Page 5 - Steuart Pennington News Today

It’s Freedom Day in SA 27 th April. Many of us will remember standing in multi-racial, highly diverse queues for the first time as we defied, with a peaceful vote, world predictions of a looming civil war. We talked of our ‘political miracle’, we spoke of the possibility of an ‘economic miracle’ to follow, which hasn’t really happened. We even spoke of s ‘social miracle’ with the prospects of moving towards a truly non-racial society, that hasn’t really happened either. So wha...

By Steuart Pennington In 1998, 22 years ago, our then Deputy President, Thabo Mbeki in opening of the debate on nation-building commented “This reality is South Africa comprises two nations, underwritten by the perpetuation of the racial, gender and spatial disparities born of a very long period of colonial and apartheid white minority domination, constitutes the material base which reinforces the notion that, indeed, we are not one nation, but two nations.  And neither are we becoming one n...

By Steuart Pennington Annually Transparency International produces a Corruption Perceptions Index (the methodology is outlined below). The report is comprehensive. Below I have summarized the most important numbers for easy reading, while SA ranks in the top 40% of least corrupt countries at 69 /180 (we have been as high as 50 /180) our ranking has declined over the past 10 years and we are more ‘corrupt’ than we are ‘clean’. When comparing population size and GDP we rank in the top 35 ...