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?
Richard Pithouse -
For a long time the ANC was able to sacralise its authority by invoking the key events, ideas and personalities of the struggle like Catholics recite the Stations of the Cross. However we have now reached the point where the power of that political liturgy to inspire and to discipline is in precipitous decline. Patronage and repression have contained some of the fallout. But despite the mobilisation of money and guns to shore up the party’s authority, new heresies, some with their own...
Glenn Ashton -
Over the course of the past century our food supply has shifted from local to global. Most food our grandparents ate was grown regionally, often by neighbourhood farmers. Today our food comes from across the world. More importantly, it is often produced in highly destructive ways, at the lowest possible cost.
Consequently our food production system is responsible for accelerating the rate of destruction of the very ecosystems we are reliant upon in order to maintain our delicate global...
Alexander O'Riordan -
Little more than two years since declaring independence, South Sudan is now in what can only be described as a civil war. Right now representatives of both sides are in Addis Ababa for peace talks backed by Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya amongst others. While many pundits have and continue to point to ethnic based threats to stability, few have paid enough attention to the raw economics of the situation.
South Sudan’s government inherited one of the world’s poorest and most...
Tom Fawthrop -
The long struggle of Nelson Mandela—from freedom fighter and political prisoner to president of South Africa—has, in death, received universal acclaim from world leaders.
Even George H.W. Bush, who was U.S. president when a white racist dictatorship held the predominantly black South Africa hostage, gushed with praise. UK Prime Minister David Cameron and other Western leaders past and present were similarly effusive.
So if the leaders of the most powerful countries had...
Christopher Zumski Finke -
When Emily Graslie started her YouTube program, "The Brain Scoop," out of a lab at the University of Montana, she couldn't find many role models that looked like her. Today, she's a popular Internet science educator—Chicago's Field Museum's first-ever "Chief Curiosity Correspondent"—whose viral YouTube shows often get hundreds of thousands of views. And she's still looking for that role model.
“There should be some woman on some show on some...
It is predicted that trillions of dollars of wealth will be transferred to the hands of a new generation of philanthropists in the next half-century. “It’s the biggest inter-generational transfer of wealth that we've ever seen. (And) so much of what happens in the future will depend on what the rising generation of major donors (now in their twenties and thirties) will become. Will they do things very differently from the previous generation?", asks Caroline Hartnell of...
