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 -
[D]eath is always close by, and what's important is not to know if you can avoid it, but to know that you have done the most possible to realize your ideas.
- Frantz Fanon, 1961.
As a boy without a father of his own and living as a ward of the Thembu Regent, Jongintaba Dalindyebo, at his Great Place at Mqekezweni in the green hills of the Transkei, Rolihlahla Mandela heard stories about people like Nongqawuse and Makana, people who had passed into the realm of myth. When he washed...
Richard Pithouse -
As Numsa head towards their special congress in Boksburg next week the tensions within Cosatu, and between Numsa and the SACP, are exploding. The critical question that is up for debate at the congress is whether or not the union should break with the ANC and support another party or set up its own party. If the union does decide to break with the ANC and set up a workers’ party its political credibility, solid organisational base and capacity to generate its own resources from its...
Glenn Ashton -
Edward Snowden, Chelsea (Bradley) Manning and Julian Assange have all attained legendary status amongst citizens’ rights advocates. They have exposed the extent that modern government has, under the aegis of security and intelligence gathering, encroached into all of our lives. This blanket surveillance of the citizenry, on a previously unimaginable scale, is the current manifestation of Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother.
Yet few have heard of Jeremy Hammond, sentenced to 10 years for...
Mandisi Majavu -
The Democratic Alliance’s (DA) official position on the Employment Equity Amendment Bill reveals, among other things, the irrelevance and the inadequacy of classic liberalism in addressing racial justice in post-apartheid South Africa. The Party Leader, Helen Zille, characterises the bill as “Verwoerdian social engineering”. Zille’s reasoning is that “there is nothing progressive about coercion that enforces racial quotas…”
Zille’s...
Richard Pithouse -
In 1961 Frantz Fanon described the colonial world as “cut in two”, divided into “compartments .... inhabited by different species”. For Fanon the creation of different kinds of spaces was central to the creation of different types of people and their ordering in a hierarchy of value. He concluded that the ordering of the colonial world must be examined to “reveal the lines of force it implies”, lines of force that “will allow us to mark out the lines...
Dale T. McKinley -
“A council member told me we are too dirty to fish there … they are putting on a party to tell the world it is a beautiful country, but poor people are being trampled on.” That’s what Durban fisherman Khalil Adam told a journalist after hearing that he and thousands of fellow fisherfolk had been barred from Durban’s piers just a few months before South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 Soccer World Cup.
And, what was the reasoning behind Durban...
