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.
Saliem Fakir -
If there were to be a beauty contest, Sarah Palin (formerly Governor of Alaska) would win over ANC Youth League President, Julius Malema by far in the looks department.
However, as political celebrities for a growing anti-intellectual movement in two different parts of the world, they share a real and symbolic place in contemporary popular culture and politics.
Palin, like Malema, shows no great intellectual curiosity. Their erudition of complex geopolitical and economic issues is not going...
Richard Pithouse -
The democratic ideal, the idea that the people should rule themselves, is grounded in equality. It recognises that everyone is capable of thought and it is committed to the right of all people to shape society via free and equal participation in deliberative processes. Because democracy is a politics of equality it is a fundamental rejection of the idea that people should know or be forced to accept their place in society.
One way of containing the radical force of the democratic ideal has...
Dale T. McKinley -
Even if the meanings we give to measurements of time are most often overblown, there is something about the mark of a new decade. In the case of South Africa, 1990 marked the beginning of the end of the apartheid system, ushering in a period pregnant with new hopes, possibilities and dreams. When 2000 rolled around it heralded not only a once in a lifetime turn of a century but carried with it the delayed weight of majoritarian expectation of an age of progress and plenty. So what are our...
Fazila Farouk -
Sporting an anomalous gaze, President Jacob Zuma stares righteously from Time magazine’s 7th December cover.
Making the cover of Time Magazine has come to symbolise the ultimate accolade and establishment endorsement for rising stars as well as those deemed worthy of redemption. And even if Zuma did only make the cover of Time’s Africa edition, the chief architects of public discourse have indeed remodelled and redeemed him.
"Could Zuma be what South Africa...
Richard Pithouse -
The 2010 World Cup is being sold to us as a moment of collective redemption. Patriotism and theological sentiments are being mobilised to persuade us that a moment of millennial grace is at hand. Africa's time, we are told, has come.
Back in 2007 Thabo Mbeki heralded the World Cup as "an event that will send ripples of confidence from the Cape to Cairo - an event that will create social and economic opportunities throughout Africa. We want to ensure that one day, historians will reflect...
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen -
About a decade ago, there was a fashionable rebuttal for developmental alternatives within the broader configuration of power called the ANC. That rebuttal was simply that alternatives were "intellectual gymnastics."
The criticism was at once soft and devastating.
In a single stroke, a double critique unfolded. First, that alternatives existed in the realm of ideas and being "intellectual" had little practical value. Second, that because political office bearers...
