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?
Dr. Richard Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University where he teaches contemporary political theory and urban studies and runs an annual semester long post-graduate seminar on the work of Frantz Fanon.
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Richard Pithouse -
The sickening detail of how Andries Tatane was steadily murdered by the police in Ficksburg, shirtless, bleeding and bewildered, blow after blow after blow, has become a national memory. The television image from the next night’s news, showing Julius Malema striding into the High Court in Johannesburg with a suited private militia carrying M14 assault rifles, has also become part of the national consciousness.
Malema’s carefully choreographed performance was designed as a...
Richard Pithouse -
There are moments when a society has to step back from the ordinary thrum of day to day life and ask itself how it has become what it has become. There are times when a society has to acknowledge that it cannot go on as it is and ask itself what must be done to set things on a new and better course.
The historians of our children and grandchildren’s generation will write the history of our failure to redeem the promise of our democracy and the struggles that brought it into...
Richard Pithouse -
The local government elections are just over a month away and there is an astonishing degree of ferment. Various groups have announced a no vote position, others are running independent candidates, there are new electoral alliances and in some parts of the country, like the Eastern Cape, the contest between the parties is more keenly felt than ever before.
Even within party politics, a new fluidity is discernable. Some former social movement activists have given up trying to occupy land and...
Richard Pithouse -
It’s now almost three months since David Kato, a former teacher and a leading Ugandan gay rights activist, was beaten to death in Mukono Town in Uganda. Kato was living in Johannesburg in the salad days of our new democracy and, inspired by the progress made here in recognising the legal right of gay people to an equal humanity, he became a key figure in the Ugandan movement when he returned home in 1998.
Homosexuality was first criminalised in Uganda in the 19th century...
Richard Pithouse -
A forensic investigation has concluded that more than R500 million has been misspent from the housing budget in Durban and recommended that criminal charges be brought against top officials, including the city’s manager Mike Sutcliffe.
It’s also emerged that tenders worth more than R80 million have been awarded to the immediate family of the city’s mayor, Obed Mlaba, and that the Mlaba Family Trust was part of an attempt to seize a tender worth R3 billion. There has also...
Richard Pithouse -
As the first unconfirmed reports of airborne attacks on protestors in Tripoli and Benghazi reached Al Jazeera the station crossed to a spokesperson for the European Union. There was talk of the need to affirm ‘European values’. Moments later the programme cut away to the story of the two Libyan fighter pilots who had landed in Malta and sought political asylum rather than obey orders to attack protestors in Benghazi.
Those pilots are not the first people to have arrived in Malta...
