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?
SACSIS promotes the principle of just economies. We are opposed to economic development that violates social and economic rights and increases inequalities in the pursuit of economic growth.
Fazila Farouk -
In recent weeks, two meetings of global significance have come and gone with little media attention. At the end of January, the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting took place in Davos, Switzerland, followed days later by the World Social Forum (WSF) in Dakar, Senegal, which ended on an ecstatic note on the very day people’s power triumphed over Egypt’s autocratic Mubarak regime.
The Davos forum was, of course, covered by the bigger television networks, but there was none of...
Dale T. McKinley -
Editor's Note: Find "Part One" here.
The ascension to and capturing of, political power always has a way of (eventually) exposing the practical underbelly of the victor’s ideological dressage. And so it was with the ANC’s transformation from liberation movement to political party in the early-mid 1990s.
Flush with their ‘overwhelming mandate from the people’ in the 1994 election, the ANC leadership quickly abandoned any possibility of a radically...
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen -
Has the campaign for a Basic Income Grant (BIG) been successful?
This question requires reflection, as in any democracy, assessing advocacy objectives can never be as simple as ticking boxes. The answer to the question is mostly answered in the negative, simply because South Africa does not have a universal income grant. The despondency of activists still supporting the campaign leads to a reaffirmation that South Africa will remain unequal and that feasible redistributive mechanisms are...
Danny Schechter -
This is an upstairs/downstairs story that takes us from the peak of a Western mountaintop for the wealthy to spreading mass despair in the valleys of the Third World poor.
It is about how the solutions for the world financial crisis that the CEOs and big politicians are massaging in a posh conference center in snowy Davos Switzerland have turned into a global economic catastrophe in the streets of Cairo, the current ground zero of a certain to spread wave of international unrest....
Leonard Gentle -
Once again we are being hamstrung by being forced to take sides in what the business media is presenting as the debate of the day. Should the Rand be weak or strong?
Minister of Economic Development, Ebrahim Patel’s New Growth Path (NGP) was released in December 2010 and, predictably, elite economists lined up to criticise it mainly on the lines that it asserted a greater role for the state, promised decent jobs and called for a more “competitive value” for the rand.
Of...
Glenn Ashton -
Few South Africans realise the power of Co-operatives in the global economy. Canada, Norway, Italy, India, China and Brazil each have a significant amount of their GDP generated by Co-operative organisations. One in four citizens in the USA and Germany are members of Co-ops. The United Nations has proclaimed 2012 as the International Year of Co-operatives.
Even though our government has identified and prioritised Co-operatives as an ideal developmental tool, most South Africans remain...
