100% Zuma. This means that you are firmly behind a political leader named Jacob Zuma. I do not know what you base your support on as his policies change on a daily basis, his integrity is questionable and his tenure as deputy president was not exactly earth shattering either.. irrespective of race.

Please tell me indeed when we can move on and stop accusing opposition supporters of racism merely because they do not support the party who led the liberation of black south africans. Irrespective of race.

I will leave it to the legal academics on this blog to opine on the legal basis of your argument.

However your intellectual argument is flawed very early on in your comments when you refer to the “chattering classes “ – “The sad thing about the chattering classes is that they rely on each other and the newspapers for the information on which they base their opinions. So they’re misinformed. This means they keep circulating misconceptions and misinformation in frenetic whirlpools.”
– giving me the impression that you were referring to the general (wo)man in the street. That is to say the general public. It seems to me that underestimating the intelligence of the general population with an elitist statement like the one you made is fatally flawed as history has shown all over the world – repeatedly.

Barack Obama learn’t this – much to his chagrin, after he uttered what could be seen as a similar elitist remark recently in Pennsylvania. An election that despite his populist leanings he lost by double digits.

A reminder of what he said.

”You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Last by not least.

The double entendre included in your “bad old apartheid” comment further leaves nothing to imagination as to a mindset mired in colonial elitism.

I look forward to the day when most journalists (there are exceptions) and opinions formers take the time to go to the source documents for their information, rationally consider them, and then report on them.

Instead we get re-cycled conference circuit gossip, political party handouts and ‘informed sources’ with axes to grind and party political agendas to act on.

There’s a long weekend coming up, so Pierre, this should give you plenty of time to get hold of the Erasmus Commission’s terms of reference for its ‘probe’ into the affairs of Cape Town’s government, take a few deep breaths. Focus. Read and inwardly digest, and tell us – with your independent constitutional law academic hat on – what you think of the terms of reference. If you were fighting in a court of law for the commission to continue, what would be your argument. Why do the ratepayers of Cape Town and the citizens of SA need the ‘truth’ that will come out of this exercise. Would justice and the truth be served?

I have yet to see any rational, informed analysis in a South African publication, on these terms of reference.

In the bad old days of apartheid there were journalists who would take the time to read the terms of numerous NP-inspired commissions and explain why they were a travesty of justice. Nowadays, if the ANC hacks say a commission is a good idea, why rock the boat. It takes too much effort.

And please, stop whining about the way Helen responded to your criticism. As her predecessor Helen Suzman, one of South Africa’s greatest liberation fighters, once said to Jimmy Kruger (I think) : If you’re going to dish it (criticism) out, you must be able to take it.