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 -
When we are the prey and the vulture - Aimé Césaire, 'Batouque', Miraculous Weapons, 1956.
Last week Jacob Zuma visited the Sweetwaters shack settlement near Orange Farm in Johannesburg. He informed the nation that his shock at seeing human beings living like pigs had almost reduced him to tears. He also visited the Siyathemba settlement in Balfour where he, like a typical bullying ward councillor, berated angry residents for asking the questions that mattered.
Zuma's...
Leonard Gentle -
In the streets of Athens, tens of thousands march and protest, unions strike and even sections of the police and public servants join hands against an austerity programme. Daily, we go through a pattern of announcements from European Union (EU) finance ministers, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank (ECB) promising bailouts and relief from market speculation, only to have the whole thing declared insufficient the next day, while “market jitters” continue...
Karly Curcio -
Foreign aid programs continue to pour funds into what seems like Africa’s bottomless bucket. Illicit financial flows out of Africa are twice the amount of foreign aid into the region. Between 1970 and 2008, according to a study by Global Financial Integrity (GFI), illicit flows from Africa totaled at least $854 billion, and could reach as high as $1.8 trillion when taking into account missing data from certain countries and other conduits of illicit flows not captured in the study....
In Thailand, the government has rejected an offer by anti-government protesters to enter talks after a bloody week in Bangkok that's left at least 38 protesters dead. Some fear the standoff could lead to an undeclared civil war. The protesters are mostly rural and urban poor who are part of a group called the UDD, the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship, more commonly known as the Red Shirts. Is the Red Shirt movement a genuine grassroots struggle, or a front for the ousted former...
Glenn Ashton -
South Africa has a crime problem. The resounding call from society is to incarcerate criminals, to remove them from the population.
Given increasing spending on the justice system, putting more police on the ground, the inevitable result is increasing numbers of criminals entering prison. Prisons become ever more overcrowded and are struggling to cope despite new institutions being built.
Our Department of Correctional Services (DCS) has come in for some heavy criticism over the...
Jewish-American intellectual, Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was denied entry into Israel on Sunday. Chomsky was due to deliver a lecture at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah.
Chomsky's lecture would have covered American foreign and domestic policy.
He spoke with Al Jazeera about the reasons Israel denied him entry. In his words, there were two reasons:
1) "The government of Israel does not like the kind of...
