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 -
Jacob Zuma’s ascent to the presidency in May last year was an ugly business, a really ugly business. And Zuma was hardly a candidate with the gravitas to rise above the mess. He was the former head of iMbokodo, a social conservative in whose name sexism and ethnic chauvinism were openly mobilised, the former Deputy President who had never stood up to Thabo Mbeki on any question of principle and a man who had surrendered his personal political autonomy to some of the shadiest elements in...
Dale T. McKinley -
I am not sure whether the word ‘polipreneurship’ has ever been part of our political lexicon but I do know that what it represents has been with us for some time now, not just in South Africa, but globally. At its most basic level, polipreneurship can be defined as ‘politics as business’.
While there were no doubt some political figures in the pre-capitalist era that could be more broadly classified as polipreneurs (the practitioners), it was the arrival and...
Jane Duncan -
What ails South Africa’s security cluster? The military has been mired in controversy recently over the cluster’s lack of transparency. Questions that have been asked and answered in the public domain for years about the military’s use of resources are not being answered now on grounds of ‘national security’.
Nyami Booi has been fired as Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Defence, for taking the Zuma administration’s professed commitment to an...
Richard Pithouse -
These men… at the head of a team of administrators…. proclaim that the vocation of their people is to obey, to go on obeying and to be obedient till the end of time (Frantz Fanon, 1961).
Gwede Mantashe and Jeremy Cronin have both recently taken the view that the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) needs to be defended against attempts to organise outside of direct party control. We shouldn’t be particularly surprised by this development given the long history of...
Richard Pithouse -
Gwede Mantashe, the Secretary General of the African National Congress and Chairperson of the South African Communist Party, is not a democrat. He’s hardly the only influential public figure in South Africa who is not a democrat. Julius Malema, with his hysterical attempts to symbolically annihilate the humanity of his opponents, is certainly not a democrat.
And Helen Zille’s attempt to justify her illegal, violent and, in strict legal terms, criminal evictions in Hout Bay by...
Jane Duncan -
In an editorial in March this year, the Sunday Times newspaper warned against “a culture of political assassination,” becoming entrenched in the Mpumalanga province of South Africa, after the paper published allegations of the existence of a hit list of officials blocking access to tenders linked to the 2010 World Cup.
By that time, seven officials had died in mysterious circumstances, including the Mbombela Municipality's Speaker, Jimmy Mohlala.
The World Cup tender...
