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South African Television's Accumulation by Dispossession
Last month, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) released draft Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) regulations for a second round of public consultations. The DTT transition provides South Africa with an opportunity to address the uneven development of television, given the enhanced capacity for more broadcasters to offer more channels.
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Corruption has even become means of social control
Corruption in South Africa is not nearly as ubiquitous as it is in countries like India or Italy. But it is becoming an increasingly ordinary part of the texture of everyday life. It is certainly a serious issue and its certainly obscene that even state projects with as urgent a social function as providing school books and housing to the poor are taken more seriously in some quarters as opportunities for personal enrichment than as collective social obligations. Its equally obscene that corporate power has colluded to fix the price of a commodity as basic as bread in a country where its not unusual for people to get through their day on little more than a cup of sweet tea and a couple of slices of white bread.
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The Education Crisis and the Politics of Contempt
In 1987, in the midst of a Cape Town winter, Jeremy Cronin wrote a poem about being on the run under the state of emergency, his picture on the walls of the police stations that still squat, square and fenced, across the country like forts on the borderlands of some incompletely subdued colony. The poem speaks of the “snuffling soul” of his newborn son as he stretches out his fist in the afterglow of the timeless pleasure of an infant at the breast. “In the depths of their emergency”, Cronin wrote, this fist became his flag:
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On the Return of the Political
When the African National Congress was founded in Bloemfontein in 1912 Sol Plaatje, then a newspaper editor, was elected as its first Secretary General. Plaatje, along with some other mission educated African intellectuals, had been optimistic about the new country that had come into being with the Union of South Africa in 1910. But within a year it was clear that segregation was going to be at the heart of the union, the white union, that followed the Boer war, its concentration camps and the English success in seizing control of the gold-fields.
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No simple solution to SA’s inequality problem
SOUTH Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world. The richest 10% of the population earns 58% and the poorest 10% just 0.5% of national income. The poorest 50% of the population earns 8% of income.
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