Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
South Africa’s alluvial diamonds have the potential to create sustainable jobs, drive inclusive growth and aid our economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. But that will only happen if we change the archaic, rigid diamond mining legislation strangling the junior diamond mining industry in this country.
It shouldn’t cost more than half a million rand and take a year to get a permit, when the average life of an alluvial diamond concession is about 1.3 years. But it does. Alluvial diamond operators shouldn’t have to comply with 10-year social and labour plans when the average life of an alluvial mine is only one to two years. But we do.
Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
On the 30th anniversary of the Windhoek Declaration this year, media outlets, civil society institutions and media activists will reflect on the state of press freedom and other systemic issues facing journalists, and the profession of journalism, around the world.
Each year, the publication of the World Press Freedom Index is meant to inform and hopefully inspire or shame governments into remedial action, but I doubt it makes it into Vladimir Putin’s daily briefings.
I read this year’s World Press Freedom Index list alongside the World Happiness Report to see how the top 10 compared with one another. Seven of the top 10 countries appeared on both lists (and yes, those overachieving Scandinavians are all there). I won’t dive into the perils of confusing correlation and causation and I am certainly not saying press freedom equates to a happy society. It’s more likely that when governments get things right, they have less reason to try to
Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
Like all complex questions, the reasons are multifold, and the fault lies, inevitably perhaps, with all parties; government, business and labour. And behind it all lies two deeper problems: greed and desperation.
I’ll get to that in a moment, but just to sketch the background: several recent incidents in labour relations, to me at least, are highly indicative. The first example is the letter sent by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) to the management of Eskom. The letter overall suggests a kind of militant cockyness that is just mind-boggling.
The headline demand is for a 15% overall increase. You have to pinch yourself a bit; there seems to be zero appreciation for the fact that the organisation is bankrupt. It’s not just bankrupt itself – that would be bad enough. It’s so bankrupt that it threatens the fiscal probity of the entire state.
weekly newspaper.
Defining genius in the sporting sense is, of course, a subjective exercise. Statistics and numbers will lend weight to an argument for or against anointing someone as a genius, but that’s only one thread of the discourse.
In tennis, Novak Djokovic is not referred to as a genius, but Roger Federer is. Djokovic’s record is at the very least as good as Federer’s, if not better, and he will almost certainly end his career with more titles than the great Swiss.
But his style is less fluid and less graceful and therefore less … genius. It’s a debate that will rage on and will never be fully resolved. That’s the way it is with genius: the beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
weekly newspaper.
That’s not to say things can’t change, particularly when it comes to what seems to be virtual-platform fatigue. The last Cabinet meeting in late April actually had ministers in person in the same room, physically distanced and masked. It was an Instagrammable moment for some, like social development portfolio boss Lindiwe Zulu, as Government Communication and Information System snapped the photos.
Cabinet meetings have been getting more attention lately. The regular cycle of meeting every other Wednesday, followed by a public briefing or statement, has been cranked up.
Then, sight seemed lost that Cabinet is South Africa’s executive decision-maker amid pandemic war talk, the creation of a coronavirus command council and securocrats’ push into constitutional democratic decision-making through the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure (NatJoints), a collection of spooks, soldiers and cops that’s not established in law or regulation and do