A Soweto man rises early in the morning, baths and heads to work. So far this is a pedestrian – even cliched – routine anywhere in the world and certainly doesn’t merit a feel-good write up on one of the country’s premium media outlets, Daily Maverick. Except Brian Chauke’s gig – likely inspired by a …
As the proles were clutching at their collective throats in light of a possible 0.5% VAT hike and Potus 2.0’s no-aid salvos at SA, a quartet of ex office-bearers were refusing to vacate their heavily subsidized state housing despite having long been kicked off the carousel of power. According to the GroundUp report, ‘the department …
The 2025/2026 fiscal framework of the National Budget that was postponed in February, delivered in March and looked like it wouldn’t see the light of day this April limped it’s way through Parliament with a slim 12 (194 to 182) votes this Wednesday. These the ANC scrounged together from the IFP, PA, BOSA, UDM, Rise …
Budget 2025 – Is it the end of the road for the GNU? Read More »
For this writer, I imagine South Africa a lot like being the ‘sane’ staff who find themselves tasked with overseeing the goings on of a mental institution. Most days you wing through the motions. The mayhem, noise, the guy who violently mutilates his head against the wall, the woman who swears that she was once …
SA is a joke even though we aren’t really laughing Read More »
The Franschoek Book Festival, to paraphrase a prolific black writer of some repute, is the sort of shindig where you wash the salted crackers down with award-winning savignon-blanc, rub shoulders with respectable men of letters, all the while feeling out of place in this ‘spot-the-darkie festival.’ Apparently the darker hued scribes would rather bluetick (or …
The Rainbow Nation doesn’t mean singing Kumbaya in Paarl Read More »
Emerging from flunkable stints in both the embattled home affairs and a health department in a vegetative state, one never thought anything worth paying attention to would ever escape the lips of Dr Aaron Motsoaledi. Seen as the paragon of a non-performing minister, his doctoral qualification, however, may have spared him from the usual accusations …
Crumbling health, Pepfar and The Donald shows his true colours Read More »
Given the much publicised budget speech differences in the GNU, one half-expected the Finance Minister Minister to serve president Ramaphosa with a sick note on Wednesday, D-day for his much-anticipated appearance. But before the surprisingly composed Enoch Godongwana could brace himself for the moment up rose one Mzwanele Jimmy Manyi, a Zumaite long before the …
Regularly I keep the company of Lino, a dreadlocked Mozambican migrant who’s a tenacious laybuilder and many years my junior. He’s black, doesn’t speak a word of English and his Xhosa is a crude creole of isiZulu mixed with Shangaan, meaning we often have no idea what the heck we’re going on about. But inasfar …
‘Ons fade nie, ons vokof.’ These blunt words speak the spirit of what was Vrye Weekblad – an unpretentious but outstanding rag that flipped the bird at injustice regardless of who was wielding the sjambok. In the 80s doing so ‘in good Afrikaans,’ no less, as editor-in-chief Max du Preez expresses in a farewell column …
As the world was running a fever thanks to President Donald Trump’s unexpected sneeze on Ukraine, South Africa’s Finance Minister, Enoch Gondongwana, was effectively social distancing from his annual fifteen minutes of shine. Chickening out, as it were, from the Budget speech – not so much a ‘sorry comrades’ or an hour-to-midnight family meeting for …
