The Contested Renaming of South African Airports
The Department of Transport and the Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) have been holding public meetings over changing the airport’s name. The incident that was witnessed on 5 June 2018 at the Cape Town International Airport, when tempers flared between the members of the Economic…
Maybe a new set of Values are required
Some love Einstein’s definition of madness, “doing what one has always done, believing the outcome will be different”. So often one agrees with such a simple but insightful wisdom but not realise its wider application. Take, for example, our current challenge about water security in…
There’s something rotten in Cape Town
There’s a water crisis, the City of Cape Town’s management, by its own admission, is in disarray, mired in “instability”, evictions of poor, black families already living in tenuous circumstances continue despite evidence showing occupation and violent protests and aftershock flare-ups have continued in the…
Still walled in by race and class
DESPITE claims that it is the best-run city in South Africa and that it is relatively corruption-free, all is not well in Cape Town. In many ways, it is a sick city…. And it is precisely because of its natural beauty and its high standard…
Without Radical Socio-Economic Transformation, our legacies will remain hollow
Winnie Mandela, whose life we have been remembering and celebrating in the past weeks, dedicated her life to the downtrodden and marginalised of our society. When she met Nelson Mandela, this young woman, in her early twenties, was working as a social worker at what…
Prioritising and understanding land reform
THE prioritisation of land reform presents an historic opportunity for civil society and state to right past wrongs and build a more inclusive economy, experts told a recent public meeting in Cape Town. But the issue can also sow division and undermine the agrarian economy,…
Losing ground is an EmotioNolotov Cocktail
Over the past decade my experience with “squatters” has turned my head around. I have been converted from one who championed “Jubilee” – the biblical return of land to its owners – into a believer in the primacy of non-racialism. I have concluded that land-grabs…
Land theft is an explosive issue in South Africa and Palestine
Land is an explosive issue as manifested in South Africa by the “expropriation without compensation” debate and the Israeli massacre of Palestinians in Gaza as they peacefully marched in protest of the unending usurpation of their land. The expropriation and forced removal of the indigenous…
Day Zero has not gone away – it has just changed its name
CAPE Town’s water crisis continues to be a source of concern and confusion as demonstrated by the furore over the ‘cancellation’ of Day Zero. But the rest of the country must learn from Cape Town – and the rest of the world – how to…
The scandal of water leaks
LAST Thursday, the National Assembly (NA) debated the current water crisis in Cape Town, the Western Cape and South Africa as a whole. It is important that South Africans, and Capetonians in particular, have all the information necessary with regards to the management of this…
The water debate in Cape Town
Millions of households have responded to the crisis cutting down on water use. But will the city respond to its own call for the ‘new normal’? The water crisis has brought about radical change in our behaviour with water. For Muslims the act of cleansing…
Don’t raise VAT, rather clamp down on illicit trade
Billions of rands can easily be brought into over-stretched-state coffers if illicit trade is addressed with urgency. South Africans were shocked in October last year when then Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba informed the nation in his mid-term budget speech that a drastic decline in economic growth, coupled with “a sharp deterioration” in tax collections had led to a tax revenue…
Mangena’s Toons
