Thursday, 23 March 2023
Steven Friedman is a professor of political studies at the University of Johannesburg.
Though the Stellenbosch university student’s act needs to be condemned, obvious discrimination is a symptom of an ingrained hierarchical system that continues to favour white people.
There’s a limit to how much one person can spend and it falls way below what top executives are paid in South Africa. Inequality will remain until the wealthy concede this.
Hounding people born elsewhere is a form of bigotry, no less than racism or sexism. Those who believe in equal treatment for everyone should campaign against this prejudice.
Mainstream media compared South Africa’s pandemic response to European and North American countries, claiming we had done well, but African countries in fact did much better than us.
The media simply repeating what the South African Jewish Board of Deputies says is misleading. The Constitutional Court judgment is something of which our country can be proud.
Nothing in the state of the nation address signified that the president and his administration know how to win back the trust of the impoverished who feel let down by them.
Lindiwe Sisulu’s attack on the judiciary is misguided. Not once since 1994 has a government tested the Constitution’s capacity to enable change, but the courts have.
Despite much ado being made about the ‘shocking’ outcome of negotiations for positions in municipalities, nothing has changed for the majority without a voice.
Steven Friedman addresses the roots of state capture in colonialism and apartheid, showing how these same webs of corruption are active in postapartheid South Africa.
An examination of the language the party uses shows that it is echoing right-wing voices the world over in its insistence that those who point out its racism are, in fact, the real racists.
Citizens want a meaningful say in how they are governed, not local government that foists on them what it has decided the people need.
Green Papers are supposed to be discussion documents, but after the media’s disinformation campaign on a proposed national social security fund, no deliberation is possible.
Climate change is now irreversible, but if you follow only South African news, which reports almost exclusively on elite interests, you would never know.
A discussion on the structural reforms that the country needs to lift its economic growth out of the doldrums cannot be the one-sided conversation it currently is.
The government’s Covid-19 vaccine rollout plan blatantly ignores the realities of life for the majority of South Africans. Sadly, this lack of insight and sense was to be expected.
The signs are there that the Israeli state may have ‘won’ the most recent battle against Palestinians but could be losing the protracted war, especially in the court of public opinion.
South Africa’s economic policies have been moving to the right, embracing big business and ignoring workers and jobless people. Why does no organised voice speak out against this?
Contrary to what they proclaim, they discard their belief in freedom of speech and the rule of law when it concerns either Palestinians or their supporters around the world.
The Democratic Alliance’s constant stream of racism suggests it doesn’t know it is prejudiced. Instead, it imagines – along with people in the suburbs – that white rules are ‘normal’.
Campaigners sense racial inequality extremely accurately but lack the same sensitivity to social and economic inequality, as is evident in the recent student protests.
Social spending is being reduced in South Africa as a policy choice and not as a result of the weak economy and the negative effects of Covid-19.