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The first step in a much longer journey
We must celebrate the passage of the Sexual Offences Bill through the National Assembly this week. This vital piece of legislation is now on the home stretch after an extraordinary seven years in the making. But it is also a deeply distressing piece of legislation, for it mirrors how our country is mired in a sex war. |
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Time for a tough decision
Say what you like about South Africa’s first five months at the United Nations Security Council, the country hasn’t suffered from stage fright. Voting against a resolution to bring the appalling human rights record of the Burmese junta under council scrutiny laid down a marker early on. |
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Opposition must get positive
We may all be preoccupied with the race for the presidency of the ANC, but the volume and tone of the reaction to Helen Zille’s election as DA leader suggests an interest far beyond the party’s electoral base in the future of opposition politics. Even President Thabo Mbeki has been conciliatory, inviting Tony Leon to the Union Buildings at long last. |
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Sleazy Bill
We have an admirably liberal Constitution, but on many issues, South Africa is a conservative country. In the past 13 years, conservative interests have launched attack after attack on the more advanced rights enshrined in the Constitution. Laws guaranteeing freedom of choice on abortion and sanctioning gay marriages have been the subject of raucous debate. |
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A new X
Why should we Africans tolerate standards that are less than the best? To accept anything less than the best is to play into the damning stereotypes employed by Afro-pessimists everywhere. So why should Nigerians and those interested in the sustainability of democracy in Africa’s giant accept less than the best X on the ballot paper? |
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SA's quiet war
No one should be surprised any longer to learn that South Africa is a front in the United States-led war on terror. The revelation that Khalid Rashid has been detained in Pakistan for alleged links to the London Underground bombings of July 7 2005 is only the most recent indication of the quiet battle going on in this country. |
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Dare to dream
For seven years, South Africans fought each other instead of tackling the real enemy: the HIV and Aids pandemic that has left scarcely a family untouched by infection, the rigours of care or death. Civil society, including the media, was bunkered down fighting a blinkered and often confused government and ruling party. |
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Police state
This week the Mail & Guardian reports, in horrifying detail, the confessions of a former member of the Zimbabwean National Youth Service who was allegedly recruited and trained by President Robert Mugabe’s secret police to murder, torture and petrol-bomb members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. |
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A ply too far
Regulation is in the news this week, as we reflect in this edition:in steel, air travel, alcohol and, yes, toilet paper. Steel producer Mittal, part of the international steel empire owned by the fabulously wealthy Lakshmi Mittal, has been found guilty by the Competition Tribunal of excessive pricing. National carrier SAA, projecting a R650-million loss for the year. |
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Racially tinted glass ceiling
In human rights week, young banker Bonga Bangani became an unlikely hero. He sent a five-page letter to Investec, his former employer, complaining about how he had been treated in the course of a one-year contract. His story has resonated with the experiences of many young, black people, who have flooded him with emails and blogged about his letter. |
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Endgame
As we saw in South Africa in the mid- to late Eighties, oppressive regimes become more violent as their grip on power and moral standing become more tenuous. So it is in Zimbabwe, where the weekend’s brutal repression of a MDC prayer meeting has revealed how desperate the ruling Zanu-PF and its security forces have become. |
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Nkrumah's spirit
When Kwame Nkrumah remarked 50 years ago that “the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked with the total liberation of Africa” he may not have known how much of a catalyst he was providing for the subsequent wave of decolonisation that swept the continent. |
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Policing the rainbow nation
The sudden upsurge in right-wing Afrikaner mobilisation and the purge of Somali traders from Port Elizabeth’s Motherwell township both underscore how far South Africa still has to travel in dealing with diversity and xenophobia to stem inter-group hatred and find the holy grail of non-racialism. |
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Two and 12 zeros ...
At the opposite end of the good news spectrum is a human challenge expressed in the following numerical detail: according to the official definition of unemployment, there are 4,4-million people who are unemployed. That’s a 4,4 and five zeros. If you use the unofficial definition, which includes people who have given up looking for work, then it is probably just less than seven million South Africans. |
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A social democracy?
A welcome breathing space opened up this week, as those with their hands on the levers of power let policy take precedence over politics. Measures outlined in President Thabo Mbeki’s State of the Nation address, which will be fleshed out in the budget, provide hope for a more meaningful attack on poverty. |
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'My people ...'
In a week in which debates about crime have again raised the national temperature, President Thabo Mbeki takes to the podium to deliver his annual State of the Nation Address. This is what we hope he will say, though we are not staking the Mail & Guardian on the president using such words. |
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A new age of denial
The signs are there. We are in a new age of denial. In 1999, President Thabo Mbeki, fresh in office and faced with the spectre of a new struggle, this time against HIV and Aids, turned his face away. He dabbled with fringe science, establishing a panel to attempt to refute that which was accepted by the world: that HIV causes Aids. |
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The league’s 'Young Quirks'
Today we publish details of the sad erosion of the ANC Youth League, the original political home of towering nationalist leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Robert Sobukwe and Anton Lembede. From its proud beginnings in the 1940s as a home of radicalism and principle, it has degenerated into a platform for populist grandstanding, infighting and the pursuit of money and power. |
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| MORE ARTICLES |
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| Ostrich politics |
| It will not go away |
| Passport control |
| Political bling |
| Kick up dust |
| So what? |
| There are no winners |
| Where the corruption lies |
| The problem with ANC Inc |
PW: The hard truth |
| Budget bling |
| Court E and Section 16 |
| Unclassified |
| High on the hog |
| A march for all |
| A case to answer |
| Eye off the ball |
| Contrition not enough |
| Nuclear tightrope |
| System failure |
| Commanding heights |
| More than just a jol |
