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. Dale T. McKinley is an independent writer, researcher and lecturer as well as political activist. Originally from Zimbabwe, Dale has lived and worked in Johannesburg since 1990. He ran/managed a socialist bookshop from 1991-1994 and was a full time activist/ educationist with the South African Communist Party from 1995-2000 (before being expelled for trying to be a communist).
Dale was a co-founder and executive member of the Anti-Privatisation Forum and remains active in social movement/community struggles. He holds a PhD. in Political Economy/African Studies. Dale occasionally lectures at university level, gives regular talks/inputs to a wide variety of organisations and has produced numerous research reports and analyses for a range of NGOs, academic institutes and other civil society organisations. He is the author three books and has written extensively on South African and international political economy, socio-economic rights/struggles and liberation movement and community politics.
Dale T. McKinley -
If the publicly expressed opinions of many opposition politicians, lawyers, academics, journalists and political commentators are to be believed then South Africa has already had several ‘constitutional crises’ and there are more hovering on the horizon.
Cast your memories back a decade and the messy saga involving then President Mbeki and his highly controversial attempts to protect his Police Chief Jackie Selebi. Claims flew thick and fast from several...
Dale T. McKinley -
In a democracy worthy of the name, no specific belief, conscience, thought, opinion or religion has special legal or societal status.
As captured in the equality clause of South Africa’s Bill of Rights, “everyone is equal before the law”, wherein “equality includes the full and equal enjoyment of all rights and freedoms”.
Those rights and freedoms encompass the political, civil, legal, environmental, social, economic and cultural. Simply put, all of our...
Dale T. McKinley -
No sooner had the final results of the recently concluded 2014 national elections been announced than President Zuma gave a predictably self-congratulatory speech lauding the result as “the will of all the people”. The reality however is that the ANC’s victory came from a distinct minority of “the people”. The real ‘winner’, as has been the case since the 2004 elections, was the stay away ‘vote’.
Since South Africa’s first-ever...
Dale T. McKinley -
Messy alliance politics are clouding issues in the run up to the 2014 general election, but community organisations and other civil society formations across the country have welcomed promising moves by National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) to forge an independent and anti-capitalist united front of the broad working class.
For the first time in the history of a democratic South Africa, a COSATU-aligned union, and its largest one at that, has openly declared that it no...
Dale T. McKinley -
In the spirit of John Lennon, imagine this near-future scenario.
It is 2016, the 20th anniversary of South Africa’s Constitution. Alongside all sorts of official festivities, a sizeable portion of the population is celebrating the recent decision by the Constitutional Court to declare the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act (No. 142 of 1992), a piece of legislation embedded in over a century of colonial, racist politics and wrapped in layers of ideologically and morally manipulated...
Dale T. McKinley -
If you hadn’t already noticed the ever-expanding waistlines of most of our politicians – a tell-tale sign of a political class feeding feverishly at the public trough - then you might have missed the latest bulging of their other ‘stomach’, salaries.
Following enabling recommendations from the ‘Independent Commission for the Remuneration of Public Office Bearers’, President Zuma signed off on the most recent salary hike for the country’s national...
