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 media lacks a grand narrative on the political economy said SACSIS columnist, Saliem Fakir, at a roundtable discussion co-hosted by SACSIS and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung South Africa Office.
Fakir argues that the media does not even understand its own role in society.
The roundtable discussion, which examined the media's perspective of the South African economy, put the following questions to editors: Is the economy on the right growth path? What are the prospects for making it more...
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen -
Sixteen Rand is not much. It’s what a single shot of espresso at an upmarket hotel in Cape Town might cost. However, poverty estimates reveal that over 20% of the population attempt to meet not only their food needs, but every other need with less than R16.00 a day.
At an upmarket hotel, a Minister could live, what is called in popular parlance, a “caviar lifestyle.” Consider this: for the estimated half a million Rand one Minister actually did spend at a hotel, one...
Richard Pithouse -
Democracy is...the action that constantly wrests the monopoly of public life from oligarchic government. - Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 2006.
Now that the African National Congress has issued a clear declaration of its intent to roll back media freedom in the name of the people, civil society is scurrying around like a disturbed ant’s nest.
But as it rallies to the blogs, op-ed pages and debates in the higher reaches of the public sphere to defend its freedoms, we...
Dale T. McKinley -
It didn’t take long did it? Despite the lingering stupor, just a month after the end of the constructed mega-hype of the Soccer World Cup, South Africa is firmly back in the reality trenches. With intensified public attention on important social and economic issues/debates, a host of strikes and re-energised political faction fighting taking centre stage, it seems an apt time to critically redirect some of the fading winter sunlight onto the political, economic and social state of the...
Jayati Ghosh, economist from India's Nehru University in New Delhi and author of the book After Crisis, says India's economic growth is no miracle. India is often compared to China for its rapid economic growth, but Ghosh argues that the two countries are very different. China has better economic growth and poverty reduction indicators. It also has a completely different institutional system with massive state control over finance, which enables the state to manipulate the nature of the...
Glenn Ashton -
Wealth is relative. Anyone with enough to eat and a house to live in is rich. If you are reading this you are probably rich.
Around 80% of people live on less than US$10 (R75) per day. The top 20% consume around 75% of the world’s goods. The elite, upper and top half of the middle class constitute no more than 10% of the worlds population, yet control nearly 60% of global wealth.
Despite global promises to achieve greater equality, we are living in a world that is becoming ever...
