12 July 2021 - After the British and their many allies had defeated Erwin Rommel at the second Battle of Alamein in October and November 1942, Winston Churchill famously commented that this was not the “beginning of the end but perhaps the end of the beginning”.
Media
Every week we reach hundreds of thousands of people through placing arguments in the media in support of the principles we stand for. No other advocacy group in the country does as much as we do to promote support for policies that defend your right, and that of your community, to make decisions about your own life free from counter-productive government interference.
12 July 2021 - Proposed changes in the Firearms Control Amendment Bill have ignited fierce public debate on the implications for legal gun-ownership in South Africa.
9 July 2021 - In a wide variety of social media-fuelled half-truths, memes and conspiracy theories, the greedy profiteers of the pharmaceutical industry play a pivotal role. The entire world’s elite is conspiring to make them rich, so the story goes.
Equality of outcomes and the Pepuda Amendment Bill
9 July 2021 - Proposed amendments to the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act (Pepuda) of 2000 could precipitate a banking crisis and push many companies into retrenchments or even bankruptcy, says the IRR in a new report on Equality of Outcomes and the Pepuda Amendment Bill released today.
8 July 2021 - The government’s bungled and tardy Covid-19 vaccine roll-out has predictably led to an upsurge in infections, great suffering among the ill and isolated, and many hundreds of additional deaths that could have been avoided.
8 July 2021 - Some years back, I was feeling particularly depressed about the state of the country, lamenting where it was going and whether I had any role in it. A dear friend of mine – something of a partner-in-crime and mentor at that point, who also happened to be black – chuckled about that latter point.
7 July 2021 - The SA Human Rights Commission (HRC) dismisses the Institute of Race Relations’s (IRR’s) well-founded criticisms of the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination (Pepuda) Amendment Bill as “misinformation” and “alarmist”, and that it paints a misleading picture of the bill and its likely harm (“Human rights commission vows to support equality bill”, June 27).
7 July 2021 - Most local governments in South Africa are in crisis, and the services they provide are fast deteriorating. There is no convincing nationwide plan to get out of the mess.
6 July 2021 - If cadre deployment, or pervasive looting and corruption, or anti-growth economic policies, or bureaucratic red tape, or trade barriers, or blackouts, or crime, or lockdowns fail to retard South Africa’s growth, one can always rely on activist obstructionism.
5 July 2021 - A few weeks ago (on 14th June) this column asked whether there was a “growing backlash against wokeism”. The answer seems to be yes, certainly in America, England, and South Africa, and perhaps further afield, judging by recent comments about “critical race theory” (CRT), one aspect of something known as wokeness.
5 July 2021 - In January, after human rights activists had exposed the state’s failed vaccine procurement strategy, Barry Schoub, head of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Covid Vaccines, castigated them, saying “the availability of a Covid-19 vaccine will not be a magic wand”, and accused them of “dangerously threatening the public motivation to continue with non-pharmaceutical interventions”.
5 July 2021 - The ANC government is updating the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act, colloquially referred to as Pepuda. The changes the Department of Justice put forward in a Bill for this purpose are far-reaching and upon occasion puzzling.