In his response to the debate on the 2016 State of the Nation Address, president Jacob Zuma reiterated Parliament will consider the promulgation of the Cyber Crimes and Related Matters Bill during the first half of this year. The South African Institute of Race Relations (IRR) has concerns with this Bill.
Our own writing in the media
The supreme irony is that Ramaphosa’s vast wealth is founded on political access to white capital eager for access to government.
In his fortnightly column in Business Day, John Kane-Berman, the Institute's CEO, writes that the Democratic Alliance (DA) should use the moral authority of the party's history and fight against the racial practices of the ruling tripartite alliance.
The South African visa spat has been well documented as has the squabble between Tourism Minister Derek Hanekom and Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba. The figures show that tourist numbers have fallen from key regions, while many jobs are said to be on the line. Not something the government needs to deal with as unemployment already sits at 1 in 4. The President has called for a review of the whole debacle but the damage may have already been done.
John Kane-Berman asks whether that is what President Zuma really wants.
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.
Approximately 60% of black people disagreed with the statement that “South Africa is a country for black-Africans and white people must learn to take second place”. Only 30% agreed and 10% were uncertain.
27 March 2018 - Mondli Makhanya's critique of the IRR's research begins by acknowledging that current debates on joblessness and other vital issues are "laced with racial suspicion" and "riddled with myths, suppositions, and disdain for fact", all of which "makes it impossible to have rational conversations" ('Dear IRR, Racism is real').
20 April 2018 - The DA’s statement, issued by DA leader Mmusi Maimane, made no mention of any of this, however. Instead, it focused rather on Kaunda’s liberation credentials.
Contrary to what some analysts have reported, Malusi Gigaba has not clearly countered the views of his leftist adviser, Chris Malikane
Cilliers Brink responds to Max du Preez's call for whites to 'behave'.
John Kane-Berman wrote in Business Day today that, "Kgalema Motlanthe, Thabo Mbeki, Trevor Manuel, and Jacob Zuma have all warned against SA’s becoming a welfare state. But the welfare state rolls on regardless. In five years’ time, Manuel’s legacy may appear different from how it does now, especially given the global slump: social spending on a scale that upsets the fiscal apple cart."
More and more people now recognise the disastrous consequences of the cadre deployment policy of the African National Congress.
Along with Helen Zille, Dianne Kohler Barnard, and Chris Hart, I will no doubt be accused of thought-crime for saying so, but the recent decision of the Constitutional Court in the social grant case is something of a victory for the "white monopoly capitalism" the African National Congress (ANC) likes denouncing.
Destroy accountability and you destroy one of the two most important reasons for Parliament to exist, the other the passing of legislation.
President’s bumbling country-bumpkin persona is a foil to lure his adversaries into a sense of false security
These days, the news coming out of Venezuela is all bad. The economy is in free-fall, daily rolling protests are rocking the country, people are being beaten, arrested and killed by the hundred, and thousands are fleeing the country in desperation. How did it come to this?
"’n 21-jarige meisie het sterwend op ’n voubedjie gelê. Die vader, ’n groot, sagsinnige Boer, het langs haar gekniel terwyl sy vrou in die volgende tent waggehou het oor ’n sesjarige kind, ook sterwend, en nog ’n kwynende kind van omtrent vyf. Hierdie paartjie het reeds drie kinders in die hospitaal verloor en kon dus nie moed opgee met hierdie kinders nie, hoewel ek hard gesoebat het om hulle uit die warm tent uit te kry."
ALMOST everywhere the African National Congress (ANC) and its increasingly influential partners in the South African Communist Party (SACP) go, they leave a trail of destruction. Parliament, whose white-anting started with its first speaker, Frene Ginwala, and the torpedoing of the arms deal investigation, is but the latest wreck.