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?
The relationship between democracy and governance and the realisation of socio-economic rights is an important issue for debate. SACSIS seeks to understand this relationship and identify issues that act as barriers to pro-poor democracy.
Richard Pithouse -
Corruption in South Africa is not nearly as ubiquitous as it is in countries like India or Italy. But it is becoming an increasingly ordinary part of the texture of every day life. It is certainly a serious issue and its certainly obscene that even state projects with as urgent a social function as providing school books and housing to the poor are taken more seriously in some quarters as opportunities for personal enrichment than as collective social obligations. Its equally obscene that...
Anna Majavu -
With the DA beginning their campaign to wrest control of another few provinces from the ANC in the 2014 elections, the impoverished residents of Cape Town’s Lavender Hill and Hanover Park have become the latest convenient political footballs.
Like other so-called “Coloured” communities - Delft, Grassy Park, Ocean View and Bishop Lavis - Lavender Hill and Hanover Park remain derelict ghettoes, which appear to be stuck in a long forgotten era. A part-privatised leaky...
Richard Pithouse -
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
- Antonio Gramsci, Regina Coeli Prison, Rome, 1930
Neil Daniels was murdered in Cape Town on the 2nd of June. His genitals were burnt. Thapelo Makutle was murdered in Kuruman in the Northern Cape on the 9th of June. His genitals were hacked off his body and shoved into his mouth. Phumeza Nkolonz was murdered in Cape Town on the 23rd...
Richard Pithouse -
There's no question that the debate, in and around the media, ignited by the ANC's response to Brett Murray's painting has been voluminous and intense in equal measure. But the way in which many of its protagonists have mobilised the idea of a tumultuous wave of threatening popular anger hasn't been borne out on the streets.
The march of just 300 at the court in Johannesburg and then, later, 600 people in downtown Durban were total flops. Any self-respecting grassroots organisation would,...
Glenn Ashton -
The last few years has seen a steady procession of various shady characters from around the world paraded across our headlines and through our legal systems. So is South Africa becoming a sunny place for shady people? To be more precise, are our democratic institutions at risk from infiltration by international criminals and crime networks? Crime and corruption are ancient confederates.
Apartheid South Africa was not only morally corrupt, it was corrupt to its core. Despite denials by...
Richard Pithouse -
The allegations that have been levelled against Richard Mdluli are very serious. If they are true he is a dangerous man, a very dangerous man.
We do need to be mindful that some of the allegations against Mdluli have entered the public domain as different factions of the police leak information and allegations against each other. But Jacob Zuma's decision to make him the head of the Crime Intelligence unit in the police is still chilling. The man is accused of kidnapping, murder, fraud,...
