I think we must distinguish between a Constitutional Democracy and a “young nation”. They are entirely different things.
When the miracle of 1994 happened and the ending of Apartheid, it was a magnificent moment for rebuilding our economy as we were no longer pariahs - and by doing so, to create more jobs.
It was a moment to close the equality gap, to build schools, end pit toilets, enhance education for all, and the same with healthcare.
But there was an existing infrastructure in place - it wasn’t a start off nothing. But an opportunity to take a very unfair and unequal system, with a world class infrastructure in many areas - and to build on this.
We must always be entirely factual and honest about our successes and failures equally, if we are to understand where things went right, or wrong, because failing to do so, and blaming it universally on “youth” won’t solve anything.
Let’s just look at what Singapore and Dubai have achieved in 32 years.
South Africa has abundant opportunities, but we must understand that unless we have the qualified people in the right jobs, we cannot succeed. Look at what is happening in Gqeberha (my hometown). A tragedy of note in how that city is falling apart.
And we need world class governance. So long as our Auditor General reports on billions of misused funds, we cannot move forwards. I read an article just last week on a R32 million water tender awarded to a company with zero expertise nor equipment. And the missing funds from Gauteng healthcare facilities #BabitaDeokaran
All these things need our attention Mr President and cannot and should not be brushed under the carpet of being “a young nation” 🙏 And 3 decades later is not a young nation either…
DA exposes shocking scandal at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Hospital: unacceptably high death rates in heart surgery and we suspect a cover-up! 😡
This hospital was once a centre of excellence, performing several hundred heart operations a year. Now it’s down to about 200 operations, with alarmingly high mortality. Patients are dying, and answers are missing.
The DA has referred the matter and is calling for a formal Commission of Inquiry to uncover the truth and ensure full accountability.
We cannot allow our public hospitals to fail patients in life-saving surgery. Urgent fixes and transparency are needed now.
The DA will keep fighting for better healthcare in Gauteng lives depend on it.
#DAatWork #RescueSA #DA_GPL #FixGauteng #VoteDA #HealthCrisis #CharlotteMaxeke #HeartSurgeryScandal
YouTube: https://t.co/t7AMSz4XKT
Pieter Coetzé leaves the China Swimming Open with a clean sweep of the Backstroke titles! 🏊♂️
50m Backstroke 🥇
100m Backstroke ����
200m Backstroke 🥇
The Triple Crown belongs to him.
#TeamSA #ForMyCountry
Why do SOE leaders continue to receive substantial remuneration despite persistent failures and over R520 billion in taxpayer-funded bailouts to entities like Eskom, Transnet, and SAA since 2008?
OUTA's latest report exposes weak governance in board pay, with inconsistent links to performance and limited accountability.
Watch the clip above for key insights. Full video: https://t.co/kQ87nayKD3
The full report: https://t.co/ziCqK4kxFn
Time for reform: stronger oversight and real performance alignment in public institutions.
#Accountability #SOEs #TaxpayerRights #OUTA
Bob Mueller was one of the finest directors in the history of the FBI, transforming the bureau after 9/11 and saving countless lives. But it was his relentless commitment to the rule of law and his unwavering belief in our bedrock values that made him one of the most respected public servants of our time. Michelle and I send our condolences to Bob’s family, and everyone who knew and admired him.
Sunday Times understands the decision by the SABC to scrap its popular Face the Nation political talkshow appears to have been taken following complaints from key ANC and government officials, who are said to have accused host Clement Manyathela of being deliberately harsh on the ANC and the Presidency.
Read more: https://t.co/2drFztvPG4
Robert Mueller died last night.
He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.
He had integrity.
And tonight the President of the United States said good!
I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.
I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.
Good.
This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.
That is what is happening. That is what has happened.
The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.
America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.
And the church said nothing.
Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.
Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.
Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.
JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.
These men are something more painful than monsters.
They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.
Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.
Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.
That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.
And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.
When Trump is gone, they will still be here.
Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.
That morning is coming.
Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.
He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.
He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.
The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.
That is all it needed to be.
A man died. His family is broken open with grief.
That is all it needed to be.
Instead the President said good.
And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
DID YOU KNOW 🚨
In 2025 alone, South Africa spent about R4 BILLION on VIP protection 😭
👉 R2.39 billion for bodyguards, blue lights & convoys
👉 R1.62 billion guarding homes, offices & buildings
Meanwhile ordinary citizens are out here providing their own "VIP protection" daily
#humanrights
#humanrightsday
The ANC, Ramaphosa downwards, has knives out for Prof William Gumede over his demolition of the BEE scam. Latest bombshell: secret mining research found 46 politically connected people secured 60% of BEE deals, becoming millionaires or billionaires overnight. WSM’s column on @Politicsweb.
https://t.co/GGUQgD2XEz
❌ It has been days since the reporting by the Sunday Times revealed that two senior ANC officials have benefited from a water tanker contract with the Tshwane Metro. Mayor Moya likes to speak about the rule of law and zero tolerance for corruption. But her own administration has become lawless.
Read the full press statement here: https://t.co/UE29kbcNFZ
Government regulations are stifling South Africa’s business productivity, the IMF says this week.
We’ve been highlighting this for years. #economy#markets#business#macro
This is Professor Nyaweleni Tshifularo who lead the remarkable Team of Clinicians at Mankweng Hospital who did the Procedure of separating Conjoined Twins 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌
Let's make him Trend
Our winning team of Paediatric and Plastic Reconstructive surgeons after making history. Mankweng hospital has successfully operated and separated our conjoined twins delivered on the 28th of January by a 29 year old as referral from Maphutha Malatjie hospital