Litnet

"Widespread municipal corruption, management failures, poor skills and continual disruptions raise serious questions about the prospects of municipalities or other public bodies sustainably delivering better services. Meanwhile, National Treasury has often cited ineffective grant utilisation by municipalities as a key reason for why water finances have not reached local low-income groups."

"The word 'intent' is of paramount importance here."

"This always seems to happen nowadays: When wars break out conveniently close and accessible to the world’s press, they get wall-to-wall coverage."

"One or two clicks could turn into Johnny Cash performing 'Barbie girl' or create a photograph of Steve Hofmeyr singing into a barbecue sausage."

"South Africa’s foreign policy towards Israel and its war in Gaza should therefore not be seen in isolation, but as part of a broader framework in which the cause of the weak, marginalised and oppressed is apparently advocated."

"Although water and sanitation service delivery is a local government function in South Africa, it will likely be – like electricity supply – much more prominent in voters’ minds in the upcoming May 2024 national and provincial elections. Voter frustrations about the state of these services recently have boiled over in numerous locations, and may well influence how people vote at national and provincial level."

In this video, he asks the viewer to consider how the hunger and humiliation of concentration camps forced individuals into unethical behaviour. Then he turns the spotlight to decades of poverty and humiliation in South Africa.

"Creators should be incentivised to keep making art, while at some point in time it should be enjoyed by the public at large so that new ideas can be expressed."

"If you’re lucky, once in a while a truly luminous soul will cross your path."

"The future of our political direction depends on those with enough courage to venture out into something new and convince the majority of eligible voters, who are in a stupor due to political choice despair. My friend counts himself among these, whom he amusingly terms the 'electile dysfunctions'."

"So, you can well imagine my absolute delight when a pristine, popular, illustrated account of the Boer War, which had lain unread in a Welsh attic for over 100 years, was gifted to me by a good friend recently. This contained the photo of Kruger proudly and romantically advertising his earring, like a latter day Raleigh, or Drake."

"The reign of these juggernauts was quite a golden age, but not without its problems."

"Their concerns about diminishing state debt are well motivated and should be taken seriously, and their manifesto includes much of interest and many good ideas. But the last bolts need tightening, the final budget needs better costing, and they should give us, even if in appendices, much more detail about their thinking."

"Here, on the southern tip of Africa, political commentators, journalists, authors, philosophers, economists, thinkers and columnists unanimously agree that the 29 May 2024 election in South Africa will be a make-or-break event."

"Thus, these many commitments are not commitments to study and then decide on action; they are clearly phrased as actions that have been decided on, and must now be seen through. We know where we are with the EFF."

"It feels a bit unreal putting these words on paper, but a phantom is looming ever larger in the global consciousness. Something is definitely going on; turbulent daily news events describe geopolitical tensions of all sorts – military build-ups and diplomatic stand-offs."

"For months now, the water and sanitation (WSS) unit of eThekwini (Durban) municipality has been in the news for all the wrong reasons."

"If there is anything in common between the rigour of the English boarding school system I grew up in and the staunch Calvinism of Afrikaners of, say, Stellenbosch University, it is the belief that young men in particular need to be toughened up to prepare them for life. It is the reason why, though known to authorities, these rituals and rites of passages are tolerated and ignored until they go too far, as they sometimes do."

"Democracy is at risk of being replaced in many cases with despotic oligarchies and fascist elites. Our ‘imperfect, but still the best system of government’, to paraphrase Churchill’s definition of democracy, is even under threat in the EU, where right-wing parties with dubious links to history are poised to make electoral gains this year."

"I suggested that it might be useful to think of Modisane’s history like a kind of monstrous Large Language Model (LLM) – a bizarre and monstrous simulacrum of human intelligence trained on our basest reflexes and insecurities."