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 -
Climate change predominantly impacts those who have benefited least from fossil fuelled industrialisation. The poor have less social, economic and political capacity to adapt to climate change than the rich. The arrival of the global climate negotiating lobby on African shores must focus the minds of the world on how climate change impacts developing nations and how we propose to solve this problem.
When the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP 17) to the United Nations Framework Convention...
Richard Pithouse -
When the Springboks are running rampant even a drab supermarket in a small town can take on a carnival air with excited conversation moving between people without regard to all the usual barriers. But the nation, as we all know, is riven with all kinds of fractures. For the ANC some of these fractures can be useful as it seeks to sustain its moral authority while electoral support declines, popular protest continues and internal battles escalate. But other fractures pose a real challenge to...
Released earlier this year, Two Worlds is a documentary that according to its makers, "questions why South Africa has one of the greatest divides between rich and poor." Noting that inequality is no longer a phenomenon exclusive to the developing world and that poverty is now very much prevalent in the developed world, this 28 minute film uses South Africa as a case study to probe questions about inequality for a global audience.
Visit the Two Worlds website to learn more about the...
Mandisi Majavu -
Reading the 11th Commission for Employment Equity (CEE) Annual Report, which details the status of employment equity in South Africa, I was reminded of a report that Dr Sabie Surtee and Professor Martin Hall wrote two years ago. In that report titled, ‘Transformation: African People in the Western Cape’, Dr Surtee and Professor Hall conclude that the labour market in South Africa remains “highly inequitable.” Two years later, the 11th CEE Annual Report makes similar...
Richard Pithouse -
The words that escaped from Darren Scott's private life and crashed into the public realm via an argument in a bar are no unique perversion. For anyone with any doubts about the extent to which white racism not only spills over into the new order but also continues to reinvent itself the comments sections on news and analysis websites, spaces that enable public anonymity, make for dispiriting reading.
But with the exception of extreme figures like Steve Hofmeyer white racism is a...
Dale T. McKinley -
There are few conflicts - especially when money, power and ego are at their centres - that are more intense, brutal and destructive than those involving family members. In this sense, and in case we might have forgotten, at the heart of the more recent and ongoing battles between the incumbent ANC leadership and their Youth League counterparts lies a long-running and ongoing internecine war within the broad ‘family’ of the ANC itself. As shocked and disappointed as many - both...
