Quote of the week
A few months ago, author William Gumede described Zuma as someone with a narcissistic personality disorder — a set of traits defined by Austrian psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut as “including an exaggerated sense of superiority, a lack of self-awareness about the impact of their behaviour and having a disdain for others, who they devalue to validate their own grandiosity”. These people lack empathy, have a distorted sense of reality and are incapable of seeing anything from anyone else’s perspective. Narcissists like Zuma, Gumede argues, can’t accept responsibility and don’t care if they take down entire countries with them. The events at Nkandla, sadly for Zuma, only reinforced that perspective.
Financial Mail
Elite Capture of land reform
The Plaas research team gathered data on 66 land reform projects across the country and found that “land reform has shifted from being pro-poor to being pro-elite”. The question, then, is: who has benefitted from land redistribution in South Africa? Who are the winners and who are the losers Elaborating on the concept of elite capture of the land, Mtero says, “[It] simply refers to the concentration of public resources in the hands of a few individuals, and usually it’s the economically powerful and the politically influential individuals. Instead of broadening access to land and reconfiguring the unequal agrarian structure, a select group of black commercial farmers is promoted in land reform.”
