25 January 2018 - Perhaps the key idea here is not about whether land reform should take place, but its terms and objectives. ‘The “land question”,’ they write, ‘strikes a chord for many people and serves as a potent symbol of persistent poverty and structural inequality.’
Our own writing in the media
Every year our analysts and policy experts, in promoting new ideas and policies, contribute a wide range of articles to newspapers across South Africa.
25 January 2018 - Given the reasons for which South Africa’s State-owned Enterprises have been much in the news of late, we should be grateful that Mandela heeded the warnings on nationalisation. The land reform experiences in Vietnam and China are particularly instructive. Both of these fed on real grievances on the part of the peasantry – but were so overpowered by ideology that their outcomes, quite predictably, exacted huge costs.
24 January 2018 - A good showing in Davos could help get South Africa back on track. And so, as any number of media reports have stated, Team SA will be going to Davos to advance a positive view of South Africa’s future. Key to this – as an article in one of the Sunday papers put it – would be the ‘Cyril effect’.
24 January 2018 - “The school's Afrikaans-only language policy was previously rejected by the education department”, and that “Afrikaans was a language that symbolised ‘sorrow and tears to the majority of those (of) whom it was not their mother tongue’”.
23 January 2018 - How long the charade will last is hard to tell, but the Gauteng department of education has to date done very well in getting parents, activists, journalists and analysts to focus on almost everything other than the real problems confronting the education of their children.
23 January 2018 - A dynamic South Africa's hopes must ultimately depend on its own choices and its willingness to make them.
22 January 2018 - But both assurances will hinge on convincing investors that property and assets will remain safe from indiscriminate seizure
22 January 2018 - A commission of inquiry to interrogate this depressing state of affairs should make eminent sense. Or does it?
22 January 2018 - Cyril Ramaphosa has been given a blank slate by all and sundry to clean up the mess Jacob Zuma has left behind. This is not necessarily a good thing.
21 January 2018 - South Africa's Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) no doubt regard themselves as heroes for their acts of vandalism against H&M retail fashion shops in various parts of the country, but the real hero of this episode is Terry Mango, mother of the five-year-old boy who posed for an advertisement wearing a jumper bearing the words "coolest monkey in the jungle".
19 January 2018 - The current policy of the government is not to give ownership of land to black farmers, but rather for the State to own all redistributed land and to force black farmers to lease it.
18 January 2018 - Where freedom has been fought for and won, it is ironic that choices are so often reduced rather than expanded by the very environment that is meant to guarantee them