Why South Africa is on the right side of history
There’s no point in reminiscing over the bad old days when we have bad new days to talk about
South Africans who remember those heady, long-ago days of state capture are finding what’s happening in the US eerily reminiscent. It’s only long ago in internet years, of course — what was it, 2010? — when then president Jacob Zuma started his backyard sale of our country. Quite how many of us do remember the details is uncertain. From the support Zuma’s new fire-sale political party received at the last elections, it certainly seems that a forgetting, wilful or not, has taken place for some.
But we’re not here to reminisce over the bad old days when we have bad new days to talk about. There are loads of articles that discuss the similarities between Zuma and US President Donald Trump, going back years. In The Nation in 2017, former Mail and Guardian editor-in-chief Nic Dawes wrote a prescient piece about how poorly US journalism was dealing with the growing threat of Trump and his “alternative facts”...
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