As I went for one of my early-morning runs last week, it was a rubbish collection day. As I panted up and down hills on the comfortable, sequestered roads around Observatory, I noticed many more people than usual foraging in the bins. These were not just waste-pickers. On that day the small army of informal workers who sift rubbish for a living was supplemented by people picking through bins for scraps of food. Household food waste was being packed into plastic bags in much the same way as a more wealthy shopper carries away foodstuffs from still well-stocked supermarkets.
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Our message to the World Health Assembly: Ignore Trump, protect the right to health, save lives
This week it is likely that the world will record its five millionth confirmed Covid-19 case – and yet the pandemic has very far from run its course.
Another Country: Hungry Children and the Quest for Four Big Pots
If Alexandra was sitting on a westward facing hill it would look directly over to Sandton, accusingly. Instead it faces to the East and is invisible to its well-heeled neighbour. Another country. This makes it possible for those who live and work in Africa’s richest square mile to ignore the suffering to which they are umbilically connected and to shun their responsibilities even in a time of crisis. But this article is not a story about guilting the rich; it is a positive story about those who get on with the business of saving lives, oblivious to their hardened wealthy neighbours. As if they live in another country. It’s a kind of fairytale.
Dr Clarence Mini (1951-2020): A champion for health and human rights
As a young adult, Clarence ‘Bizzah’ Mini jumped the border to join umKhonto weSizwe, trained with the June 16th Detachment in Angola and survived ‘the Boers’; in exile, he was trained and qualified as a doctor; in early middle age, he returned to South Africa just as the Aids epidemic was taking hold, became an Aids activist and worked tirelessly against HIV, which killed three million of his compatriots over the following two decades. But this week, Dr Clarence Mini, was eventually felled by Covid-19, a coronavirus nobody had drawn up battle plans for.
Science, Citizens and Democracy – the need to hear all voices
There are rough days ahead in which we are going to see death, disease and panic. But if a pattern of questioning the bonafides of critics is entrenched it will be bad news for national unity in the response to Covid-19. Ultimately, it will leave the government with a choice: a continued lockdown enforced by brute force and fear, or a meaningless lockdown honoured only in the default. Neither is what we want, and the worst thing is that with either option, Covid-19 would be the winner.
Long Live Bhani’s Bicycles! Long Live the Radium Beerhall!
Pull a pint, fix a bike… against all odds, some of Joburg’s small family businesses survive. But now the lockdown to stem the Covid-19 pandemic may be putting them through their ultimate trial. This article celebrates the tenacity of two family businesses and calls on readers to patronise them when this crisis is over.
Constitution packs a real punch:opinion piece published in the Mail and Guardian
Fourteen years ago, our freely elected representatives adopted the Constitution – in part – to “free the potential of each person”, “[h]eal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights”. So it is strange that Jimmy Manyi – president of the Black Management Forum (BMF) and Director-General of Labour – asks why it seems “that the Constitution does not support the transformation agenda of this country”. On the contrary, transformation lies at the heart of the constitution, and is its raison d’être.
Screw the poor? How deep is our commitment to equality?
In recent weeks President Cyril Ramaphosa has made two speeches in which he has made far-reaching promises and stated plainly his commitment to use the crisis to rapidly accelerate efforts to build an equal and fair society out of the ruins of the economy left by Covid-19 and the lockdown.
Overlooking the missing millions – another ‘stain on our national conscience’
In the last few weeks it has often been said that SARS-Cov-2 is a virus that knows no boundaries – be they national, socio-economic, class, race or ethnicity. Although Covid-19 the disease has malicious preferences for the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions, the virus itself doesn’t discriminate in its infectiousness. If you are a human being, you are at risk. It’s a great leveller of artificial denominators based on class, gender and colour.
Protect and Serve (Food), in Happiness Valley on Freedom Day
On Monday, 27 April 2020, at an informal settlement called Happiness Valley, SANDF Major Andre Meisner told Maverick Citizen, ‘we are not at war with the community’ and invited the writer to participate in a military mission where no blood was shed and where only bread and not bullets were fired. It felt like one of those days that could only happen in South Africa.