Archive for the ‘Current Events’ Category
by Thando on May 6th, 2013
Former ANCYL leader Julius Malema has called on the National Prosecuting Authority to charge the Gupta family with high treason for illegally landing a chartered jet at the Waterkloof Air Force Base.
In a statement, Malema said the Guptas should be charged for “undermining and threatening national security”. According to the Mail & Guardian, Malema alleges in the statement that the Guptas control the government and the ANC. “It is not a fallacy that the Gupta family has tremendous control over the ANC and government and have had influence and knowledge of key decisions even before the most senior of ANC leaders are aware,” he said.
“We call on the National Prosecuting Authority [NPA] to charge the Gupta family with high treason for initiating and pushing through efforts that led to the usage of our military airbase despite the disapproval by the minister of defence,” Malema said in a statement on Sunday.
“If the NPA is not in the pockets of the Guptas like many are, it will proceed to lay charges of treason against the Gupta family for undermining and threatening national security.”
Read Malema’s complete statement:
We have over the past week observed the events, statements and developments that happened around the illegal and treacherous landing of a Gupta plane carrying more than 300 people in one of South Africa’s National Key Points, the Waterkloof Airbase, without the approval of the Minister of Defence.
Since that incident, everyone, including the media, analysts, union leaders, government Ministers have been egg-walking around the problem and therefore failing to expose and speak to the reason why South Africa’s security was undermined. As considerate and fearless South Africans, it is now the moment once again to speak truth and expose what many people are scared to say. As youth, we carry an obligation to speak truth at all times, and we will never claim easy victories.
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by Thando on Apr 17th, 2013
Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer has said that she finds the recent deaths of South African peacekeeping troops in the Central African Republic, “very, very troubling”. She is quoted in City Press as saying that, “we have blundered rather badly”.
In the article, Gordimer warns the South African government that getting involved in other countries “brings a kind of obligation. You may indeed (be) helping to support the wrong side – in some cases the government is the wrong side and the other cases, it’s the rebels.” She commented that troops should not be sent on offensive operations when it isn’t clear what the situation is. This is in light of the news that South African troops will soon be sent to the eastern DRC as part of a UN force mandated to conduct offensive operations.
Nobel literature prizewinner Nadine Gordimer has urged South Africa’s government to be more cautious about deploying peacekeepers abroad after 13 troops died in the Central African Republic (CAR).
Gordimer told AFP the deaths of soldiers in the remote Saharan nation were “very, very troubling,” and should raise questions about the imminent deployment of more troops to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
“It seems in the Central African Republic we have blundered rather badly,” the 1991 laureate said.
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Image courtesy Times LIVE
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by Thando on Feb 12th, 2013
The Daily Beast has published an article by Eusebius McKaiser, author of A Bantu in My Bathroom, about South Africa’s reaction to the brutal gang-rape of Anene Booysen. Booysen was left for dead on a construction site in Bredasdorp where a security guard found her. She identified at least one of her attackers but died shortly afterwards.
McKaiser writes about how this rape has caused a national outcry in a nation that routinely ignores the thousands of rapes that occur on a daily basis. He says that over the past two days he has had numerous people phoning in to his radio show on Talk Radio 702 to share their stories with him, saying that “Women and girls make up the highest number of victims, including many of my media colleagues who have shared their stories with me in confidence after reading about my own rape in my recent book A Bantu in My Bathroom.”
What is needed now is for this focus to be sustained, writes McKaiser, and for South Africa “to address the factors that partly explain why rape is so prevalent here” including issues of inequality and the weakness of the justice system:
Eight days ago, in a crime that shocked South Africa, 17-year-old Anene Booysen was brutally gang-raped. Her throat was slit; her fingers and legs shattered. The attackers had stuck a broken glass bottle inside her body and left her for dead on a construction site in the small, quiet Western Cape town of Bredasdorp, about 120 miles from Cape Town. A security guard found her near lifeless body. She identified and named at least one of the alleged rapists, but died soon thereafter.
South Africa, a deeply wounded nation that still grapples with the scars of a violent apartheid past, has been jolted to its core by the gratuitous act of violence visited upon this young woman. Booysen’s case has also shattered the silence around the country’s rape crisis, which seldom gets the national attention it deserves.
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- A Bantu in My Bathroom: Debating Race, Sexuality and Other Uncomfortable South African Topics by Eusebius McKaiser
EAN: 9781920434373
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by Thando on Jan 24th, 2013
Eusebius McKaiser, author of A Bantu in my Bathroom, has added his voice to the debate about FNB’s adverts depicting school children expressing her concerns about and hopes for the country. Following criticism from the ANC, who saw the campaign as an attack on the government, the bank pulled the ads, citing concern for participants “fearing reprisals”.
In an article for the Mail & Guardian, McKaiser says that he believes “government’s reaction to the campaign was ‘over the top’” and questions whether the criticism is legitimate. The article also includes opinions of, among others, a marketing trends analyst and a social media consultant.
The bank at first gave no official reasons for why it had pulled the videos, and said only that its intentions were misinterpreted.
FNB chief marketing officer Bernice Samuels eventually responded to calls for clarity on why the adverts were pulled.
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- A Bantu in My Bathroom: Debating Race, Sexuality and Other Uncomfortable South African Topics by Eusebius McKaiser
EAN: 9781920434373
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by Thando on Nov 27th, 2012
Reverend Frank Chikane, author of Eight Days in September: The Removal of Thabo Mbeki and No Life of My Own, gave a speech at a rally organised by the Palestine Solidarity Association in Lenasia last week.
