Dale T. McKinley

President Jacob Zuma’s recent Cabinet reshuffle is nothing more and nothing less than the latest instalment of a long-running story of the capture of the ANC and the post-1994 democratic state it has politically run.

 ISBN 978-1-928232-32-2

GENRE Fanele Politics

FORMAT Trade Paperback  

EXTENT 208pp PRICE R240

RIGHTS World Rights RELEASE Ferbuary 2017

One of the favourite sayings of ANC leaders over the years, and most often directed at those of its members who have departed the organisation for various reasons, is that “it is cold outside the ANC”.

As captured in the equality clause of South Africa’s Bill of Rights, “everyone is equal before the law”, wherein “equality includes the full and equal enjoyment of all rights and freedoms”.

No sooner had the final results of the recently concluded 2014 national elections been announced than President Zuma gave a predictably self-congratulatory speech lauding the result as “the will of all the people”.

In the spirit of John Lennon, imagine this near-future scenario.

“A council member told me we are too dirty to fish there … they are putting on a party to tell the world it is a beautiful country, but poor people are being trampled on.” That’s what Durban fisherman Khalil Adam told a journalist after hearing that he and thousands of fellow fisherfolk had been

Here’s a sobering fact: none of us, whether in South Africa or in most any other democratic country for that matter, really knows what our government security-intelligence agencies (‘spooks’ for short) are up to; and, that is exactly the way the spooks want to keep it.

Every time the annual season of wage negotiations is about to begin, as it is now, representatives of capital unleash a tsunami of propaganda about workers’ ‘high and unaffordable’ wage demands.

There can be no doubt that since 1994 (non-corporate) progressive civil society organisations (CSOs) in South Africa, despite serious organisational and resource challenges alongside an often hostile government and corporate sector, have achieved a great deal.