26 March 2018 - Relief was palpable across South Africa when Moody’s announced that it was maintaining South Africa’s credit rating at investment grade.
Latest from the IRR
25 March 2018 - The death of five-year-old Lumka Mketwa in a pit latrine at her school in the Eastern Cape earlier this month is already disappearing from news columns. After a time Lumka will be in the news again when one of the watchdog organisations demanding better facilities in schools, or a public-interest law firm, brings a case to court seeking compensatory damages for her family.
Inside South Africa’s ‘Secret Police’
21 March 2018 - Few things in South Africa are more visible and yet more secretive than the VIP Protection Services, the subject of the IRR’s latest report, South Africa’s Secret Police: Inside the Multi-Billion Rand, Clandestine VIP Protection Services
Racial goodwill in South Africa an important reason for hope
20 March 2018 - The IRR celebrates Human Rights Day with the release of its latest research showing that relations between South Africans of different races are mainly positive, with an overwhelming majority believing that ‘the different races need each other for progress and there should be equal opportunities for all’.
16 March 2018 - Today’s decision by the head to of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to proceed with criminal charges against former President Jacob Zuma is to be welcomed.
16 March 2018 - Your report mischaracterises President Cyril Ramaphosa’s plan for property rights (Ratings agencies are happy with Nene, March 14). You write of "his plan to change the Constitution to allow white-owned property to be taken without payment for redistribution to landless blacks". This is not so.
16 March 2018 - A lack of information about land ownership has been a critical hindrance to an informed debate around land reform. As a rendering of the findings of the land audit, President Ramaphosa’s words are a good deal, more accurate than what some of his associates have put out. But they still obscure as much as they reveal.
14 March 2018 - The EFF’s involvement in Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s appointment was risible, but, as ever, it doesn’t get called on it.
14 March 2018 - The ANC has never wanted to succeed at land reform. Rather, one of its key objectives has long been to ‘eliminate’ private property rights, so as to help shift South Africa from a capitalist to a socialist and then communist economy.
What South Africa needs to do to beat unemployment
14 March 2018 - Data in the 2018 edition of the South Africa Survey, published by the South African Institute of Race Relations (IRR), underlines the urgent need for investment, economic growth and policy reforms, especially in education, if the country is to reduce its high unemployment figures.
12 March 2018 - Beneficiaries of reform are only leaseholders, and holdings by trusts, companies and the state must be included, writes Terence Corrigan.
SA has made significant progress against HIV/AIDS, but more must be done
12 March 2018 - South Africa has made considerable progress against the scourge of HIV/AIDS, with a marked decline in the number of new infections since 2009 – but an intensified campaign is needed to sustain the gains.
Sisulu’s words do not compensate for reality
7 March 2018 - Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Lindiwe Sisulu statement on expropriation without compensation offers little reassurance to foreign investors and their governments.
4 March 2018 - The ANC’s shift towards expropriating land without paying compensation has prompted a warning from the Wall Street Journal.
2 March 2018 - The ruling ANC’s shift towards a constitutional amendment allowing it to expropriate land without paying compensation has prompted a warning from the Wall Street Journal that “(s)eizing private property has produced misery everywhere it has been tried. South Africans don’t need more of that.”
Ominous raid on investigative journalist Jacques Pauw’s home has a chilling effect on democracy
1 March 2018 - Profoundly worrying questions arise from the raid by the Hawks' Crimes Against The State Unit on the Riebeek Kasteel home of writer and investigative journalist Jacques Pauw.
1 March 2018 - President Cyril Ramaphosa has recently claimed the ruling party must move ahead with land expropriation without compensation because of a 'pressing' and 'urgent' hunger for farming land among South Africans.
A profound danger for SA’s economic future
26 February 2018 – The IRR warns that any renewed effort in the National Assembly to begin the process of introducing a regime of expropriation without compensation represents a profound danger for South Africa’s economic future.
Nothing to be had if the cupboard is bare
22 February 2018 – The latest edition of Fast Facts, ‘Old Mother Hubbard’, from the Centre for Risk Analysis at the IRR, assesses the 2018 Budget, warning that, in the absence of profound changes in economic policy, “Mr Ramaphosa will fail to translate his political success into an economic reformation”.
22 February 2018 - It is worrying that the medium-term expectation is for South Africa to continue underperforming regional and emerging market growth averages by around 50%. The current growth projections will put paid to the prospect of a medium-term employment uptick.
22 February 2018 - While newspapers will herald the budget as ‘good’ and ‘brave’ and ‘striking a balance’ between competing objectives at a difficult time, it is none of these things.
Gwen Ngwenya to take up post in political arena
21 February 2018 – Gwen Ngwenya leaves IRR to take up a post in the political arena, as head of the policy for the DA
21 February 2018 - Appointing a new, capable mining minister who has the confidence of the industry is one of the vital steps newly inaugurated President Cyril Ramaphosa needs to take to give credence to his thinking that mining is not a sunset, but a sunrise sector. Party stalwart and former trade unionist, Gwede Mantashe, got that role in the latest cabinet reshuffle.
19 February 2018 - Voltaire's Dr Pangloss, the practitioner of metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology, would have done a roaring trade in South Africa today. His particular brand of optimism, that this world is "the best of all possible worlds", captures something distinctly South African. And the election of Cyril Ramaphosa as president of both the ANC and the country has made the impulse manifest.
19 February 2018 - One of those who made it clear last week that the African National Congress (ANC) was ready to vote with opposition parties against Mr Zuma was the finance minister, Malusi Gigaba. Since Mr Gigaba was one of Mr Zuma's chief instruments of state capture when he was minister of public enterprises between 2010 and 2014, this no doubt prompted Mr Zuma to mutter "Et tu, Brute?" as Mr Gigaba thrust in the knife.
19 February 2018 - It may be stating the obvious, but viable business depends above all on a relatively simple mathematical calculation: the revenue that a firm is able to make must, over time, exceed the costs it incurs in the course of its activities. Where this calculation fails, business becomes – in a rational sense – impossible.
18 February 2018 - Here’s a brilliant assessment of the state of South Africa by one of the country’s foremost analysts. Frans Cronje is the CEO of the respected Institute of Race Relations, which since its formation in 1929 has been acknowledged as the country’s leading political and economic think tank.
19 February 2018 - It’s a marvel how things change, that to be a Zuma might, implicitly, trump being a Verwoerd. Both men, as it happens, represent a continuum of sorts: the truth about SA, recently addressed by distinguished political analyst RW Johnson, that we are a nation obsessed with Leaders with a capital L.
Ramaphosa’s SONA: A weak speech that follows more than leads - IRR
17 February 2018 – The IRR says that while the sentiment of President Ramaphosa’s SONA was praiseworthy, its lofty ideals and values will live or die by how hard the President is willing to fight for them.
17 February 2018 - Even the DRC is seen as a better mining investment destination than SA, but that can be changed