Eusebius on TimesLIVE

Makashule Gana has today resigned both as a member of the Democratic Alliance and as a member of the Gauteng legislature. He spoke to TimesLIVE contributor and analyst Eusebius McKaiser about the reasons behind this decision.

Gana has been a member of the party for twenty years, and occupied many leadership and governance positions during that time. He has served as DA Youth leader, deputy federal chairperson, and as an elections campaign manager. He has been a councillor representing the party in Johannesburg, as well as serving as a member of parliament (national assembly and national council of provinces).

In a wide-ranging interview on Eusebius on TimesLIVE, Gana argues that the DA is no longer interested in growth, but is focusing only on consolidation of its existing electoral support base. He cites several by-elections in recent times, including in Nelson Mandela Bay, where the party had not contested. Gana claims that these examples are exemplary of a party that no longer has ambition, and therefore could not unseat the ANC.

When pressure tested by McKaiser as to why a party he had been a part of for two decades, including his own occupation of senior leadership positions within it, could suddenly be described as not appealing to a wide-ranging demographic of voters, Gana claims that there is a growing gap between what the party claims it is about and how it actually behaves politically.

Umkhonto weSizwe and ANC veteran Mavuso Msimang was a guest on Eusebius on TimesLIVE, discussing the importance of language and naming in politics after the victory of the Taliban slate in the recent ANC KwaZulu-Natal leadership contests.

Msimang had penned a general lament about the poor quality of political leadership in KwaZulu-Natal. It included a comment about why it is regrettable to self-refer as Taliban when naming a group contesting for political positions in a democratic society.

Msimang, prompted by host McKaiser, said conventions around naming signal your ideological positioning to the political market, and therefore should not to be regarded as frivolous and unimportant.

He shared examples of political names, such as ones that might include a reference, to a Christian God, that would immediately establish a political party's identity.

Given that words matter, the name Taliban, argued Msimang, conjures imagery of forces that are violent and misogynistic rather than ones that share the kind of values the ANC asserts, including sensitivity to gender justice.

McKaiser suggested the political victory of this slate in KwaZulu-Natal must surely signal a bigger problem within the ANC itself?

Msimang said it is disturbing the nomenclature had hardly caused a stir within the ANC, and said he, as a veteran, could therefore not defend the ANC as theoretically capable of redirecting on these kinds of issues.

The discussion ended with Msimang and McKaiser drawing links between the naming controversy, and a general commitment, or lack thereof, to considerations of ethics within ANC leadership structures.

You might be perplexed by the debate in the governing ANC on the step-aside rule. Should the rule stay or go? What does the rule say? What should the public make of this “debate”, which has become a hot-button issue at the policy conference in Johannesburg?

In this audio explainer, TimesLIVE contributor and analyst Eusebius McKaiser grapples with the difference between law and ethics. He argues ethics must be distinguished from law. In turn, ethical leadership in our body politic is important. He explains this broader context in which a step-aside rule can be formulated.

He also explains the ethical intuitions behind such a rule, and how it might be implemented. This explainer audio ends with a provocative discussion about why many ANC comrades resist embracing a culture of voluntarily stepping aside when they are implicated in wrongdoing. Sceptically, McKaiser concludes that poor regard for the general value and importance of ethical leadership accounts for why the ANC is divided over an issue that ought not to be a controversial matter.

In this episode of Eusebius on TimesLIVE, he is joined by fellow political analyst Ebrahim Fakir, and they debate whether the ANC's policy conference this weekend will produce honest and productive debate on policy.

Fakir has written a trenchant critique of the ANC's obsession, as he sees it, with externalising its problems. The ANC, argues Fakir, still posits “colonialism of a special kind” as the prism through which to understand contemporary ills in society.

This approach, he argues, is anachronistic and dishonest, because it does not adequately refer to ANC governance failures which are the major drivers of our poor economic and socioeconomic indices.

McKaiser and Fakir also discuss the past failures of the party to implement policies already adopted and which are now being repackaged for hackneyed discussion this weekend.

An example of this, which McKaiser wrote about on TimesLIVE, is the ANC's discussion document on “organisational renewal”.  In 2012, the ANC committed to a “decade of renewal” which, argues McKaiser, has not played out as the party resolved. This led McKaiser and Fakir to also debate the extent to which the ANC's policy stocktaking, and debates, can be regarded as a bona fide festival of ideas.

Fakir concedes that, though in his view the post-1994 era is still too short an historical period to talk about ANC conference patterns, McKaiser is justified in asserting that the conference, like ones before it, is best seen as a dress rehearsal for the elective conference scheduled for the end of this year.

They end the discussion by reflecting on why, despite these analytic and political problems with the ANC, citizens interested in the state of the nation and in the health of our democracy have no choice but to keep tabs on what happens at ANC conferences.

