South Africans would do well to take note of President Zuma’s statement in Parliament yesterday regarding the ANC’s plans to “intensify the implementation of affirmative action policies in order to deepen reconciliation and social cohesion in our country.” The President did not grab these ideas from the air – they are a core element of the second phase of the ANC’s National Democratic Revolution.
International Mother Language Day (IMLD) – on 21 February each year – celebrates language diversity, variety and multilingualism throughout the world.
In a recent article (abridged in the Cape Times, 20 January 2014) Professor Jane Duncan pointed to the fact that although socialist ideas are widely espoused by the masses there is little reference to socialism in most of our media. She says that objective viewers “would probably conclude that socialism was consigned to the dustbin of politically bankrupt ideas long ago.”
FW De Klerk 2014 Goodwill Award goes to Patrice Motsepe The FW de Klerk Foundation is delighted to announce that the recipient of the 4th annual
The way the Judicial Services Commission (JSC) of South Africa presently recommends candidates for judicial appointment to the President has been the subject of controversy and widespread criticism and raises concerns that it attaches excessive consideration to race and not enough to whether candidates are fit, proper and appropriately qualified.
The sorrow and adulation that the world has expressed following the recent death of Nelson Mandela are a worthy tribute to his greatness. Last Monday the British parliament added its voice to the global chorus. It was appropriate – because it was the same parliament that set the course for South Africa’s future history when it created the Union of South Africa only 103 years ago. In so doing it set the stage on which Nelson Mandela – who was born only eight years later – would play out his extraordinary career.
There is something quite touching in the ANC’s belief that it can solve complex economic and social problems simply by promulgating new laws. What is not so endearing is the underlying notion that the state has a right to intrude into the legitimate affairs of private businesses, civil society organisations and political parties in its efforts to impose its ideological precepts throughout society. That has the whiff of totalitarianism‐ however benign the intentions may ostensibly be.
The recently published BEE codes and the Employment Equity Amendment Bill (EEAB) can be understood only within the context of the ANC’s overarching National Democratic Revolution (NDR) and its ideology of demographic representivity (DR).
According to the ANC’s 2007 Strategy and Tactics document “A critical element of the programme for national emancipation should be the elimination of apartheid property relations.” This would require, inter alia, “the de-racialisation of ownership and control of wealth, including land”; and “equity and affirmative action in the provision of skills and access to positions of management”.
No doubt to the alarm of his minders and keepers, President Zuma deviated from the prepared text of his speech yesterday to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Giyani, Limpopo. His speech should have been suitably innocuous – with a nod to the older generation on International Grandparents Day, exhortations to the youth and the expression of justifiable pride in the fact that the number of children infected with HIV within the East and Southern African region has more than halved in the past 10 years. There was only one reference to “apartheid colonialism” – and for the rest, the tone of the speech was suitably presidential.
