Patrick Bond

From May 11-13, the World Economic Forum (WEF) Africa summit in Kigali, Rwanda, reinforced extractive-industry and high-tech myths. The gathering unveiled the 1%’s elite’s exuberant imagination and its lack of exposure to the continent’s harsh economic realities.

Now communities on the country’s East Coast are confronting mining houses. This is the area that supplied Zulu and Xhosa workers to the mines. And now the mines are coming home.

A wedge is being quickly driven through Pretoria’s political elite, splitting even those who operated tightly together in the murky 1980s Durban spy scene during the fight against apartheid.

“South Africa can claim to have one of the world’s most redistributive public purses,” argues Johannesburg Business Day newspaper associate editor Hilary Joffe, drawing upo

In late January, as I listened to activists and allied academics at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Mumbai’s Tata Institute for Social Sciences (TISS), the magnitude of the responsibility faced by the BRICS’ leadership suddenly became clearer to me.

Last December 4-5, Chinese leaders visited Johannesburg’s central business district to pledge $60 billion to help industrialise the African continent. More than 40 African heads of state were in attendance for the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (Focac).

But because the latest version of the annual United Nations climate talks has three kinds of spin-doctors, the extent of damage may not be well understood.

Climate change, the biggest threat to the planet, appears to be amplifying, as the “financialization of nature” through carbon markets resumes in earnest.

An historic victory over South African neoliberalism was won on October 23, after the most intense three-week burst of activist mobilization here since liberation from apartheid in 1994.

Among the hot ideological wars South Africans wage, now that a viable left is rising in the trade unions and parliament, perhaps none is as violent to the truth as the rejigging of the Gini Coefficient measuring income inequality.