The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question: How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question: How do we make democracy work for the poor?
The relationship between democracy and governance and the realisation of socio-economic rights is an important issue for debate. SACSIS seeks to understand this relationship and identify issues that act as barriers to pro-poor democracy.
Mandisi Majavu -
As Noam Chomsky once wrote, the vocation of “historical engineering” is as old as history. White liberalism has developed this vocation into a science, and one of the tools that liberals deploy when carrying out “historical engineering” is ethnic solipsism. This is why today the French revolution is globally recognised as an important historical event, whereas the Haitian revolution is not foregrounded in the study of the development of the 18th century social...
Dale T. McKinley -
God (of the Christian variety) runs deep in the veins of the ANC.
Ever since its founding conference in 1912 was opened by a prayer and the singing of Enoch Sontonga’s Christian anthem - ‘Nkosi Sikele’ i-Afrika (‘God Bless Africa’) - and ended with the election of a leadership dominated by Christian preachers/theologians, the ANC has, with varying degrees of intensity and application, embraced and invoked its and its leaders ‘special’...
Richard Pithouse -
In his speech at the memorial service for the soldiers who were killed in the Central African Republic Jacob Zuma presented us, and not for the first time, with the idea that we should receive another accumulation of bodies – of black bodies – as a tragedy, as a cruel consequence of the random movement of the wheel of fortune. Thabo Mbeki, watching our steady accretion of 'tragedies' from the sidelines, might, perhaps, have recalled a line from Shakespeare: “Our remedies oft...
Alexander O'Riordan -
Last week South African NGO, The Institute for Democracy in Africa (Idasa) announced its closure for lack of funds. Many have asked how this could happen when donor funding to South Africa is at a ten year high?
Participating donors report their financial disbursements to the OECD as part of a coordination and anti-corruption mechanism. Using the OECD QWIDS database, one can see that in 2011, donors reported $1.2 billion in disbursements to South Africa with $90 million (around R820...
Alexander O'Riordan -
In a March 26 press statement, the Executive Director of The Institute for Democracy in Africa (Idasa), Paul Graham, announced that the venerable South African democratisation and rights organisation would be closing. Idasa has been in existence for over twenty years, played an important role at the end of apartheid and is a major loss to civil society in South Africa.
However, it is also important internationally. Idasa is one of the widely recognised African democratisation and rights...
Richard Pithouse -
In the colonies ….the agents of government speak the language of pure force. - Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
All societies are managed with a mixture of force and consent. But in South Africa like, say, India or Mexico, violence, or the threat of violence, is woven so tightly into the banalities and intimacies of day to day life that it is part of the deep structure of things. And it is not simply a matter, as many politicians would like us to believe, of criminality...
