South Africa

An insight into Freedom Day for dispossessed indigenous people fighting giants to preserve sacred land and water. How can you redevelop sacred land by infilling parts of a river with concrete bulk?

Freedom is not absolute in South Africa and never will be. In fact, the notion of absolute freedom, while it sounds good to say, is an absurd fallacy.

The case of Life Esidimeni is one of the most significant violations of health and human rights in post-apartheid South Africa.

Civil society organisations in South Africa are proposing a post-WW2-style economic recovery programme to steer energy transformation for the state utility that echoes Roosevelt’s New Deal in the USA. But the country has been thrown into an even deeper energy crisis, following an explosion at one of the country’s newly-minted power stations. Could this make the ‘Green New Eskom’ idea even more relevant?

In the first of a series of webinars examining the crisis in local government ahead of the elections on 1 November, activists said there was no doubt that many municipalities were on the verge of collapse. They said the system to deliver services needs a redesign to benefit residents and not politicians.

It remains to be seen whether the steady uptick in voter turnout for local government elections will maintain the upward trajectory seen over the past two decades, given the ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Many impoverished communities have been condemned to the political wasteland of service non-delivery, while deployment and tenders to politically connected companies remain the order of the day in many municipalities. Political parties’ graving for power has come at an impossibly high cost for the poorest South Africans.