Blog Archives

JUST TRANSITION OP-ED: Social ownership of renewable energy — searching for the deck chairs long after the Titanic has sunk

By Jeff Rudin | Daily Maverick | 19 Sep 2023  Why do the European failures in transitioning to social ownership of energy get so little attention? South Africa needs to understand where potential pitfalls lie and grapple with them as a

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INTERNATIONAL TRADE OP-ED: Why do we allow the rich to rig the rules in their favour?

  By Jeff Rudin | Daily Maverick | 06 Aug 2023  The very language of trade negotiations is the language of war. Once concluded, the trade agreements give way, with astonishing cynicism, to the language of double-speak and deception. “The problem

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BEYOND THE RAINBOW OP-ED: Narrow views of SA from afar may be bleak, but the reasons for hope are worth salvaging

  By Jeff Rudin | Daily Maverick | 11 Jul 2023 Out of a group of 15 classmates who matriculated together in 1960, only three have remained in South Africa. The group still stays in touch, with those outside the

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WATER-RELATED HEALTH CRISES OP-ED (PART ONE): Cholera — have we really learnt nothing from Covid-19?

By Jeff Rudin | Daily Maverick | 26 Jun 2023  The first of two articles examining water-related health crises in South Africa asks why we have learnt nothing from previous crises and why our government, having responded to each new crisis

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CLIMATE CHANGE OP-ED: The green economy – at best, a wishful illusion; at worst, a deceptive myth

By Jeff Rudin | Daily Maverick | 25 May 2023 The claims of the green economy, together with the green economy’s long history, provide the essential backdrop to the question of why, after a gestation of 34 years, it still

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COLOUR OF MONEY OP-ED: Cecil John Rhodes the racist is not guilty when it comes to today’s racial capitalism

By Jeff Rudin  | Daily Maverick | 11 Apr 2023  Applying Rhodes’s racial capitalism to post-1994 South Africa obfuscates the entire matter of what former president Thabo Mbeki called the ‘black bourgeoisie’ whose creation, consolidation and expansion has been one of

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Electric cars — a major problem for all and a solution for only a few!

By Jeff Rudin  | Daily Maverick | 07 Mar 2023 One has indeed to be rich to afford the comfort of doing one’s bit for slowing down climate change. Were it not for neglected railway and underground systems, along with the

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WRITING’S ON THE WALL OP-ED: Thoughts arising from the ideological astigmatism in Pieter du Toit’s ‘The ANC Billionaires

By Jeff Rudin  | Daily Maverick | 27 Feb 2023 There was nothing exceptional in what Big Capital undertook to do in South Africa. No ruling class anywhere in the world has ever voluntarily relinquished power to those they used to

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BEYOND THE COP27 OP-ED | Climate crisis – practical action begins with better understanding of planetary reality

By Jeff Rudin | Daily Maverick | 09 Jan 2023    Documents that were kept under wraps for 50 years give us insights that help explain why efforts to agree on climate change interventions have failed so far. The scale of the

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RACE RELATIONS OP-ED: Where does the call for greater complexity in public discourse take South Africa?

By Jeff Rudin | Daily Maverick | 16 Nov 2022  Two recent articles make the same poignant plea: as a prior condition to addressing South Africa’s whirlpool of problems is the need for the best possible understanding of what those problems are.

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