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?
SACSIS embraces a rights based approach to development, which views poverty as a denial of human rights.
Anna Majavu -
A truck transporting 100 cattle to the abattoir overturned last week on the N1 highway, with 32 cows then allegedly being stolen by residents of a nearby poor community.
News websites carried a story sourced from a National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (NSPCA) press release, which described the residents negatively as “frenzied”, a “mob” and “vultures” and said they had “the intention” to hack pieces of flesh off the...
Richard Pithouse -
We would be more effective at dealing with the endemic racism in our society if we didn’t relentlessly speak in a manner that reduces racism to apartheid and ‘apartheid tendencies’. The reason for this is not because historical trauma should be repressed and its consequences in the present naturalised. On the contrary it is because the development of an adequate understanding of how our society came to be as it is requires us to speak a lot more about both colonialism and...
Fazila Farouk -
There likely aren’t many journalists, bloggers, cartoonists or comedians anywhere in the world who don’t feel a connection with the massacred staff of French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo. These are the men and women of the world who regularly scale the chillingly exposed platform of public opinion to hold a mirror to the world. It’s a frightening space to inhabit in a world of such diversity and difference of opinion. One never really knows how those whom one has...
Anna Majavu -
This year looks set to be another gloomy one for asylum seekers, as the ANC government makes a renewed attempt to deport and restrict the number of African migrants to South Africa.
Black Africans are not welcome anywhere, even as tourists, and must jump through dozens of hoops to apply for visas to enter almost every country in the world to prove their worthiness. Lately, the quest for tourist visas can even entail providing proof that they have paid their children’s South African...
Richard Pithouse -
For some time now much of the left has either been alienated from actually existing popular mobilisation or unable to make and sustain productive connections with it. But the emergence of new forces to the left of the ANC, forces with money, a national reach, easy access to the media and, in the case of NUMSA, an established and organised membership, is generating fresh optimism.
However, the old fantasy that history will, in time, reward radical patience sometimes functions to prevent...
Jane Duncan -
Drones. Many South Africans are likely to think of lazy worker bees or boring people when they hear the word. But Pakistanis, Afghanis or Yemenis are likely to think of the unmanned planes sent by the Barack Obama administration that rain death on their heads.
Obama’s drone strikes are summary, extrajudicial executions. The victims never having a chance to defend themselves against the accusations made against them, namely that they are terrorists. Furthermore, these strikes...
