In a statement issued today, the President’s spokesman, Mac Maharaj, has taken “strong exception to the attack on the South African government by the Executive Mayor of the City of Cape Town, Ms Patricia de Lille”, because “she blamed government for the cancellation of the 14th World Summit of Nobel Laureates.”
People who are sceptical about big government sometimes observe that society can afford lazy and ineffective public servants because, on the whole, they do little harm – apart from consuming taxpayers’ money.
Jonathan Jansen is one of our most outspoken and influential academic leaders. From time to time he has taken sensible and courageous decisions in navigating the minefield of transformational politics at his own university, the University of the Free State.
In an article that he wrote for Rapport last Sunday, Frans Cronje of the Institute for Race Relations quite rightly warned South Africans to plan for all eventualities.
According to media reports, the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development is getting ready to introduce indigenous language courts “in an attempt to speed up justice” and “make courts more accessible”.
A pilot project for indigenous language courts was run in 2009, but was stopped after an assessment by the Department. The Department stated last month that it was reopening the project.
According to the Department, the objective is to introduce and promote the use of indigenous languages in a few courts, then to expand to other courts.
The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) has just published its final policy proposals on land reform titled “Strengthening the Relative Rights of People Working the Land“.
Sunday, 6 April will be the 362nd anniversary of the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck in the Cape – and of the founding of our mother city – Cape Town.
I welcome Cyril Ramaphosa’s response to my speech of 31 January, which dealt, among other topics, with the ANC’s approach to transformation – as embodied in its National Democratic Revolution (NDR).
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.”
