Thought Leader

I’m between home and show and booked in for the night, but adrenalin has bled out, and the minutes feel skinned alive. Moments hang together, nerves exposed. I’ve chickened out and beat the last joke to the car. Drunk executives and their punch bags heave under the weight of free buffet. Young do-goods shake jowls and [...]

It was a sunny day in Shanghai on Nanjing West road, apparently the longest shopping road in the world. We ex-pats were doing what ex-pats do on a day off, sitting in a favourite pub, The Long Bar, fronting the Ritz-Portman hotel. While we sipped our beers a small body of citizens gathered outside the [...]

Recent events in South Africa (like the looming attempts to control the media), together with a comment by “Maria” on one of my previous posts, have set me wondering if we are seeing the beginnings of what Arundhati Roy, Indian social activist and novelist, called “creeping fascism”? Referring (in 2003) to what was happening under [...]

In a dramatic turnaround, South African journalists have welcomed the proposed changes to the Protection of Information Bill and the Media Appeals Tribunal, as vetted by the national government last month. The South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) hosted a press conference in Pretoria on Tuesday issuing an apology for the initial “hysterical” reaction to [...]

Since 1994, there has been a lot of talk about South Africa’s lost generation — the Y generation that is apathetic, apolitical, consumerist and vulnerable to a range of social ills, such as substance abuse and Aids. More recently, we have heard talk of the so-called born-frees growing up in ignorance of the hardships that [...]

There are two words commonly used in South Africa which I really, really can’t stand. The one is the word “comrade”. The other one is the word “bokkie”. “Bokkie” is often used in insipid Afrikaans love songs by commercial singers (presumably because it rhymes with “sokkie”). In that way, it fulfils the same function that the [...]

If a sliver of South Africa’s future can be glimpsed through the prism of the current public-service protests, then the future should be delayed indefinitely. The unchecked culture of irresponsible protests has been allowed to grow into a soulless monster, ready to incite anarchy and we should all be afraid. Much has been said about how [...]

A case of the proverbial hornets’ nest having been thoughtlessly kicked

So I have to change her name. Well, at least to the name I have chosen to use in a semi-autobiographical novel I am writing, tentatively titled Shame. Well I remember being attracted to Alexis in what was then a rural part of Boksburg. She had a younger brother, Cosmo, and the three of us [...]

Mills persuasively identifies the one thing that outweighs all others in fast growing economies that have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. It is leadership.

Never had I imagined having to break in and out of work. To understand the nature of this strike, you need to realise that a hospital has both clinical and non-clinical staff. The clinical staff are far more reliant on the non-clinical staff in order for the hospital to function in any capacity and to [...]

By Monde Nkosi Winston Churchill once claimed that all men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes. It would appear that we, as a country, are not wise. As far back as 2005 during a strike by the SA Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union, a placard read: “Sean Summers you earn R12 million but [...]

Evil Santa Claus Andrew Mitchell is in the process of training the British public to accept international aid as a force that discriminates rather than helps. Can this be reversed before the UK’s aid budget skips Africa altogether? Mitchell is the UK’s International Development Secretary and insists that the UK’s donation of £64 million to Pakistan — [...]

They say paranoia is just being in possession of all the facts. Clearly the minister of state security knows more than I do — he accuses us of “war talk” in relation to the secrecy bill. What? Not just that but we apparently have engaged in “personal attacks on members of the ad hoc committee [...]

I was not going to write a follow-up to my previous post but was compelled to by an email response from a “friend”. This “friend” managed to spoil my thorough enjoyment of Koos Kombuis’s Lisa se Klavier. His email made me think quite a bit about why he wrote the email, what my response would [...]

Professor Steven Friedman in an article in Business Day says that the media has it wrong about secrecy law’s victims and that the failure of the media to analyse the bill accurately may be the only reason it has received so much attention. He basis this, primarily, on the following : “Media coverage of the bill has [...]