part of no part

They called him “TheSeagull”. The nickname, which was only uttered behind closed doors and among friends, was a name that Marcus Jooste had earned, not by virtue of his free flying nature, but instead this name was acquired as a result of his uncompromising hardnosed executive style.  Marcus was the seagull because he would fly in, shit all over his executives and then fly out. In one particular nasty moment in which Marcus displayed his propensity for flying in and shitting on people, he made sure that he had a captive audience and used the moment for maximum humiliation. It was after eight on a Friday evening when executives of one of the groups companies, received an sms demanding their presence at the office the next morning at 8am sharp. Being called to an urgent meeting on a Saturday morning by the Chief executive officer of the group was a clear indication that they were either going to receive an unprecedented bonus, or there was some serious shitting in the offin...

David Hume famously wrote that “FORCE is always on the side of the governed”. It is the governed who have the power and it is thus that the rulers have to find ways to keep them from using that power.  Or as Walter Lippman, a famous 20 th century public intellectual once said, that we have to protect the responsible men, the intelligent minority, from the “trampling and roar of the bewildered herd”.   Or more to the point, as Janan Ganesh recently wrote in the Financial Times; “The poor will always outnumber the rich. Technocracy can protect the rich from the poor”. In modern society this includes the use of “democratic” systems which creates sufficient appearance of public control but which concentrates and maintains power among the “responsible men and intelligent minority”. It is on this foundation, behind the scenes, away from the scrutiny of public involvement that the schemes of corruption and deception are allowed to spread and mutate like the ca...

In a recent opinion piece, the Deputy Secretary General (DSG) of the ANC, Jessie Duarte, asked a pertinent question with regards to the Mining Sector. Is South Africa benefiting enough from extraction of its resources? While we are delighted that such a senior leader of the majority Party would publicly question the efficacy of mining and its benefit to South Africa and its people, there remains a significant disconnect between the rhetoric that emerges from the governing party and the policies and legislation which entrenches and enables the deep and historical inequality of the past to continue into the future. The DSG approvingly quotes the Minister of Mineral Resources, Mosebenzi Zwane as saying that “With an estimated $2.5 trillion (R30 trillion) to $3 trillion in non-energy mineral reserves still in situ, we are looking forward to another 150 years of mining in South Africa,…[a]s we move mining forward, let’s take everyone along and ensure that the mineral wealth bene...

*First published http://m.news24.com/news24/Columnists/GuestColumn/natural-resources-must-be-shared-20170922 The primary objectives of the Minerals Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA), which governs the mining Industry, are to: ·          Promote equitable access to the nations mineral and petroleum resources. ·          Substantially and meaningfully expand opportunities for Historically Disadvantaged Persons. ·          Promote employment and advance the social and economic welfare of all South Africans. With this in mind, one would assume that after 15 years of implementation that significant strides would have been made in bringing these objectives closer to realisation. Yet it appears that after all this time, access to the nations minerals are controlled with the intent and purpose, not of allowing greater access, but of protect...

As we pass through another cycle of remembering our heritage, it would appear as if now is as good a time as any, to lance a few pus-filled cysts that continue to hinder the emergence of a discourse or discourses, which could help to heal the ailing body which we today call South Africa. Race, and the ever elusive national question, the ebullient idea of the rainbow nation, appear to be slowly receding into the back alleys of history, to lurk there in the shadows, and to haunt us, like the unfulfilled promise of a lover. In its place, growing stronger by the day and being fed with more and more urgency, stands a familiar shape of a dark history we had thought was forever banished…..”never and never again”, echoes, Madiba`s words. Like a mirror image, whose reflection we cannot escape, the deep and pervasive logic of race, has and continues to deeply imbue our lived realities in ways that mimics the logic, reactions and ideology of the past. This is not to say that a...

“In Human Society nothing is natural” (Simone de Beauvoir) During the Mid-19 th century, there emerged among African –American intellectuals a concept of race as a social construct. This was a significant departure from the received wisdom of European Science at the time which promoted the notion of race as a biological concept.  The central argument developed during this time argued that observable differences between the races are socially and economically constructed rather than natural or innate. Up to this point and even beyond,  the European notion of race as a biologically determined reality had been used in colonial settings to justify the stratification and division of oppressed people across the globe and which I outline at length in the first part of this essay . By the end of the 19 th century and the beginning of the 20th, the concept of race as a social construct had gained some academic credence through the work of W.E.B.Du Bois. But it was n...

The Coloured question has been back in the media with a vengeance again lately. This has been a debate that I have avoided with great angst, not only because it is a personal embarrassment to me to be grossly lumped into an anomalous grouping created by Colonial masters as a means to degrade and control me, but also because the debate is so deeply rooted in colonial tropes and framing and because most conversations about race have been shallow, generally bigoted and anachronistic and thus unable to help us to navigate toward a decolonised outcome. This truth was brought home to me again when Wanelisa Xaba, a self-proclaimed “radical feminist and decolonial thinker”, recently posted an article calling on us to talk about the violent anti blackness of coloureds . This was shortly after I had read a Facebook post by respected journalist and activist Zenzile Khoisan who warned of an “ uprising brewing among the Khoi and San descendants ” and a heartfelt lament by Nicole Van Driel a...

Standing in the glare of a media contingent that almost overshadowed the collected delegates to the #OperationRecapture! Conference, Sipho Pityana, the leader of the Save South Africa organisation and corporate executive, breathed fire, as he called on all South Africans to stand up to the evil force of corruption. He noted that Members of Parliament would be asked to vote on the 8 th of August and that this conference would have to come up with strategies to pressure MP`s into voting in the interest of the people of South Africa. He spoke of how the conference would have to break the nexus between big business and politicians in order to overcome the corruption which was now apparently so inherent in the current administration. Even though we are from different ideological and material backgrounds, he shouted from the podium, we needed to make common cause in order to ensure that we redefine power relationships and that we build peoples power to advance the peoples agend...

The modern party political system, for all its claims at being the pinnacle of democratic expression in liberal society has nonetheless produced the contradiction of a state that stands “above and outside of society” as Hannah Arendt, the esteemed 20 th century philosopher so aptly pointed out. In South Africa, that point is poignantly illustrated by the attempts at deep soul searching that has played itself out at the ANC National Policy Conference in Nasrec over the last week. The ANC has come face to face with the reality that no matter how noble an organisation or Party`s intentions are, the exercise of power and wealth, without the sobering limitations of a deeply democratic structure, inevitably leads to the development and rise of a political class that soon alienates the state and the party from the people it once represented. At the centre of the malaise which currently drives the steep descent of the ANC from a once proud and noble liberation movement to an o...

*This article first appeared in  http://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/opinion/whose-narrative-is-it-anyway-9852504 (Cape Times and iol) The Political discourse both in South Africa, and indeed globally has over the past 3 decades, become increasingly plural in nature with a growing sense among most that everything is relative and that my truth is not necessarily your truth and vice versa. This is significantly different from the cold-war era or the during the Apartheid years when political and economic discourse was decidedly more binary and revolved around two great narratives of either the West or the East, either for Apartheid or against Apartheid. After the cold- war ended, the world`s leading philosophers such as Francis Fukuyama argued that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the endpoint of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. Since then, Western liberal democracy has indeed been on the ascent and the worl...