Johannesburg is scrambled upon as a preferred laboratory for testing all sorts of devilish experiments. Perhaps we must consider how we tackle South African public discourse and liberate it from being Johannesburg-centric. Regrettably, for now, Johannesburg occupies a New York state of mind. If one makes it here, it is believed one will make it anywhere. Frank Sinatra sang it. Shirley Bassey sang it. Lou Rawls sang it. Repeated with rhythmic melody, we believed it. I must admit, we in…

Politics is about power. Power can oppress. Power can liberate. And power gained from the mandate of struggling people can be squandered. South Africa has become a laboratory where that squandering has been tested to its limits. Conferences like this one are meant to be a reality check. The question is simple: Is South Africa the picture of what liberation promised? Honesty in grappling with that question is what brings scholarship back to politics. Out of that scholarship, we are…

Known on the field play as LTD, a devout liberation seeker off the field, Nkosi Molala’s life on earth totalled 64 years. LTD stood for “Let Them Dance”. This was a nom de guerre Nkosi Molala got for his bewitching football wizardry. In the spell of his juggling presence, the soccer ball delighted under his happy feet to thrill fans, ripping applause on grandstands, met with obliging standing ovations for scored or enabled goal scored, for the referee to order…

Afrika Day is yet to know its dawn. The poor, seldom listened to or seen to matter, are on the verge of giving up on their hopeless dreams due for burial to waiting yawning graves to swallow to final rest that found no peace in their lifetimes. When Viola Davis said ‘when you are poor no one sees you, you are invisible’, it seemed a fleeting moment of an award acceptance speech of a film star.  Not only are the struggling masses…

Outside the dust and smoke of the fiery encounter US President Donald Trump and Ukraine counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky had in the Oval Office, which has unavoidably been serially screened on TV and reflected in newspaper headlines, is a revolution that most miss of what is happening in America. Predictably, most readers of this diplomacy failure or lapse out of this Trump-Zelensky encounter have primarily apportioned it to rude Trump and cast him as having lost the manners of the Presidency to…

WHAT the proxy war between Russia and Ukraine illustrates is that not all lives matter nor is the wellbeing of all nations and countries. The money-making war machines matter the most to preserving human lives. That the national interests of some countries are a given, and not so with others, is the mother of all hostilities breastfeeding toxicity amongst supposedly free nations of the world to deny them their deserved peace. This is all because of the Euro-Anglo-American-centric logic fuelling…