by Hannes Wessels With the sun setting on her stellar political career, there may be no contemporary politician who has done more good for more people for less reward than Helen Zille. Through her working and political career, she has been diligent, dedicated and fearless in working to protect the poor, remedy injustice and improve […]
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by Hannes Wessels Reading Richard Steyn’s excellent account (Louis Botha: A Man Apart) of the life and times of General Louis Botha was enlightening, enjoyable but also saddening. Despite the best efforts of the author and publisher I fear the story of this remarkable man will soon be known to only a tiny few because […]
Read more >by Hannes Wessels The news that Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann has filed a $250 million lawsuit against Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post must have pleased President Trump. Bezos has made destroying the Trump presidency an editorial priority and his reporters have been unrelenting in their hostility toward his administration. In this instance the […]
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by Hannes Wessels South Africa is presently in the grip of a self-inflicted crisis as Eskom, the state-owned and managed monopoly charged with supplying the country’s electricity, appears to be drowning in debt and collapsing under the weight of rampant mismanagement and chronic corruption. The president, who was Jacob Zuma’s vice-president for four years, […]
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by Hannes Wessels Last week I took some friends to watch Pieter Dirk Uys, (aka Evita Bezhuidenhout) perform at his wonderful local theatre, ‘The Peron’. Although I suspect we would disagree on much, I’ve always been a supporter of his because he’s a brilliant satirist and behind the façade of funny impersonations there lies a […]
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by Hannes Wessels Recently I watched a video clip of people being interviewed in what was still then Salisbury (now Harare) days after the official announcement made by then Governor Soames confirming that Robert Mugabe would head the first government of the newly independent Republic of Zimbabwe. All the Africans interviewed were thrilled and spoke […]
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by Hannes Wessels My infatuation with Kenya goes back almost 50 years to my early teens when I first read Robert Ruark’s African classics; Something of Value and Uhuru. Enthralled by the people, the places, the savagery, the beauty, the tragedies, the triumphs; these pages were life-changers for me and I was left as a […]
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by Hannes Wessels This last week saw the broken people of Zimbabwe being being gunned down and beaten into merciless submission by goons deployed by a poorly disguised Junta determined to protect the ill-gotten gains of a miniscule minority at the expense of a benighted multitude. Finding themselves destitute and bereft of hope, thousands […]
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by Hannes Wessels Looking at what has recently taken place in France, the UK, Europe and elsewhere, I was reminded that we are not alone in Africa with our troubles. While we must accept our continent boasts some of the most atrocious governance on the planet we are not the only ones being led […]
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by Hannes Wessels On 11 December the South African Constitutional Court delivered a scathing judgement against former president Jacob Zuma’s decision in 2014 to support a Mugabe initiated pseudo-legal manoeuvre to block a South African Development Community (SADC) tribunal ruling. This court had been constituted at the time of the formation of SADC and was […]
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