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?
Visit the archives.
Richard Pithouse -
Some days ago we saw a sunset that turned the robe of heaven a bright violet. Today it is a very hard red that the eye encounters. - Frantz Fanon, Towards the African Revolution
Frantz Fanon, the Caribbean philosopher and revolutionary who joined the Algerian Revolution, died of leukaemia at the age of 36 on the 6th of December 1961. His last book, The Wretched of the Earth, was published soon after his death and so we are fifty years on from both Fanon and the first...
Tom Engelhardt -
When I arrived at Zuccotti Prison one afternoon last week, the “park” was in its now-usual lockdown mode. No more tents. No library. No kitchen. No medical area. Just about 30 leftover protesters and perhaps 100 of New York’s finest as well as private-security types in neon-green vests in or around a dead space enclosed by more movable police fencing than you can imagine. To the once open plaza, there were now only two small entrances in the...
Egyptians are voting in the first step of a long parliamentary election which will happen in stages up until March 2012.
This follows a week of protests, including a return to Tahrir square. This round of protests in Egypt was met by a violent response from the military, resulting in more than 40 deaths and many serious injuries among the protestors.
RT correspondent, Anissa Naouai, says, "While many people are voting in this round of the polls, many Egyptians feel the political...
Imraan Buccus -
As Durban welcomes the world for the COP 17 meeting, the air is filled with some of the excitement that we all felt during the World Cup last year.
But the debates around environmentalism and the need to take serious action against climate change are often tending to the superficial. There is a lot of self-righteousness and Hallmark style sentimentality around, when what we need is a clear look at the realities of the situation.
Climate change is a reality and for a low-lying country like...
Fazila Farouk -
The United Nations Climate Conference 2011, COP17, kicks off on Monday, November, 28 in Durban when negotiators from nation states around the world will descend on the city to try and hammer out a global agreement to reduce global warming and bring climate change under control.
The parameters of that global agreement are vitally important as a public interest issue because it affects not just environmental policy, but economic and industrial development policy too, with further...
Bobby Peek director of Durban based environmental justice NGO, Groundwork, argued that the climate change debate is an energy debate and that the poor do not have access to energy.
He also said that the South African government's claim that the Kusile and Medupi coal-fired power stations would produce jobs has not materialized.
Peek made these remarks at a roundtable discussion, which sought to ascertain how the South African media is reporting on climate change in the run up to...
