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 -
As the African National Congress heads to its centenary conference in Mangaung and on to the end of its second decade in power there is still considerable popular fidelity to the ANC as an idea and as an identity. But the ANC does face declining electoral support, escalating popular protest and increasing hostility from the media, intellectuals and much of civil society. The authoritarian currents in the party like to blame all of this on sinister attempts to oppose a democratic government....
Richard Pithouse -
Taking over a mode of rule is not the same thing as transforming it. Barack Obama is not George Bush but that fact makes little difference to the bankers looking for a public subsidy or a wedding party in Pakistan at the moment when a drone rushes out of the sky.
Time and again governments that have come to power on the tide of popular resistance to oppressive systems have ended up reinscribing central aspects of the systems they had opposed. It's easy enough to imagine that on the...
Leonard Gentle -
There is a very cynical, old apartheid era joke about English-speaking whites in South Africa to the effect that, ”Most supported the Progs (Helen Suzman’s old Progressive Party); voted UP (the old United Party of De Villiers Graaf) … and thanked God for the Nats”.
Meaning that it was okay to be disgusted by the racism and repression, but hell those Afrikaners knew how to run the economy -- and they kept everything functioning nicely.
With the exception of the...
Anna Majavu -
The Democratic Alliance (DA) has been campaigning furiously for the past two months against the assertion that Cape Town is racist, after this was again thrust into the public spotlight at the beginning of the year by acclaimed singer Simphiwe Dana’s tweet that “no matter how famous/ rich you are, you’re still a 2nd class citizen if you’re Black in Cape Town”.
After Dana asked DA leader Helen Zille for proof of the change she often trumpets, Zille responded,...
Richard Pithouse -
Jacob Zuma has often been presented as an avuncular man who needs to stop dithering and get on with the business of governing. But the trajectory of the ANC under Zuma is actually very clear. From the fascination with the authoritarian capitalism of China to the return to brutal methods of policing, the nature of the attacks on the media, the judiciary and civil society, the escalation of the powers and role of the intelligence agencies and the increasingly brazen repression of grassroots...
Dale T. McKinley -
One of the questions I am sure many in South Africa (and abroad) have been asking themselves more recently is how the state of the nation more generally and of the ANC itself more specifically has gotten to this point? Let’s face it; there is a huge amount of disillusionment and disappointment out there, of varying measure, intensity and origin, which cut broadly across our sizeable societal divisions.
Most often however, the ‘answers’ ignore the variegated but...
