Thomas Johnson - The Blog

It is unfortunate one of South Africa’s most eminent satirists, Jonathan Shapiro, aka Zapiro, was forced to defend freedom of speech and his cartoon depicting NPA head Shaun Abrahams as an organ grinder’s monkey, then recant, following the usual social media outrage.   B arely containing her "liberal" outrage in her Mail & Guardian column, Rebecca Davis asks Shapiro, "What were you thinking? Don't you know the monkey metaphor is offensive to black South Africans?".   By the way, to be precise, Shaun Abrahams is a person of colour , expediently termed "black" to excori ate a white person of "racism", in this instan ce unfairly . I mention this in the context of a country where institutional racism is pernicious and entren che d - remember gov ernment spokesman J immy Manyi who said the Western Cape had too many coloureds ". In Davis' case, though, what qualifies her to speak on behalf of ALL blacks.  Is she patronis...

What should be done about the Cape Town Stadium regularly comes up.  Like zombies, it never dies.  It should have its own episode in Fear the Walking Dead : SA. Plot pitch: There is a zombie apocalypse .  Survivors make their way to a rumoured refuge in Cape Town.  The stadium has been turned into a fortified haven, with all remaining comforts, for politicians and their brethren only, run by a dictator-like leader, the nefarious Premier .  (Acknowledgements to AMC and Lee Herrmann .) However, in the here and now, to its credit the city is trying to find a way for the World Cup zombie to defray some of its life costs.  One of the reasons it's taking so long is their refusal to recognise the stadium will never be fully utilised and self-sustaining: it doesn't attract regular events, even at subsidised rates, to justify its existence. From the vague plans in the proposed business plan , the city intends selling, or leasing, valuable land in the W...

Gareth van Onselen wrote a searing deconstruction of finance minister Pravin Gordhan , and the hero worship surrounding him.   I never bought into the media's smarmy praise - "sensible, cautious, saving for the future" - of our finance ministers from Trevor Manuel to the present (Des van Rooyen - who dat?).   For me Onselen's best line describes Gordan, past finance ministers and ANC: "It would be foolish to elevate Gordhan to the status of deity. He has a nasty majoritarian streak. Ostensible piety belies a typical arrogance that has contributed to the crisis the ANC ( and South Africa ) finds itself in."    The fact is before they were appointed they were dilettantes in economics and finance - the high-level expertise needed on their CVs to run a modern economy.  At the time, with my third class pass in honours economics, even I knew better than Manuel's "amorphous markets" comment that sent the rand into a dive.  Ma...

The University of Cape Town (UCT) has been remarkably compliant with Rhodes Must Fall's (RMF) demands and agenda that has more to do with anarchy than transformation. It's probably fear. UCT's "accelerated transformation" plan, which is still in development, has seen the censorship of its art that is deemed racially offensive (to RMF, I suppose) and a draft strategy to rapidly fill academic posts with black Africans.   An academic I know who has sent the plan says its "badly written among other things". Oddly enough, in 2014  vice-chancellor Max Price defended the slow pace of transformation and why there are few black academics arguing it takes more than 20 years from PhD to full professor .  What has changed between 2014 and today - have they found a way to truncate the 20 years? Over recent weeks and months there has been criticism of RMF and UCT - particularly UCT kowtowing to RMF - notably from UCT professor Kenneth Hughes , which create...

Government, unions and black business associations frequently complain about the lack of transformation in the private sector. White males are regularly made out to be the bogeymen holding black managers back. Labour minister Mildred Oliphant threatened severe penalties for business' noncompliance with employment equity plans .  Analyst and columnist Andile Khumalo, again joining in the white male bashing, writes in the public sector, 7 3% of senior managers are African, compared with 11% in the white-controlled private sector . The public sector, including state owned enterprises, are characterised by ANC cadre deployment.  And a significant majority of national and local departments and enterprises is incompetently and corruptly managed and failing to deliver.    By comparison, most white-run companies have near international level management expertise.  Explain that. Face it, without the private sector, South Africa would be like any failed ...