Chikane compared the oppression of Palestinians to that of South Africans during apartheid and called world leaders hypocritical for supporting the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
Reverend Frank Chikane on Wednesday said world leaders had been hypocritical by supporting Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
Speaking at a rally organised by the Palestine Solidarity Association in Lenasia last night, Chikane also slammed the United States for its support of the Israeli government.
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by Thando on Feb 29th, 2012
In two separate articles for the Daily Maverick, Kevin Bloom, author of Ways of Staying, looks at the enduring charm of Die Antwoord and “the soft side of Zef”, and pays tribute to the work of David Foster Wallace to mark what would have been his 50th birthday.
In his piece on Die Antwoord, Bloom discusses an aspect of the band which is usually absent from analyses – their tame, and sometimes sweet nature. He refers to their sedate meeting with New York Times reporter Eve Fairbanks, as well as the heap of praise they gave to Jane Alexander, even after she had them remove their Ten$ion trailer from the internet, citing copyright infringement:
Die Antwoord’s “genius” has been written about in this medium and others so many times, and from so many competing angles, that two years after the rave-rap duo exploded all over the Interwebs it kind of feels like there’s nothing much left to say. In fact, it was in April 2010 already that the Daily Maverick got bored with all those breathless attempts at deconstruction, those long essayistic pieces that referenced everything from Eminem to Aeschylus in an effort to “understand” (or was it, less benignly, to “demystify”?), and so we decided rather to sit back and enjoy. Thing is, with a band like Die Antwoord, half the enjoyment resides in the sense of gaping disbelief: the sense that hierdie ouens can’t get away with something like this; the sense that we better smaak it now ‘cos soon it’ll all be a memory wot we won’t tell to the kleinkinders one day.
In his tribute to Wallace, Bloom looks at the way in which Foster lived his life with an acute awareness for everything around him, no matter how inanimate the object:
In 1999, when David Foster Wallace had already published two novels, two short story collections and two works of non-fiction – including the ground-breaking A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again – his alma mater Amherst College ran a Q & A interview with him in the university magazine. Among the questions that the famous writer chose to ignore were numbers ’3′ and ’4′, which asked, respectively, how he thought people at Amherst would remember him, and how he best remembered Amherst. This was unsurprising, not because the questions were shallow and somewhat obsequious (as they undoubtedly were), but because Wallace, a generous man given to pardoning another human being’s shortcomings, had trained at Amherst as a philosopher: the existential and metaphysical conundrums posed by memory and the fluidity of identity would conceivably have rendered any attempt at a pair of answers redundant. What he did answer, however, was question ’5′, where the interviewer posed the far more subtle query about his “disappointments” while at the school.
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by Thando on Feb 23rd, 2012
In his latest column, Jonathan Jansen responds to the claims made by Pieter Mulder, Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, who caused an uproar when he said that black people have no claims to large tracts of land in South Africa, because “whites got there first”.
Jansen, author of Great South African Teachers, criticises Mulder for his use of the word “Bantu” and his insensitivity to the history of land ownership in South Africa:
When Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Deputy Minister Pieter Mulder last week made the claim in parliament that blacks had no legitimate claim to large tracts of land in South Africa because whites got there ahead of them, he pressed all the right buttons of the black elite.
A seething President Jacob Zuma could hardly contain himself, nor could a sizeable number of media talking heads, as they choked on their cereal the next morning.
Mulder got what he wanted – a momentary place in the spotlight for an insignificant right-wing outfit in the country.
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by Thando on Jan 25th, 2012
Oral submissions in Julius Malema’s appeal application, following his suspension last year from the ANC, were concluded yesterday. Malema’s fate now rests in the hands of the ANC’s national disciplinary committee of appeals, consisting of Trevor Manuel, Jeff Radebe, Jessie Duarte, Brigitte Mabandla, and Cyril Ramaphosa, who will make their decision “in due course”.
However, even if the five year suspension is upheld, Fiona Forde, author of An Inconvenient Youth: Julius Malema and the ‘New’ ANC, is quoted by News24 as saying that it will not eliminate the threat Malema poses:
Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC’s national disciplinary committee of appeals now holds ANC Youth League President Julius Malema’s future in his hands.
Ramaphosa is chairman of the committee of appeals, which on Tuesday concluded the oral hearing in Malema’s appeal application.
A lone protester wearing an ANC shirt and cap and chains around his neck, waist, wrists and ankles urged Ramaphosa to be harsh.
The man held a placard with the words: “Comrade Cyril, do the right thing, there’s no case here, just shackles.”
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by Thando on Jan 17th, 2012
Reflecting on the “bad week for education” in which a mother was killed in a university registration queue and a Unisa psychology professor was arrested for raping two homeless men, Jonathan Jansen says a cultural shift is needed in schools and societies.
Jansen, author of Great South African Teachers, suggests dropping Life Orientation and raising the bar of a subject pass, and argues that online registration should become the norm.
According to Jansen, online registration would be better than long queues where students “who travel for hours from rural areas” are expected “to stand for hours in the sun”:
She joined the long queues that formed overnight as young people slept on streets to ensure they could do “walk-in” registrations the next day.
Excitement mixed with anxiety: “My child is going to university!”
By the end of the day, Sekwena would be dead, crushed in a stampede for that precious gift – education.
This has been a bad week for education in South Africa.
A mother dies in a University of Johannesburg queue.
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by Thando on Jan 10th, 2012
Writing for the Saturday Argus, Jonathan Jansen, author of Great South African Teachers, says that the official announcement of the Grade 12 National Senior Certificate results was a political spectacle that downplayed the real problems in South African education:
It was pure political theatre. The excited room was filled with government officials, government consultants, quasi-government agencies, politicians and pupils from government schools.
As if on cue, the room rang with applause as one education victory after another was claimed. This was, after all, the annual drama in which the minister of basic education appears on stage to announce the Grade 12 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results.
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