Quote of the week
Early in 2016, a racist outburst by a white woman in KwaZulu-Natal, Penny Sparrow, ridiculing Black beachgoers as ‘monkeys’, and announcing that thenceforth she would ‘address the [B]lacks of South Africa as monkeys’, published in her online profile, was quickly disseminated countrywide. It convulsed South Africa in shame and acrid anger. The [Constitutional] Court was not unaffected. Previous members of the Constitutional Court took comfort in reflecting, with evident satisfaction, on the absence of racially loaded and racially defined splits. Dramatically, these now fractured the Court.
"Rainbows and Realities: Justice Johan Froneman in the Explosive Terrain of Linguistic and Cultural Rights" - Constitutional Court Review
On corruption
Perhaps Ramaphosas gamble is that a strengthened and autonomous criminal justice system will provide the coercion to keep political allies honest. The problem with this, though, is that it implies an indiscriminate policing of corruption, one that does not avoid figures who are necessary to the stabilisation of the dominant coalition. Prosecution of such figures may be satisfying to all who oppose corruption – but it poses the distinct threat of destabilising a potentially stabilising coalition, and providing the pretext for anti-Ramaphosa mobilisation. It is not at all clear that this circle can be squared. Hence the far greater likelihood that the dominant coalition remains unstable and subject to frequent challenge, paralysis and fracturing, accompanied by violence and attempts to subvert the criminal justice system. It is not impossible that such a dynamic produces a split in the ANC.
