Sunday, 19 September 2021
The military presence of the United States in Africa is strategic and enduring. It ensures a fragmented continent, easily pliable to the West’s interests and a convenient site for the ‘new Cold War’.
Leaders promise a ‘peaceful transition’ in Afghanistan, but there are profound fears for the future of women and girls. It is also unclear if the Taliban will, as promised, be able to control extremist groups.
The hopes nurtured as apartheid fell have crashed repeatedly on the rocks of violent and authoritarian realities. Sustaining them will require a genuinely popular democratic project.
Hunger continues to kill every day, around the world. This global failure to sustain humanity stems from the very nature of capitalism.
For as long as we treat some lives as disposable, we will not escape the colonial logic that continues to mutilate society and corrode possibilities for a just and viable future.
Spyware like Pegasus is dangerous not only because it gives hackers control over an infected phone, but also because it introduces the knowledge of nation-states into the civilian sphere.
Vigilante groups formed during the recent riots are testament to the state’s failure to protect its citizens. But self-defence can spiral out of control, harming people and fuelling paranoia.
Transcending the colonial fabrication of race is a radical idea. Now, as opportunists whip up hatred, South Africa needs to restore this emancipatory horizon.
With a basic income grant well and truly on the cards, the kind of grant South Africa might get is as important as whether we get it at all.
The ex-Robben Island prisoner and arguably South Africa’s foremost public intellectual cautioned against the spectre of violence that will arise from not resolving inequality and racism.
For too long we have understood South Africa in terms of myth rather than history, fantasy rather than reality. Now we must take full measure of who and where we are.
It would take a liveable basic income grant and a job-guarantee programme with the state and private sector behind it. But it can be done.
It is unclear how the state will respond to the recent tumult in KwaZulu-Natal. Leadership will have to come from within society.
As South Africans begin to comprehend the nuances of a tumultuous week, so too comes the renewed realisation that a common future can only be one that refuses to tolerate racism and chauvinism.
The state needs to bring the attacks on critical infrastructure in KwaZulu-Natal to an immediate end and ensure that the people who live there have food and feel safe.
There can be no return to business as usual after the rapidly mutating rupture in recent days. What happens in the months and years to come is of critical import.
Lofty plans to boost South Africa’s energy supply are promoted by loud voices who conveniently forget that most residents are highly unlikely to gain any benefits.
South Africa’s social crisis has erupted as the people Cyril Ramaphosa and Jacob Zuma deem expendable, those who bear the brunt of the past and of the social costs of Covid-19, appropriate the bread of life.
So-called political solutions were offered, some subtle and others cynical and blatant, but the Constitutional Court’s ruling carried the day. This averted a ‘Marikana’ of South Africa’s soul.
Like the former South African president, the king of eSwatini is destined to fall from grace and power. But as the wheel of history turns, it is imperative to think about viable routes into a just future.
A new citizens’ front in Makhanda is democratising participation in governance by shunning concepts such as ‘political leaders’ who take decisions on behalf of residents and rarely keep promises.