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?
Dr. Richard Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University where he teaches contemporary political theory and urban studies and runs an annual semester long post-graduate seminar on the work of Frantz Fanon.
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Richard Pithouse -
The African National Congress, perhaps buoyed by a renewed sense of public confidence in the wake of the World Cup, is, again, moving against one of our fundamental democratic freedoms.
Amidst a new flurry of indignation, paranoid and hysterical in equal measure, various representatives of the ANC have made it quite clear that they consider some of the criticisms of the party and its leaders that have appeared in the media to be unacceptable. This is not the first outbreak of this sort of...
Richard Pithouse -
As the glow of the World Cup dims and those of us who didn’t have to spend the tournament in Blikkiesdorp start to settle into the ordinary grind everyone from the captains of industry to the Communist Party is urging us to ‘build on the momentum’.
No one in their right mind could conclude that we don’t need momentum. In a country with systemic unemployment, an atrocious school system for most pupils, creeping and increasingly communal modes of...
Richard Pithouse -
The FIFA headquarters are nestled into a secluded spot on the hill overlooking Zurich, one of the richest cities in the world. Here a glass of coke will cost you R60 at a restaurant. The city, set around a lake with snow capped mountains in the background, is picture perfect in a chocolate boxy kind of way. But it’s not just a twee live-in European theme park pretending to be a city. Zurich is also home to squats, innovative housing and artists’ collectives, large immigrant...
Richard Pithouse -
The living party, which ought to make possible the free exchange of ideas which have been elaborated according to the real needs of the mass of the people, has been transformed into a trade union of individual interests. - Frantz Fanon, Tunis, 1961
It’ll be some time before we really know what happened in the National Working Committee (NWC) of the African National Congress (ANC) on Monday. But it seems clear enough that a majority of the NWC supported a proposal to bring disciplinary...
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...
Richard Pithouse -
A year into his Presidency Jacob Zuma’s inability to resolve the acute tensions within the African National Congress (ANC) is painfully evident. But this does not mean that the party is drifting aimlessly. There is a clear trajectory and that course is a steady, albeit, lumbering move towards an authoritarian state driving a modernisation project via crony capitalism and the containment of the poor.
The fact that Julius Malema has had to apologise for “undermining the stature of...
