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?
Anna Majavu -
A truck transporting 100 cattle to the abattoir overturned last week on the N1 highway, with 32 cows then allegedly being stolen by residents of a nearby poor community.
News websites carried a story sourced from a National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (NSPCA) press release, which described the residents negatively as “frenzied”, a “mob” and “vultures” and said they had “the intention” to hack pieces of flesh off the...
Richard Pithouse -
We would be more effective at dealing with the endemic racism in our society if we didn’t relentlessly speak in a manner that reduces racism to apartheid and ‘apartheid tendencies’. The reason for this is not because historical trauma should be repressed and its consequences in the present naturalised. On the contrary it is because the development of an adequate understanding of how our society came to be as it is requires us to speak a lot more about both colonialism and...
Philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues that our current brand of global capitalism is quickly outgrowing democracy and that a divorce between the two is inevitable. This leads to an array of social and geopolitical concerns regarding the public commons, including the emergence of new forms of apartheid. New walls are emerging between, for example, the United States and Mexico, Israel and the West Bank in addition to a new obsession with how to isolate Europe from Africa. The paradox of...
Nicolas Pons-Vignon -
Suggesting that workers, meaning those in low-level occupations, are overpaid, has become commonplace in South Africa. It is one facet of a broader line of argument, according to which, workers, especially black workers have been excessively well treated in the post-apartheid dispensation. The other facet of this argument is that this is not just a problem of attitude - one of entitlement justifying laziness, for instance - but also a cause of poverty, since overpaid workers keep others out...
Alexander O'Riordan -
Green energy could be something of a magic bullet for social and economic justice because it will inevitably erode elites’ grubby hold on energy resources such as coal, oil and gas in much of Africa. Small scale and affordable green energy solutions democratise access to energy because instead of having to broker a deal with an often vested elite, families and small businesses can buy and install their own ‘off the shelf’ solutions without permission needed from anyone....
Just over two months ago three grandmothers were introduced to pot for the first time by an intrepid video production team in the state of Washington in the United States where the use of recreational marijuana is legal. The women were given a bong, a vaporizer, marijuana tea and offered some snacks and a card game. The results are both hilarious and sobering. We witness the grandmothers starting to relax, laugh a lot, tell some dirty jokes, talk about their new experience and realise that...