Do you agree with Fakir and McKaiser? Have a listen, and assess their analysis for yourself.

Koffi Kouakou, an African analyst and senior research fellow at The Centre for Africa-China Studies, said the SA passport should be changed to eliminate the use of French on the cover.

He said there are significant symbolic, cultural, economic and geopolitical reasons for his proposal.

Eusebius McKaiser, not convinced by the significance of this proposal, invited Kouakou to his TimesLIVE podcast to debate the matter.

Former general secretary of Cosatu and premier of Gauteng, Mbhazima Shilowa, joined Eusebius McKaiser on his TimesLIVE podcast to dissect the SACP after the party's recent congress. Shilowa had written a provocative column in which he argues that the SACP is parasitic on the ANC, lacking the guts to contest elections on its own.

A year since the July 2021 unrests in KZN and Gauteng, there is still no clear factual account of what had happened. As covered in the Sunday Times last weekend, many individuals and families are living lives irreparably damaged by the riots, quite apart from the incalucable economic consequences for the country that resulted from the riots. 

In this edition of Eusebius on TimesLIVE, Sunday Times investigative reporters Thanduxolo Jika and Sabelo Skiti joined the podcast host to take stock of the events that had shocked the nation, and the international community, a year ago. Some of the issues framed by TimesLIVE contributor and analyst Eusebius McKaiser, and discussed with the two senior investigative journalists, included the following: why do we still not know all of the facts? What factors within the justice cluster account for why there has been no justice for survivors and victims of the riots? Has the effects of state capture on policing begun to be dealt with as yet? What, too, of the popular uprising in Sri Lanka? Might similar scenes play out here, as a renewed iteration of the July 2021 riots, or are there salient dissimilarities between South Africa and Sri Lanka? Should the ANC learn lessons from places like Sri Lanka where citizens protested in part because of an unbearable cost of living crisis?

In this edition of Eusebius on TimesLIVE, political analyst Eusebius McKaiser frames several questions that are raised by the much reported exchange between member of Action Society, Ian Cameron, and police minister Bheki Cele. At a community safety event held at Gugulethu in Cape Town, Cameron appeared to be asking some robust questions about the efficacy of policing in the area, and Cele subsequently responded in a manner many have described as political bullying. In order to debate the issues, it is important to crystalise what the nexus questions are.

Eusebius on TimesLIVE hosted an energetic debate about a controversial limited-edition sneaker released by Balenciaga.

The “distressed” design, which looks like very dirty, well-worn shoes that only people under conditions of extreme poverty may be reluctantly compelled to wear, retails at about $1,850 (R30,000).

Mikhail Brown, who writes about the politics of fashion, framed a fascinating debate in the Sunday Times recently on whether the dirty and broken sneakers could be considered art. He excavated the biography of the designer to make sense of what the motivations were behind this work.

In this episode of Eusebius on TimesLIVE, gender activist and director of Rise Up Against Gender Based Violence, Vanita Daniels, joined Brown to discuss a number of issues. Some questions they explored included: Is the design ugly? Can a sneaker be a work of art? Is functional value an exclusionary criterion in determining what counts as art? Does a motif that draws on the experiences of the poor, or those of oppressed and vulnerable groups, such as homeless people and refugees, count as unethical appropriation of their stories? Is it wrong for a work of art to be priced exorbitantly when it draws on struggle narrative? Is fashion necessarily political? Can I dress as I want without engaging issues of sustainability and ethics?

A diverse range of views emerged, and no doubt many more will be added by listeners of Eusebius on TimesLIVE and provoked by Daniels and Brown in this latest episode.

In this episode of Eusebius on TimesLIVE, both the RAF and the AA were represented in a discussion about the fund, including whether the levy that goes to the RAF is optimally used.

The CEO of the RAF, Collins Letsoalo, argued that the portion of the levy that goes to the RAF is not a dominant driver of the cost of fuel in SA. He cited externalities such as geopolitical factors in Europe and the strength of the rand in relation to the dollar pricing of oil as bigger cost drivers. The AA's Layton Beard agreed but argued that, nevertheless, just as a reduction in the general fuel levy mitigated against externalities in recent months, so too one should not minimise what a lower RAF levy could mean for consumers. 

The biggest disagreement between these interlocutors, however, was in relation to the management and running of the RAF. The AA believes urgent private sector expertise is needed to improve the performance of the RAF. The RAF criticised the AA's view as one that assumes the private sector is a “panacea” for all ills. 

There was also a discussion between the AA and the RAF about whether state-owned entities do enough to drive down fatalities on the roads. While both sides agree South Africans are insufficiently law-abiding, there was vigorous disagreement about the extent to which human behaviour, rather than the state of the country's roads, account for accidents.