Thomas Johnson - The Blog

UCT is an inversion of what a university ought to be I am a University of Cape Town (UCT) alumnus.   In a letter published in the Cape Argus today concerning vice-chancellor Max Price and the university executive disinviting former cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, Flemming Rose, I said the alumni department must remove my name from the register because I no longer wanted to be associated with what the university has become. This has been a while coming.   First, there were the unseemly circumstances around the removal of the Rhodes statue.   Then, UCT censored and removed art.   During the tumult – the burnings, vandalism, destruction of property and threats against person – vice-chancellor Max Price displayed egregiously poor leadership, cowering before fallists and playing politics, and not one who was prepared be a leader and stand alone if need be, as Pierre de Vos wrote in Daily Maverick , “stick to principles when it is difficult to.” ...

In Cape Town numerous development battles are being fought as a result of the city’s red-carpet approach to developers: A monster 60m-high-rise opposite Bo-Kaap ; shopping mall in Constantia ; Maiden’s Cove , Philippi Horticultural Area (the PHA has been the focus of controversy since 2012), etc. Constantia residents are objecting to the Hadjie Abdullah Solomon Family Trust’s development of the family’s “stolen” land on Kendal, Spaanschemat and Ladies Mile Roads for a Shoprite Checkers mall.   They responded to objections with the statement “we have the right to develop our land” and invoked the ghost of apartheid under which their grandfather suffered.   In their belief their “rights” to develop are absolute, they invoke the manipulative, but irrelevant, image of the “pain and suffering” of their grandfather. These disputes are about responsible, appropriate and sustainable spatial planning and land management, not racism or economic development – develo...

 Who are the people we're voting for? You wouldn't say we're having local government elections.  Sure, there's election posters and adverts - these have party leaders' pictures on them.  But we're not voting for Jacob Zuma or Mmusi Maimane - we're voting for local, individual candidates, and not a party as for national elections. But I don't know who the candidates are, their experience, qualifications and agendas to place my trust in them for another five years. I see no posters or pamphlets or adverts in community papers introducing them to the community, listing their qualities and asking us to place our faith in them to represent us in council. No, as in previous elections, we don't know who they are until we see their names on the ballot paper. In South Africa local government elections are campaigned for as if they were national elections.  Local issues and concerns - service delivery, planning, development, etc - are sub...