The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
The relationship between democracy and governance and the realisation of socio-economic rights is an important issue for debate. SACSIS seeks to understand this relationship and identify issues that act as barriers to pro-poor democracy.
Richard Pithouse -
In the colonies ….the agents of government speak the language of pure force. - Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
All societies are managed with a mixture of force and consent. But in South Africa like, say, India or Mexico, violence, or the threat of violence, is woven so tightly into the banalities and intimacies of day to day life that it is part of the deep structure of things. And it is not simply a matter, as many politicians would like us to believe, of criminality...
David Bruce -
If one wants to understand the common thread behind police brutality in South Africa, the cruelty that last week killed taxi driver Mido Macia, the massacre of the miners at Marikana or the killing of Andries Tatane, it is helpful to go back to the ANC’s 2009 election manifesto.
The manifesto largely rehashes old ideas. But in describing how the ANC will “intensify the fight against crime and corruption” there is one word in the manifesto that is relevant to understanding...
Mandisi Majavu -
Before the 2009 general elections, political pundits predicted that a shift of black electoral support from the African National Congress (ANC) to Congress of the People (COPE) was inevitable. It was further pointed out that this shift was going to occur along class lines; we were told that the black middle class perceived COPE as the political party that could represent its class interest. Although COPE won about seven percent of the national vote in the 2009 elections, the internecine feud...
Richard Pithouse -
Here we are, almost twenty years after apartheid and from the prisons, to the shack settlements and the farms, the riotous underbelly of our society is on television most nights. We're not even a full month into the year and its been reported that the police have killed another protester in the Boland and, depending on which newspaper you read, three, four or six people in Zamdela in Sasolburg.
The new normal that we are being asked to accept after Mangaung has won consent in some...
Dale T. McKinley -
If you blinked you probably missed it.
Seemingly unbeknownst to the vast majority of South Africa’s over 120 000 non-profit organisations (NPOs), the Department of Social Development (DSD) undertook a series of ‘partnership’ meetings and summits across the country in June and July last year with selected NPOs. In the words of DSD Minister Bathabile Dlamini, these were designed to discuss “the work and challenges of government and civil society organisations...
Glenn Ashton -
President Zuma has called for a national cleansing ceremony in order to restore moral values. But what is the real meaning of this ‘morality’?
Does he intend to stamp out corruption and promote non-sexism? Is he going to defend the values enshrined in our constitution? Or is he urging young people to respect their elders and exhorting women to get married before they have children?
In a nation comprised of many cultures, each subject to the pressures which accompany rapid...
