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?
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviews South Africa’s ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, who attended the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Rasool discusses the Obama presidency, the militarization of Africa, Islamophobia, the Marikana massacre and his 2006 meeting with then-Senator Obama in South Africa.
With respect to Marikana he says, "I believe, at the end of the day, the kind of compromises we made in 1994 are coming back to haunt us. I...
The Lonmin miners' strike has entered its 4th week with no end in sight. As links between the mining companies and the ANC are exposed, there is growing frustration about poverty and inequality in South Africa, and anger at the growing class divide. Al Jazeera's Inside Story asks, "Is there a new kind of apartheid in South Africa?"
Shulie Ghosh speaks to Anthea Jeffrey of the South African Institute of Race Relations, Adam Habib from the University of Johannesburg and Tony Dykes...
Paul Jay of The Real News Network talks to Vishwas Satgar, Senior Lecturer at Wits University, about the Marikana massacre.
“The ANC has embraced a neo-liberal economic model that has opened up this economy. The most they can show for it in terms of delivery is a social grant system mainly targeting the aged and children. The ANC can also show some delivery around housing. But, a lot of the apartheid pattern of urban and spatial development has continued. Beyond this, the ANC is...
Saliem Fakir -
Sometimes economic speak merely arranges the technical as a substitution for the moral. The technical itself becomes slanted by a polemic of legitimation.
The debate as to whether South Africa’s economy is productive or not often has a convenient scapegoat - the problem of the unproductive worker. Workers don’t work hard enough for the wages they earn, so they shouldn’t expect more because there is always somebody else willing to work for a lower salary, is the...
Richard Pithouse -
The African National Congress has been captured by a predatory elite that is cynical, corrupt, ruthless and reckless. It is actively reinscribing unbridgeable inequalities into the deep structures of our society. The transit camps and new townships in the cities, the enduring ways in which the former Bantustans remain separate and unequal zones in the countryside, the state of public education and the growth of unemployment and precarious work all mark out this out with undeniable clarity....
Leonard Gentle -
The story of Marikana runs much deeper than an inter-union spat. After the horror of watching people being massacred on television, Marikana now joins the ranks of the Bulhoek and Sharpeville massacres, and the images evoked by Hugh Masekela’s Stimela, in the odious history of a method of capital accumulation based on violence.
But this is not just a story of violence and grief. To speak in those terms only would be to add the same insult to the injury perpetrated by the police on...
