IT WAS June of 1991, the apartheid government had just unbanned political parties such as the ANC and PAC, exiles were returning to the country, and negotiations towards a new democratic dispensation were in full sway. The First National Conference on Environment & Development, organised by mysel...

THAT IT would all go so horribly wrong for the African National Congress is best demonstrated by comments made by Moletsi Mbeki on national television. The ANC he says is really a conglomeration of competing, 'factions acting in their own self-interest'. What unites the party, aside from its comp...

TWO parties, each with contradictory and competing visions for South Africa's future, hold centre stage. In the one corner, the African National Congress with its legacy of struggle against apartheid and nation building, that has increasingly come under the spotlight with revelations of corruptio...

ANYBODY remember the National Development Plan (NDP)? The economic initiative was the hallmark of successive ANC administrations. As late as January 2017 the plan was being touted as a vision for 2030, "the product of hundreds of interactions with South Africans, input from tens of thousands of p...

SHOULD South Africa “undo Mandela’s economic deals”? Is Mandela’s economic miracle a chimera? Political economist Patrick Bond certainly thinks so, unfortunately alongside other critics of the Mandela era, he also appears unable to explain exactly what those compromises were and how Mandela himse...

FOR A DEPUTY-PRESIDENT who likes to claim responsibility for drafting a Secular Constitution and Bill of Rights that includes Gay Rights and other freedoms associated with the LGBT community, a visit to Iran must present a number of awkward problems. Chief of which is the Iranian Penal Code. Lesb...