TONY LEON: More votes for opposition could shift SA from its mix of toxic politics and bad economics
Many troubled democracies have intense problems but they do boast growth, which is something SA’s parasitic elite, in the words of RW Johnson’s new book, is preventing
In 2014 Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens went to Moscow. He was in search of an answer to the question why Vladimir Putin was, in the teeth of his weak economy and restive populace, doing such apparently risky things as invading neighbouring Crimea and threatening the states in Russia’s “near abroad”. The best response he received from a local pundit explaining this aggressive, arguably self-defeating behaviour was “When you don’t know what to do, you do what you know.” There is no end of evidence in SA’s current race-to-the-bottom election campaign that Moscow’s friends in Luthuli House have taken this lesson to heart. PODCAST: South African consumers are going through the most. Subscribe: iono.fm | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts | Player.fm Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba heckled out of Alexandra; civil marches carefully orchestrated and aimed at DA-controlled city governments, and the usual inflammation of racialised rhetoric from the mouths of such apostles ...
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