SACSIS - The South African Civil Society Information Service (SACSIS) - www.sacsis.org.za - has been disseminating social justice content to the print media for five years. Our news analyses and op-eds have been published in a wide range of South Africa’s daily newspapers. SACSIS is pleased to announce that we are expanding our content production and dissemination beyond print to the production of podcasts for dissemination via audio platforms such as campus and community radio stations....
SACSIS’ Fazila Farouk talks to Marjorie Jobson, Director of the Khulumani Support Group, who provides an update of South Africa’s apartheid reparations case that has been on going for a decade. According to Jobson, a lack of corporate accountability for apartheid crimes has resulted in apartheid era practices reproducing themselves in certain sectors of the post-apartheid economy, such as mining. She links the strife in Marikana today to the fact that mining companies were...
John Capel of the Bench Marks Foundation talks about the efforts of his organisation to widen the scope of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry (also known as the Farlam Commission), such that the investigation goes beyond and behind the killings of the 34 striking mineworkers, which shocked the world last year, to the socio-economic root causes of the strikes in the Rustenburg mining belt. A study by the Bench Marks Foundation, first released in 2007 and later updated in 2011, shows huge...
Dr. Salim Vally, director of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg, was recently invited by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation's Jerusalem office to visit Palestine and deliver a series of lectures, including a keynote address at Birzeit University in Ramallah. He was unfortunately detained by Israeli soldiers at the Allenby Bridge border crossing between Jordan and Palestine. After a five hour ordeal, which included an interrogation and a strip...
Section 27 of the South African Constitution guarantees the right to food. However, if one tracks the impact of inflation on the poor, one finds that their purchasing power is being eroded because the basket of goods on which the CPI is based is determined by the middle class and the elites, argues Isobel Frye, director of the Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute (SPII). Worse, poor South Africans face even greater prejudices. Her organisation's research has found that the goods...
From the tragedy at Marikana to the farm workers' strikes at De Doorns, it is evident that the South African economy is not working for the poor. At the same time, President Jacob Zuma campaigned on a ticket of "economic transformation" in the run up to his re-election as president of the ANC at Mangaung. Will the ANC succeed in its quest for transformative economic development during President Zuma’s second term in office? Is this president Zuma's Lula moment? On 8...