Using special zones may help get people back to work Eastern Cape is where it should start with Nelson Mandela Bay the ideal testing ground By Ted Keenan - 17 May 2021 Centre for Development Enterprise executive director Ann Bernstein says the country has to be much more serious about the ever-growing jobs crisis. Image: 123RF/ KRITCHANUT
Getting the giant pool of people in South Africa who are desperately searching for work into gainful employment would take a miracle.
But Ann Bernstein of the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) believes there is a solution, albeit embryonic and that the Eastern Cape is where it should start.
What goes into the making of a public intellectual life, one in which academic passions merge positively with social and civic life?
Tony Morphet was born in the small town of Kokstad on 1 April 1940, the youngest child of immigrants from Yorkshire. His farm upbringing left him with a deep respect for the harsh realities of rural labour, close observation of the natural world, especially of birds, and also a strange (for some) fascination for the complex machinery of tractors.
Once retired, he took informal lessons to improve the isiXhosa he had learnt as a boy.
Academically, his studies took him to the University of Natal and a degree in English in 1959. The contours of his political conviction were visible from an early age. At 17, he joined South Africa’s short-lived Liberal Party, where he worked closely with the writer Alan Paton.
The death of Nelson Mandela, at age 95 on 5 December 2013, brings genuine sadness. As his health deteriorated over the past six months, many asked the more durable question:
how did he change South Africa
? Given how unsatisfactory life is for so many in society, the follow-up question is,
how much room was there for Mandela to maneuver
? South Africa now lurches from crisis to crisis, and so many of us are tempted to remember the Mandela years – especially the first democratic government – as fundamentally different from the crony-capitalist, corruption-riddled, brutally-securitised, eco-destructive and anti-egalitarian regime we suffer now. But were the seeds of our present political weeds sown earlier?
Bathabile Dlamini
writes that the Zondo commission has not been consistent. This follows an article written by Jessie Duarte and a subsequent response from Trevor Manuel.
The Chinese Communist Party has a useful saying: Seeking truth from facts.
As I read and re-read Comrade Jessie Duarte s article (Testimony at Zondo commission is an onslaught against the people) and the subsequent three-peas-in-a-pod responses, I tried to find the spot where she says the ANC supports corruption or the ANC is against the commission.
Correctly, as Trevor Manuel (Clearly, Jessie Duarte drank the Kool-Aid; in the process, her morality was consumed) points out, it was the ANC government who established the commission but while many of us in the ANC argued that so-called state capture and corruption should be investigated from the founding days of our democracy, there was a determination by some to isolate and only investigate the Guptas.