US President Ronald Reagan is attributed as once wisely noting that: “Politics is simple yet hard to do.” Even more so in the international arena, as South Africa’s contortions in the United States on the bilateral relationship revealed. Last week, International Relations Minister Naledi Pandor was in the news for two apparently related reasons. Domestically, she was touted as the ANC’s premier ace – in a very thin deck if it is true – to snatch a provincial victory for the party in the Western Cape. However improbable – last time it finished second with just 28% of the vote – Pandor is t ..read more

The death last week of pioneering sociologist Professor Edward Webster occasioned distant memories of my 20-year-old self as a student in his industrial sociology class at Wits University. Eddie as he was universally called, was a Marxist academic, as were many in the faculty – but you did not need to drink his ideological Kool-Aid to be taken with his enthusiasm, learning and empathy. Webster believed scholarship needed to be grounded in careful research. Though implacably opposed to both racial and caste systems of privilege, he regaled our class with close readings of how the 1923 Parliamen ..read more

Recently in Parliament, in answer to a question by DA MP GR Krumbock, Naledi Pandor, minister of international relations and co-operation, stated that “South Africa does not consider Hamas” – perpetrator of the mass slaughter of civilians in Israel on 7 October, “as a terrorist organisation”. In her answer, Pandor claimed that SA’s stance is in part “in line with the United Nations”. There is a lot of wriggle room in that justification: for example, UN General Assembly resolutions are not determinative of public international law; and even the notoriously one-eyed UN released a report on ..read more

More than a decade back, I had a memorable dinner in Buenos Aires with a former White House speechwriter for President George W Bush. One of the guests present asked him what it was like to work for the 43rd President of the United States. Bush was famously regarded by voters as being both a regular guy and, with his mangled syntax and malapropisms, a bit dim. The wordsmith responded: I will tell you two things about Bush: firstly, he is not as nice as you might think, and second, he is not nearly as stupid as you might imagine. The most prominent member of Bush’s political team was his master ..read more

If you were doing a mental health check on the state of South African democracy today, schizophrenia could be an accurate diagnosis. On the one hand, never in its 30-year bumpy ride toward the pivotal 2024 election has the outcome been so unclear nor as contested. Evidence of the rude good democratic health here arrived last Saturday. We saw optics which very few developing world democracies could match: the principal opposition party, the DA, gathered 15 000 supporters right in front of the seat of state authority, the Union Buildings in Pretoria. No troops dispersed the event, no government ..read more

Last Thursday in the United States, a special prosecutor, Robert K Hur, exonerated President Joe Biden on charges of mishandling classified documents in a report of more than 400 pages. But just nine words of it could mark the epitaph for the president and herald the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Hur (appointed to office by Trump) lethally described Biden as “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory”. But that is not simply a partisan view: a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 86% of Americans believe that 81-year-old Biden is too old to serve four more years as presi ..read more

At the Grammy Awards on Sunday night, pop sensation, an understatement, Taylor Swift became the first honouree to win Album of the Year for the fourth time, eclipsing Paul Simon, Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder in the process. At just 54kgs, Taylor Swift bestrides the world of music today as a modern-day colossus, her concerts guaranteed to move the GDP of every city in the globe where they are staged – and Swifties, as her devoted fans are dubbed, last year shelled out around $5 billion (just under R95 billion) in the US alone on spending associated with her Eras Tour. But while Swift shoots ..read more

In 1843, Lord Thomas Macaulay, an English politician and historian, wrote: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” Substitute the ANC government and update it to present times, and you achieve a neat fit for the crowing and posturing of President Cyril Ramaphosa and his ministers. This follows the highly equivocal judgment of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) last Friday on the genocide case initiated by this government against Israel. Still, one must admire the purposeful activity, swift energy, and singular devotion to the ..read more

Enver Hoxha was the remorseless Communist dictator who held the Balkan country of Albania in his pitiless grip for just over 40 years from 1944 until his death in 1985. Once, uncharacteristically, in his New Year message for 1967, he did offer his long-suffering country a burst of candour when he advised: This year will be harder than last year. It will be, however, easier than next year. Doubtless, had Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC governed South Africa during the Hoxha iron grip on power, our two countries would have enjoyed close relations, conveyed fraternal expressions of solidarity and ral ..read more

No end of ironies emanate from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) proceedings launched by South Africa last week against Israel charging the Jewish state with genocide in Gaza. First, The Hague seat of the ICJ named “the Peace Palace” was ground zero for its opposite – a ferocious emotive attack on the words, conduct, intentions, and moral standing of a sovereign country. Israel’s very existence was founded in the ashes of the grossest genocide in recorded history, the Nazi Holocaust of World War Two. The term “genocide” was coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, whose study of a ..read more