7 December 2017 - Many analysts say that South Africa is in serious trouble, but your organisation has been saying that things are not that bad. What is the truth?
7 December 2017 - Many analysts say that South Africa is in serious trouble, but your organisation has been saying that things are not that bad. What is the truth?
As Freedom Day and this week's election approached, a number of foreign journalists asked me how South Africa was doing on the race relations front. My answer: "There are threats down the road arising from racial laws, but so far, very nicely, thank you."
Policymakers need to understand that the country’s best interests and those of the mining industry are the same.
26 March 2018 - Relief was palpable across South Africa when Moody’s announced that it was maintaining South Africa’s credit rating at investment grade.
Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s 2011 Budget shows why South Africa is rated as the most transparent government in accounting for its expenditure, as the document openly addresses pressing issues facing South Africa. The three biggest areas of spending are education, social protection and health. A notable inclusion is funding for the environment.
4 January 2018 - Profiling the provinces – written by the IRR's head of research, Thuthukani Ndebele – offers a snapshot view of South Africa's nine provinces through the lens of key socio-economic indicators. A brief summary for each province covers data on demographics, the economy, education, health and social security, living conditions, politics and government, as well as crime and security
8 May 2018 - South Africa's deficient education system is the single greatest obstacle to socio-economic advancement, replicating rather than reversing patterns of unemployment, poverty, and inequality, and effectively denying the majority of young people the chance of a middle-class life.
Under HF Verwoerd, black education was deliberately starved of funds. Now education is funded more generously than any other item in the budget — and still children start the year without books.
This clear wording in Section 1979 is also in keeping with what the provision was intended to achieve. Section 179 is the ‘McNally’ clause: so named after Tim McNally, the then attorney general of KwaZulu-Natal, who had earned the ANC’s ire by allegedly failing to prosecute enough of the ‘Third Force’ killers supposedly responsible for the upsurge in political violence in the province in the early 1990s.
Unbeknown to most people, the public has until 30th May 2015 (the end of this week) to comment on a bill that seeks to vest all agricultural land in the State as ‘custodian’ for the people of South Africa.
John Kane-Berman says the current controversy should force a wider reconsideration of practices such as cadre deployment.
In his fortnightly column in Business Day, the Institute's CEO, John Kane-Berman, argued that it was premature to invest in further tertiary education infrastructure when the South African school system was not providing sufficient quality candidates to saturate the existing system.
The state should get out of the business of running schools. Instead, it would divide its schooling budget into bursaries in the form of vouchers given to parents to enable them to buy education from the provider of their choice.
If government and a few paternalistic nannies get their way, from April, next year, we will all be paying 20 percent more for a can of our favourite cold-drink and any other sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs). Apart from the fact that a tax targeted at SSBs is clearly discriminatory and arbitrary, what governments the world over fail to recognise is that what people do with their own bodies is none of the state’s business.
Indien die regering nie beleidsbesluite neem om regstellende aksie en swart ekonomiese bemagtiging af te skaf, eiendomsreg te beskerm en die arbeidsmark te dereguleer nie, daar geen moontlikheid is dat hy die beleggings kan verkry om die nodige ekonomiese vooruitgang te bewerkstellig nie.
31 January 2018 - ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa has won many plaudits for insisting on the immediate replacement of the Eskom board, inducing President Jacob Zuma to appoint the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture, promising the prosecution of those implicated, and assuring the World Economic Forum at Davos that South Africa has turned over a new leaf and is open for business once again
First immediate objective must be to force President Jacob Zuma from office in next Monday's parliamentary no-confidence vote. The likelihood is that the vote will fail. This will demonstrate yet again that the problem South Africa faces is not Mr Zuma himself but the fact that the African National Congress (ANC) has once again sustained him in power.
The ANC knows very well what needs to be done to avoid junk status. For many years, however – and especially in the past 11 months, when the threat of downgrades has been most acute – it has been doing the opposite. So much so, in fact, that it seems to have been inviting junk status.
It's doubtful.
THE Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Amendment Bill of 2013 has been sent back to Parliament for more consultation and possibly extensive change. The bill was so damaging to an already struggling mining sector that the industry was widely expected to welcome a rethink. Instead, the Chamber of Mines has expressed dismay at the delay in the bill’s adoption. Though this response seems surprising, the chamber has reason to fear that a new bill may be even worse.
