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?
N.B. Sensitive viewers are warned that this video contains graphic images.
Nigeria has a "voodoo economy" contends Nigerian architect and environmental activist, Nnimmo Bassey. Despite Nigeria’s economy growing at an annual rate of six percent and surpassing South Africa to become the biggest economy in Africa, the country’s wealth is concentrated in a few hands. Seventy percent of Nigerians live in poverty. Inequality and deprivation is most severe in the north of...
Most people working in NGOs are driven by passion and a sense of mission. But good motives don’t guarantee good outcomes, argues Dan Corry, chief executive of New Philanthropy Capital in a seminar about non-profits, innovation, productivity and ‘theories of change’ in the UK charity sector. The discussion parallels debates about the effectiveness of South African NGOs. Corry calls for creative destruction to improve productivity and fast track social change. But Vicky...
Saliem Fakir -
The reaction to Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century was to be expected – both great praise and rejection at the same time. Most studies on inequality, certainly, in the case of South Africa have tended to focus on the middle class, the employed worker and the unemployed through household surveys.
What Piketty’s book has done is to argue that economists have been focusing so much on the bottom of the economic pile that we have lost sight of what is...
Glenn Greenwald -
On December 1, 2012, I received my first communication from Edward Snowden, although I had no idea at the time that it was from him.
The contact came in the form of an email from someone calling himself Cincinnatus, a reference to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer who, in the fifth century BC, was appointed dictator of Rome to defend the city against attack. He is most remembered for what he did after vanquishing Rome’s enemies: he immediately and voluntarily gave up...
Steven Friedman -
If the social justice agenda here depends on inflating the popular support and the commitment to equality of a loud group of racial nationalists, it is in more trouble than we thought.
The nationalists are the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), whose 6, 35% of the vote has been hailed by the media, commentators and voices on the left. If we look at the numbers, it is hard to see why the EFF should deserve this hero-worship. If we look beyond them, we will find the reaction to Julius...
Dale T. McKinley -
No sooner had the final results of the recently concluded 2014 national elections been announced than President Zuma gave a predictably self-congratulatory speech lauding the result as “the will of all the people”. The reality however is that the ANC’s victory came from a distinct minority of “the people”. The real ‘winner’, as has been the case since the 2004 elections, was the stay away ‘vote’.
Since South Africa’s first-ever...
