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?
Glenn Ashton -
The Zuma administration has clearly taken a far harder line on crime, in accord with its populist approach. Central to this is the direct threat to 'get' criminals.
Invoking this 'shoot to kill' philosophy has already impacted tragically on innocent lives. The pendulum is swinging from a more restrained, western, rights-based style of policing toward a more reactionary and offensively aligned style of policing.
Deputy Police Minister Fikile Mbalula has not only made immoderate...
At a recent event hosted by the Open Society Institute in New York, former constitutional court judge and anti-apartheid activist, Albie Sachs, talks about being detained in solitary confinement for 168 days by the security police in apartheid South Africa. He describes his psychological torture at the hands of the apartheid police during the 1960's as the worst moments of his life, even worse than losing his arm two decades later in a bomb blast orchestrated by the apartheid...
Leonard Gentle -
South Africans are inclined to moan about so much…the fact that things don’t seem to function, the corruption, the crude avarice of the new elite, the poor performance of Bafana Bafana, the crime. Add to this Julius Malema, Jacob Zuma's polygamy and the scandal of the mismanagement of our parastatals and you have a picture that evokes images of imminent collapse for the chattering classes.
From the side of the largely white middle class, there is a deep sense of, "We told...
Saliem Fakir -
If there were to be a beauty contest, Sarah Palin (formerly Governor of Alaska) would win over ANC Youth League President, Julius Malema by far in the looks department.
However, as political celebrities for a growing anti-intellectual movement in two different parts of the world, they share a real and symbolic place in contemporary popular culture and politics.
Palin, like Malema, shows no great intellectual curiosity. Their erudition of complex geopolitical and economic issues is not going...
Isobel Frye -
“It happens that you see it is better that the little ones eat and you can stay as you are, and there is nothing that you can do, and when the children ask why is it that mommy is not eating, you will say that you will eat after them.
My son eats tea and the crusts of the pap, he is 28 years old and he has tried to get work and vacancies are scarce. The biggest problem is that he does not have matric and I can see when I look at him that he longs to eat like other people, but all...
Michelle Pressend -
After the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle, the Copenhagen Climate Summit will probably go down as the next biggest multilateral meeting failure of the 21st century, but I wouldn’t say for the right reasons.
In biting cold Copenhagen, there was little recognition that 400 years of capitalism is the underlying cause of global warming and simply not enough understanding that the market-driven solutions espoused by the Kyoto Protocol will only exacerbate the climate crisis and global...
