personal. It's not strangers fighting, where there...
Saliem Fakir -
It must have started somewhere of course. Someone let the genie out of the bottle. Thabo Mbeki denies he let it out. He believes he had good grounds to fire Jacob Zuma and disagrees with Judge Nicholson's interpretation that he used the National Prosecuting Authority to pursue a political vendetta.
He has also challenged Zuma to debate him live on TV, Obama and McCain style, in an attempt to once and for all set the record straight. Zuma refuses the duel.
In the meanwhile, Mbeki has filed...
Ibrahim Steyn -
Protagonists of Jacob Zuma describe the ANC’s 52nd National Conference in Polokwane as an historic moment in the life of the organisation intended to hand back power to the masses over its body politic. Democracy inside the ANC had to be extricated from the strictures of the authoritarian bureaucratic style of politics personified by Thabo Mbeki.
However, as already observed by many analysts, the recent political parlance and practice of the high ups in the Zuma camp have cast...
John Reynolds -
Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20 vision. I’m sure that if the present leadership of the ANC could have predicted the fall-out of its recall of President Thabo Mbeki, it would have hesitated long enough to maybe, just maybe, not go through with it.
But such was the heady brew of power and retribution at the time that zeal trumped reason – where, to paraphrase the philosopher Robert C Solomon, a sense of injustice became wholly obsessed with resentment and a preoccupation for...
