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?
According to California Newsreel, this hard-hitting documentary, The Big Sellout, challenges current economic orthodoxy in contending that the dogmatic claims of the international business establishment for neo-liberal development policies are not supported by modern economic science. More importantly, it dramatically demonstrates how the implementation of these policies is having disastrous consequences for millions of ordinary people around the globe. Traveling throughout both the...
Glenn Ashton -
Apartheid South Africa was an arcanely bureaucratic, over regulated society. Through laws both petty and detailed, it regulated the lives of its citizens in ways that continue to affect us today. While we have cast off the chains of legalised racism we have not sworn off our national propensity to rely on centralised regulation through arcane legal structures to arrive at the collective goals we visualised when queueing to vote in 1994.
This reliance on the law, while perhaps necessary to...
Ann Bown -
Non-government organizations and community-based organizations are cost efficient implementers and service providers in the fight against poverty and they are the partners of choice for government to raise the living standards of millions of South Africans. It is estimated that there are well over 100 000 nonprofit organizations (NPOs) in the country.
The economic downturn has affected the nonprofit sector severely. International funders have reduced or halted grants. Corporate Social...
Glenn Ashton -
Is President Jacob Zumas proposal to create the 'opportunity' for half a million jobs in South Africa over the next six months a goal that we all must embrace?
Perhaps the greatest risk South Africa faces is of the chasm between rich and poor widening to ever more extreme proportions, threatening to rend the fragile social fabric of our young nation. So how can we, as a nation, reduce the economic disparity in the most efficient manner?
Social polarisation through increased disparity...
Richard Pithouse -
From the Communist Party across to the corporate spin-doctors and down to the Development Committees in the shack settlements, more or less everybody in South Africa speaks the language of development. In some ways this is a good thing. It indicates a hard won agreement that the realities of inequality in our society are so cruel and perverse that any social project can only be credible if it will ameliorate these divisions and the suffering they cause.
But one of the key problems with...
Stephen Greenberg -
The new appointments to the 'economic cluster' have dominated media discussion of the Zuma Cabinet. Receiving far less coverage is the restructuring of the 'rural' ministries of agriculture, land and forestry. The Ministry of Agriculture and Land Affairs has been split, and forestry has been separated from water affairs and joined to agriculture. The Department of Land Affairs (DLA) has become a newly-formed Ministry of Rural Development and Land Reform. Given the stress the ANC has placed...
