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?
Saliem is an independent writer and columnist for SACSIS based in Cape Town.
He is currently active in the sustainable energy field and works for the World Wide Fund for Nature.
Saliem was previously a senior lecturer at the Department of Public Administration and Planning and associate Director for the Center for Renewable and Sustainable Energy at the University of Stellenbosch (2007-2008) where he taught a course on renewable energy policy and financing of renewable energy projects.
Saliem previously worked for Lereko Energy (Pty) Ltd (2006) an investment company focusing on project development and financial arrangements for renewable energy, biofuels, waste and water sectors. He also served as Director of the World Conservation Union South Africa (IUCN-SA) office for eight years (1998-2005).
Saliem has served on a number of Boards. Between 2002-2005 he served as a chair of the Board of the National Botanical Institute. He also served on the board of the Fair Trade in Tourism Initiative, and was a member of the Technical Advisory Committee of the Global Reporting Initiative, based in Amsterdam.
He currently serves on the advisory board of Inspired Evolution One, a private fund involved in clean technology.
Saliem's qualifications are: B.Sc Honours molecular biology (WITS), Masters in Environmental Science, Wye College London. He also completed a senior executive management course at Harvard University in 2000.
Saliem Fakir -
An Austrian colleague of mine relays a dinner story. We are talking over lunch at a little side cafe in idyllic Stellenbosch.
There was a discussion about Obama and the historic moment for the United States when he took the presidential oath.
Obama holds great symbolic significance to all black and other non-white people of the world.
It is an important affirmation because he rose through the ranks on the basis of merit. But many whites also voted for him.
He is of course a highly...
Saliem Fakir -
The impact of the power revolution is most felt in the way in which the new steam and electrical technologies transformed human life in general – forever, so to speak. One thing fed another, producing a cacophony of innovation and redefining the very nature of abundance.
What industrialisation and the power revolution have unleashed for the west has become the dream of not only of one power, but many powers who feel they have been excluded from its magic and capacity to bring seemingly...
Saliem Fakir -
Every-time capitalism is hit by a crisis it is described as being an errant event. The latest scandal which has rocked the US financial sector, where trusted and the likeable figure Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme for almost two decades, is once again dismissed as the work of a rogue element.
But rarely will the pundits of the new economy, which rely on the use of innovative speculative financial instruments to make inflated profits from thin air, blame its faulty free market philosophy and...
Saliem Fakir -
The ANC is no longer sure of who is friend or foe. Some of its traditional members and ardent supporters are quietly vying for the Congress of the People (COPE) while pretending to be all for the ANC in public. Come the day of the secret ballot, they will have already turned.
Some have already made the leap. Others are waiting for when the time is right to join COPE more openly. And, yet others simply have a genuine concern about South African democracy and its future and will vote for COPE...
Saliem Fakir -
There is this erroneous logic that there are developmental states in some places and advanced states in other places. One advances from a developmental mode to some sort of mature state in which the markets take-over.
This implicit typology of evolutionary progression of states is just nonsense. There is nothing static and permanent about the operational modes of states. They are creatures of time and context. What needs to be done under different circumstances must be done in the interest...
Saliem Fakir -
Somebody coming from Mars would be forgiven for thinking that the era of black rule is rife with corruption and nepotism.
The white world would have been thought of as being better if one is to believe that its history was always populated with saints. History though. is infrequently remembered for what it is, seldom uncovered for all of its diversity and always selectively appropriated. Short memory, too, is the enemy of history -- and there is lots of it going around.
When it comes to...
