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31 March 2010 11:08

Shoot the boer ruling: Lekota makes the wrong call

Eusebius McKaiser says the COPE leader seems desperate to reach out to white South Africans.

Cope continues to refuse to make the right calls on the right issues at the right time. The latest strategic error is its reaction to last Friday's silly order handed down by Acting Judge Leon Hagryn in the South Gauteng High Court in which the court declared the phrase "kill the boer" unconstitutional and - ipso facto (?) - unlawful. Lekota, no doubt with the help of his foot soldier Dexter, hurried to put out a statement welcoming the court's order. (Well, the Independent Democrats beat them to it; but that's besides the present point.) But the crucial questions now are this: a) is this court order (legally) sound? b) More importantly, does it make political sense for...

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24 February 2010 01:39

Why Malema is a problem for Zuma

James Myburgh says the Youth League leader is undermining the new ANC govt.

JOHANNESBURG - In his recent reply to the debate on his state of the nation address President Jacob Zuma defended the right of Julius Malema to raise the issue of nationalisation. While making clear that this was not a policy of his government, he said he was not going to haul the ANCYL president into line.

He told the national assembly: "What members should do in an open democratic society is that if the president of the youth league, Julius Malema, raises an issue of nationalisation, they must raise their counterargument to him if they want to a debate on this. This must be done instead of saying to the government that they must stop him and make him keep quiet."

It is not difficult to...

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24 November 2009 01:26

Racial lunacy in the police

James Myburgh questions the awful silence of Western opinion

JOHANNESBURG - In November 2006 the South African Police Service adopted an "Employment Equity Plan" for the period from 2007 to 2010 (see report). The document made clear that the overriding goal of the police's top brass was ensuring that the institution reflected, at all levels, the racial proportions of the national population.

It boasted that "stringent measures" had already been put in place to ensure compliance, by senior management, with these "numeric targets" in recruitment, promotions and appointments. And, it mooted the possibility of re-introducing "severance packages" to accelerate the clearing out of racial minorities from the organisation.

The document embodied the racial...

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15 September 2009 08:51

Julius Malema revisited

Stanley Uys returns to the subject of the ANCYL president's buffoonery.

One would have thought that after apartheid had spent 46 years defining race, there would not be much left to say. Four main groups were recognised: Africans (elevated from "Bantu"), whites (mainly Afrikaans and English), coloureds and Indians, and sub-groups like Malay, Griqua, Chinese. Writing this race categorisation into statute and enforcing it in law was difficult, as a 1969 act, amending the Population Amendment Act, suggested: "It shall, in the absence of proof that any person who is not a Bantu is generally accepted as a white person, be assumed that he is generally accepted as a Coloured person." Read that again, and then admit that the apartheid government really tried.

The 1996 constitution recognised 11 language groups (nine African, one...

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26 August 2009 08:19

"Lady looks like a dude!"

Jeremy Gordin on the strange story of Herr Doktor Arbeit and Caster Semenya.

S.O.B.

There was a stirring piece of journalism on the leader page of The Sunday Independent on - as you might have expected - Sunday.

It was written by Colleen Lowe Morna (known affectionately by me as Colleen Lawn Mower - not original; she coined it), the executive director of something called Gender Links (Lynx?).

In it she explained that "sex" is a biological given, while "gender" is about "society's expectations" of what a woman or man should look like, behave and be.

Bit of a generalisation, I thought to myself, since society is made up of many groups and they might not agree with one another about what a woman or man should look like, and so on. But let it go for the nonce.

Ms Lawn Mower's point was...

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