Peter Bruce

Columnist/Fumbling podcaster Fmr Editor, Business Day & Financial Mail, Joburg. Ex Madrid, Bonn Corr & UK News Editor @FT🇿🇦🇺🇦

[Peter Bruce @Bruceps]

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts — Bertrand Russell

[Sari Botha @realSariBotha]

A #Karen complained about the black man who has been making sand sculptures on Fishhoek beach for years. Sometimes people give him tips in appreciation. That's the honest way he makes a living.
@CityofCT then sent metro police - told him he needs a license.
I feel sick.

[Peter Bruce @Bruceps]

Will they be doing the same depth of manufacturing that Nissan did, do you know, or will it be mainly assembly?

[Vuslat Bayoglu @VuslatBayoglu]

Chery did not build a manufacturing facility in Rosslyn.
They acquired Nissan’s plant.
It is a loss for a Japanese company and a gain for a Chinese one. We will still see if it is a win-win for South Africa.🇿🇦

[BBC News (UK) @BBCNews]

Local match goes viral over cheating claim https://t.co/12fdGpPZHY

[Peter Bruce @Bruceps]

Wow! ... a whole new way to cheat at cricket...

[Ben Mummery @ben_mummery]

@Saltburncc First slip clicks his fingers to imitate an edge, bat nowhere near it and given out.
This is about the worst case of cheating I’ve ever seen in cricket.
Apparently, their keeper has a huge amount of catches this season.
@talkSPORT @bbctms @SkyCricket
@TailendersPod

[Selby Bokaba @Selbybok]

I repeat, Andrea Johnson is no fool. Who was her puppet master? She can’t disclose their identity lest she risks losing her pension money. There are powerful individuals at whose behest she acted, allowing herself to be a useful idiot. It’s not the cartels. Khan, yes. Who else?

[Peter Bruce @Bruceps]

A fabulous moment for the country ..... 🎉🎉🎉

[Tumi Sole @tumisole]

#CountryDuty #MadlangaCommission

Breaking News:

The Head of the NPA, Advocate Andy Mothibi has ordered that charges against General Dumisani Khumalo, Brigadier Mokwele and others to be WITHDRAWN.

https://t.co/cpo6gQRf5i

[Redi Tlhabi @RediTlhabi]

On a VERY serious note. I hope this report is false. If it isn't, it represents a dangerous conflation of party and state.

Government ministers and local government officials are public servants, not fundraising assets for political parties. Using the machinery or prestige of government to fill party coffers is an abuse of public office and an affront to constitutional governance.

It is not acceptable. And I hope it is a false report.

[Ryan Coetzee @RyanCoetzee]

Look forward to two weeks of outrage. The ANC literally selling access to politicians. Big story @AdriaanBasson @becsplanb
https://t.co/rnssfbvebV

[Mteto Nyati @mteton]

After 32 years of democracy, a growing number of South Africans are disillusioned. We see it clearly in the steady decline in voter turnout, from the high participation of the early years of freedom to just under 59% in the 2024 national and provincial elections, the lowest on record. The trend is even more pronounced among the youth. Too many young people are choosing not to register or not to vote.

Some of them point fingers at the Constitution and claim that the late President Nelson Mandela sold out. In life it is easy to blame others. What we are less good at, as citizens, is looking honestly in the mirror and asking: how did we contribute to the mess we see around us?

In my view, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with our Constitution. Yes, we can and should refine it where necessary, but largely it remains a remarkable vision for this country - progressive, protective of rights, and built for a diverse people seeking to live together in dignity. The South African Revenue Service has also done an outstanding job for most of these 32 years, collecting the revenue needed to fund our collective aspirations. The problem has never been a simple lack of financial resources.

The root cause of our underperformance lies in the quality of the leaders we elect and appoint, across all three spheres of government, in state-owned enterprises, in hospitals, and in our schools. Merit has rarely been our primary criterion. Too often we have chosen leaders on the basis of friendship, tribe, family ties, political camps or religion. When the right things do not get done, we cannot blame the Constitution. We must look at the leaders we ourselves have chosen and the standards we have accepted.

We also cannot blame reconciliation or diversity for the corruption that has been allowed to thrive. South Africa has shown, time and again, that when we transcend our differences and work towards a common goal, greatness is possible. Our diversity is our strength, not a weakness. Our Constitution is something we must protect with everything we have.

What we must learn to do - uncomfortable as it may be - is to hold our leaders accountable. We have school governing bodies. We have ward structures to engage our councillors. In Parliament we have portfolio committees designed to oversee the executive. We have the Public Protector and other Chapter 9 institutions. Why are we not using these tools with greater consistency and courage?

