Thomas Johnson - The Blog

Cape Town councillor Jack Miller's media release on DA speaker Felicity Purchase's ejecting him from council for using term "migrant": Thank you to everyone for the support! Yes, I am doing perfectly fine. And yes, it is true that I was thrown out of the Cape Town City Council earlier for using the word "migrant". On behalf of a local community in Cape Town I was giving a speech and raising an objection over some of the concerns that this community had. They were worried that the project's objective to build low-cost housing would not go to local residents, but rather would be allocated to economic migrants coming in from the Eastern Cape. This is a concern we have heard on countless occasions in our community work across Cape Town over the last two decades. I am not concerned that the EFF or the ANC took offense to the content of my speech. I am not there to keep them happy. I am there to share real life stories and issues from and for the people of the...

 A government of national unity is used in extraordinary times, not when the incumbent party loses an election. Ramaphosa presented the county in crisis because the ANC lost the majority. But then the ANC has always conflated party and state. Mainstream media analysts credit Ramaphosa personally with the GNU, describing it as a masterstroke. Shaking off recent disappointment, their Ramaphoria is reborn. Ramaphoria 2.0. The supreme "negotiator" is back, they say. That the ANC's centre went into coalition with centre-right DA is due to his genius. It's irrelevant the EFF and MK made this possible with their predictably provocative demands. Had they not, the ANC's partners would have been them. So must we thank Ramaphosa's putative genius or EFF's and MK's stupidity for us not having ruinous coalition? Doesn't matter to the Ramaphorias.  From Ramaphosa's inauguration speech, the clamour project positive things for the GNU, though based on a coalit...