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 embraces a rights based approach to development, which views poverty as a denial of human rights.
Anna Majavu -
It will be 30 years next month since French intelligence agents bombed the first Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior, sinking the ship and killing one crew member. The event is currently being commemorated around the world. What is less well known about the anti-whaling ship is that it was also instrumental in transporting indigenous Pacific Islanders from their homes which had been contaminated by American nuclear testing.
The citizens of Rongelap in the Pacific’s Marshall Islands...
Jane Duncan -
E-tolls. Many, if not most, Gauteng residents hate them, even though the South African National Roads Agency (Sanral) has gone on a charm offensive to try and turn public opinion around. In spite of mass opposition to electronic tolling in the province, the government has decided to continue with it, and to link payment to the renewal of motor vehicle licence disks to force compliance.
The government’s decision followed an advisory panel report on the issue, which made a case for...
Charles Davis -
Chelsea Manning was an all-American patriot when she joined the U.S. military in 2007 at the height of the surge in Iraq.
But when she saw what her country was actually doing abroad — handing over thousands of Iraqi Sunnis to be tortured by state-sponsored Shiite death squads, for instance — she decided she couldn’t be a part of it. Nor could she just do nothing as injustices were committed in her and every American’s name.
So, using the access available to her...
Roisin Davis -
Until very recently Ireland was, as the saying goes,“a nation run by men in dresses” (cassocks).
Perhaps this is why the image of someone in a dress—a form-fitting rose-pink dress—was one of the most captivating to come out of Dublin on Saturday: drag queen Panti Bliss (real name Rory O’Neill) addressing a cheering crowd shortly after it became known that the nation would be the first to legalize same-sex marriage through a popular vote.
Not only was the...
Richard Pithouse -
There is an extraordinary degree of popular protest in South Africa. It is diverse, dynamic and unstable and it includes elements that are emancipatory, contradictory and reactionary. This degree of sustained popular dissent – long organised and expressed outside of liberal frameworks, and increasingly also organised and expressed at a distance from the ruling party – provides fertile ground for building popular organisations. But, with important exceptions, the vast bulk of the...
Chris Hedges -
The pathology of the rich white family is the most dangerous pathology in America. The rich white family is cursed with too much money and privilege. It is devoid of empathy, the result of lifetimes of entitlement. It has little sense of loyalty and lacks the capacity for self-sacrifice. Its definition of friendship is reduced to “What can you do for me?” It is possessed by an insatiable lust to increase its fortunes and power. It believes that wealth and privilege confer to it a...
