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?
Jane Duncan -
Last November, Grahamstown-based media activist Xola Mali produced a documentary about the plight of residents in the Vukani settlement, Grahamstown East. Previously an informal settlement, Vukani now consists mostly of Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses, which were completed in 2003. Mali interviewed a resident and activist, Nomiki Ncamiso, who sustained injuries after the wall of her RDP house collapsed on her and injured her leg when a mini-tornado struck the...
Alfred W. McCoy -
In ways that have escaped most observers, the Obama administration is now trapped in an endless cycle of drugs and death in Afghanistan from which there is neither an easy end nor an obvious exit.
After a year of cautious debate and costly deployments, President Obama finally launched his new Afghan war strategy at 2:40 am on February 13, 2010, in a remote market town called Marja in southern Afghanistan's Helmand Province. As a wave of helicopters descended on Marja's outskirts spitting up...
Saliem Fakir -
When Minister Ebrahim Patel released his fledgling department’s medium-term strategic plan, he indicated that the Department of Economic Development would investigate the use of pension funds for the purposes of infrastructure development and repair.
No sooner had he announced this, did some economists, in a typical knee-jerk reaction, jeer the idea conjecturing that it was bad. In contrast, there have been some others from the same quarters (private capital markets) who thought it...
Kate Picket, epidemiologist and co-author of, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, shares her well researched knowledge about this important question. According to Picket: "We've lived in every kind of society. For a lot of our existence as human beings, we've lived in fairly egalitarian hunter gatherer societies. But we've also lived in very hierarchical tyrannies as well. So we clearly can manage to exist in both and develop all kinds of different...
On Tuesday, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Medicine Act into law, heralding America's first national health insurance scheme. While lauded as a watershed development, the bill lacks a public option, which progressives deem its greatest failure. To call this a victory for healthcare as a human right is a mistake says media critic and journalist, Norman Solomon. "This is as much a victory for corporate America and for exploitation as it is anything...
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen -
Dear Ministers, Patel, Davies and Gordhan
Consider this letter a criticism that nevertheless appreciates the value of your recent work on creating the building blocks for a new development path in South Africa. After all, as our collective history indicates, power concedes nothing without demand. To which we might add, demands without mobilisation are futile.
I interpret the call for a new development path as a demand and a deliberate undertaking towards a more equal South Africa. On...
