Johannesburg: It is confidence that really matters
If Helen Zille, the DA candidate for Mayor of Johannesburg, is able to rule with a workable coalition after the 4 November election, she will still have a hard time turning around the city.
The Nobel Peace Prize offensive
On 9 October 2026 the Norwegian Nobel Committee (“the committee”) awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Navanethem (Navi) Pillay “for her efforts to promote peace and international law”, and announced that “Peace requires justice”.
Deeds to privatised land not all they’re cracked up to be
President Cyril Ramaphosa has promised black farmers title deeds to 2.5 million hectares of state land. It sounds like a good land reform idea, but it is hobbled from the start.
What Denel and Armscor carefully left unsaid
On Friday, 9 October 2026, the Portfolio Committee on Defence and Military Veterans received the Annual Report presentations of Denel SOC Ltd and Armscor SOC Ltd as part of the Budgetary Review and Recommendation Report (BRRR) process. What emerged was not the rigorous examination these entities require. It was another compressed exercise in which two organisations charged with equipping the South African National Defence Force were permitted to place selective narratives before members inside a sitting of roughly three hours.
Wearing a loud shirt to a funeral
‘If it’s sunny in Prague, it’s like wearing a loud shirt to a funeral.’
Some political parties are already secretly playing games with us
From: Manny de Freitas Johannesburg There has been much attention about political parties who submitted only 1 name of the proportional representative (PR) list for
You can’t defend liberalism with tribalism
There is an increasingly prevalent view among some within the broad South African liberal community that liberalism needs more elements of identity politics, group focus,
The Pretoria agreement is dead. South Africa cannot look away
Four years ago, in a conference room at the DIRCO building in Pretoria, Ethiopian and Tigrayan negotiators signed the deal that ended one of the
Mathipa hit: shaking the democratic state to its core
There’s a saying among my fellow military veterans that if a guy in a bar tells you that he was a Recce, one of South
Leopards and the cost of coexistence
I am delighted that leopards still occur around my thirteen hectares on the West Rand. But one settling there and killing my dogs would soon