Democracy & Social Justice

Watch this beautifully filmed video about a group of women in Makhaza who, in partnership with the Environmental Monitoring Group and the Coalition for Environmental Justice, are looking for positive, empowering alternatives for addressing leaks and debt where they live.

In March and April 2015, Equal Education led an effort including 10 community based organisations, 500 students, parents, teachers and grandparents belonging to the Gauteng Education Crisis Coalition in auditing the learning conditions of 200,000 students in over 200 schools in more than 20 communities in Gauteng – about 10% of the township schools in the province. This is one of the largest social audits in South Africa to date.

Sometimes, novelist Sonwabiso Ngcowa observes, a narrative form can tell you more. More, he means, than statistics, analysis and the dispassionate gaze that generates even the most accurate impressions of a time or a society.

South Africa has had its fair share of violence and xenophobia over the last decade and more. In 2015, Loren Landau wrote this piece on xenophobia following a wake of xenophobic violence in South Africa's townships.

Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation is notorious for several reasons. First, as a mouthpiece for the Zanu-PF party, whose 91-year-old president Robert Mugabe recently fell over at a press conference, causing a worldwide avalanche of memes and a more localised effort to suppress the original evidence. Second, for its appalling technical glitches. And, third, for its ingenious spoof by two Harare comedians, Comrade Fatso and Outspoken, who met on the underground hip-hop scene and are risking their lives to make some of the sharpest satire on the continent.

Equal Education and pupils frustrated by the long wait for better school infrastructure picketed outside the basic education department's office.

Over the past 3 years, Corruption Watch has worked to tackle corruption at schools.  Their work has included educating students on the problems of corruption and how to address it, developing tools that principals, teachers, parents or school governing body members could refer to in order to understand how to detect and tackle corruption, as well as provided support to those who suspected the misuse of funds in their schools.

This was initially prepared on the eve of the opening of parliament’s 2015 session.  At the time, our consciousness had been bombarded with phrases like ‘paralysis of parliament’ a ‘disgraceful moment in South African democracy’ and the need to restore the ‘dignity’ or ‘decorum’ of parliament.  These expressions and many more were a reaction to disruptions in parliament in 2014, unprecedented in South African parliamentary history, whether in the post-1994 era or in pre-democratic parliaments.