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.
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen -
The truism, same context, different outcomes, applies to the performance of politicians. A select number of politicians have excelled in South Africa, but the public remains unconvinced that the performance of government has improved. Interestingly, across perception surveys, there is a decline in the approval ratings of governments over the last five years.
An important proposal has been floated to improve the performance of our government, by having politicians with executive...
Stephen Greenberg -
Local government is the interface between the state and citizens in any country. In rural South Africa, this interface is extremely weak as a result of the power of sectional interests and a local government system that reinforces accountability to party rather than constituency.
The lack of legitimacy and responsiveness of local government was a weak point under apartheid, and the widespread struggle for democratic local representation was one of the most important factors in the downfall...
Richard Pithouse -
Carl Niehaus was the perfect spokesperson for Jacob Zuma. He had an inside understanding of the world of reckless extravagance under the patronage of dubious businessmen. He must have known, perhaps lying awake wondering who to phone to get the rent for his extraordinarily ugly house, precisely what has happened to elite politics in the ANC.
The idea of politics carries both a debased and an elevated sense. In its debased sense it is the self-serving and often ruthless competition for power...
Colette Francis -
The army is to be deployed in hot spots across South Africa to prevent an outbreak of political violence ahead of this year’s elections, says Minister of Defence Charles Nqqakula. This in the wake of a spate of attacks in Kwazulu-Natal (KZN) that has seen tensions between Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the ruling ANC resurface. On Sunday a stand-off between the IFP and ANC became so tense that the army was called in to support hundreds of police officers...
Saliem Fakir -
The ANC is no longer sure of who is friend or foe. Some of its traditional members and ardent supporters are quietly vying for the Congress of the People (COPE) while pretending to be all for the ANC in public. Come the day of the secret ballot, they will have already turned.
Some have already made the leap. Others are waiting for when the time is right to join COPE more openly. And, yet others simply have a genuine concern about South African democracy and its future and will vote for COPE...
Saliem Fakir -
There is this erroneous logic that there are developmental states in some places and advanced states in other places. One advances from a developmental mode to some sort of mature state in which the markets take-over.
This implicit typology of evolutionary progression of states is just nonsense. There is nothing static and permanent about the operational modes of states. They are creatures of time and context. What needs to be done under different circumstances must be done in the interest...
