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?
Saliem Fakir -
It must have started somewhere of course. Someone let the genie out of the bottle. Thabo Mbeki denies he let it out. He believes he had good grounds to fire Jacob Zuma and disagrees with Judge Nicholson's interpretation that he used the National Prosecuting Authority to pursue a political vendetta.
He has also challenged Zuma to debate him live on TV, Obama and McCain style, in an attempt to once and for all set the record straight. Zuma refuses the duel.
In the meanwhile, Mbeki has filed...
Richard Pithouse -
Shack fires burn hot and fast. It’s not always easy to predict their speed and direction because as paraffin stoves explode in large balls of flame fires can suddenly jump ahead or to the side.
In most settlements the number of taps is entirely inadequate for people to be able to try and put the flames out on their own. Usually the only viable strategy to fight shack fires is to demolish a ring of shacks around the fire and let it burn itself out. But when the wind is...
Ibrahim Steyn -
Protagonists of Jacob Zuma describe the ANC’s 52nd National Conference in Polokwane as an historic moment in the life of the organisation intended to hand back power to the masses over its body politic. Democracy inside the ANC had to be extricated from the strictures of the authoritarian bureaucratic style of politics personified by Thabo Mbeki.
However, as already observed by many analysts, the recent political parlance and practice of the high ups in the Zuma camp have cast...
John Reynolds -
Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20 vision. I’m sure that if the present leadership of the ANC could have predicted the fall-out of its recall of President Thabo Mbeki, it would have hesitated long enough to maybe, just maybe, not go through with it.
But such was the heady brew of power and retribution at the time that zeal trumped reason – where, to paraphrase the philosopher Robert C Solomon, a sense of injustice became wholly obsessed with resentment and a preoccupation for...
Glenn Ashton -
So we have had a change in the guard in South Africa, engineered on shaky precepts but carried out smoothly and seamlessly, at least from a political perspective. However, the real issues have been obscured by the haste of the transition and the relentless blather of the chattering classes. Perhaps the time is ripe to draft some perspective on what really happened.
It was common knowledge Thabo Mbeki was toast. As John Carlin pointed out a week after his departure, Mbeki should never...
Saliem Fakir -
The dismissal of Thabo Mbeki and the walkout by eleven ministers and some deputies indicates that a severe split exists within the African National Congress (ANC), despite claims to the contrary.
The fissure began in 2005 when Zuma was fired by Mbeki and persisted well beyond the Polokwane Congress in December 2007. Frantic efforts have been made to keep the fight within the ANC and restore unity --seemingly without avail.
Crises are usually fertile ground for fear, panic and opportunity --...