Let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We have a beautiful country with extraordinary potential. The future does not rest only in the hands of those we elect. It also rests in our willingness to demand better, to participate, and to do our own bit - every day - so that South Africa can finally realise the full measure of what it can become.

[Ivo Vegter @IvoVegter]

EXCLUSIVE: DA paid Dubai-based consultancy more than R7.7m to run its GNU operation
https://t.co/tLSG1V2EQo
(Another non-scandal, exclusively scooped by @becsplanb, who really has it in for the DA. In this episode, the party hires political consultants 🙀 🙀 🙀)

[Peter Bruce @Bruceps]

This is unbelievable...

[Pieter Garicano @pietergaricano]

Everyone's seen the old Harvard entrance exam, but how would you do at the 1878 exam to join the British Indian Civil Service?

[David Ansara @DavidAnsara]

RW Johnson in His Own Words

Selected passages from the books of one of South Africa's great political writers. R.I.P.

A thread 📚

[Richard Calland @richardcalland]

Quite right. Glad my prediction was justified. Anything else would have run against the grain of the constitution and the scheme established by parliament, as well as the decision of the constitutional court.

[Agent Nala @MainlandAfrica]

Le Giraffe View 🦒

Read patterns, not books.

[Gareth van Onselen @GvanOnselen]

Just to say, the entire premise of the DM’s story on Consulum - “EXCLUSIVE!” - is, like most of the story - sensationalist crap. Was reported at time by hundreds of publications. But I guess “OLD NEWS” is a bad headline for the news publication. https://t.co/uynuKWCqsr

[Daily Maverick @dailymaverick]

EXCLUSIVE: DA paid Dubai-based consultancy more than R7.7m to run its GNU operation https://t.co/Ieu0PFOXSz

[Ryan Coetzee @RyanCoetzee]

Complete destruction of Rebecca Davis and the Daily Maverick, which refused to publish this piece.

[Handre @Handre]

Joseph Stalin murdered more human beings than almost anyone in recorded history, and he did it with a clipboard and a five-year plan.

Let me give you the numbers, because the numbers matter. The Holodomor, the man-made famine in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, killed somewhere around 4 million people. Stalin engineered it. He confiscated the grain, sealed the borders so starving peasants couldn't leave, and let them die in the snow while the state exported wheat abroad.

He collectivized agriculture, meaning he seized private farms and forced peasants onto giant state operations. The productive farmers, the ones who owned a cow or two and actually knew how to grow things, he branded "kulaks" and shipped to Siberia or shot. He destroyed his best producers on purpose.

Then came the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. Stalin's secret police executed roughly 700,000 people in about two years. Not battlefield deaths. Confessions extracted in basements, quotas handed down for how many "enemies" each region should find.

Quotas. For arrests. Somebody in Moscow decided your town owed the state 200 traitors, and the local officers went and found 200, guilty or not.

The whole thing rests on a simple lie: that a handful of men in a Kremlin office know how to run millions of lives better than those millions running their own. Stalin believed that lie hard enough to build a machine of corpses around it.

Property rights aren't some dusty legal technicality. They're the thing standing between you and a bureaucrat deciding your grain belongs to the collective and your life doesn't matter.

Stalin proved that 20 million dead is just a statistic to a central planner.

[The Common Sense @CommonSense_ZA]

RW Johnson, one of South Africa's most formidable political writers and intellectual contrarians, has died.

Known to friends as Bill, Johnson spent more than six decades challenging first the injustices of apartheid, then the misgovernance of the ANC. He opposed apartheid as a young man, studied and taught at Oxford for over two decades, then returned to South Africa in 1995 to direct the Helen Suzman Foundation.

His most famous work, 'How Long Will South Africa Survive?' was first published in 1977 and revisited in 2015. He wrote for the London Review of Books and the Sunday Times, and became a columnist for The Common Sense in December last year.

Editor Frans Cronje said: "Between him, Lawrie Schlemmer, and John Kane-Berman we had arguably the three greatest liberal thinkers South Africa produced in the second half of the 20th century."

South Africa has lost one of its last great public intellectuals.

https://t.co/Qf4vlPnQ90

[Sangxa @sangxa]

Minister of Police - Senzo Mchunu
NDPP - Andrea Johnson
Police Commissioner - Shadrack Sibiya
Crime Intelligence - Feroz Khan 😳😳😳😳Thanks again Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi