Heads of state at an African Union session in Addis Ababa. They have signed up to a plan that envisages strengthening institutions and governance.
EPA/Solan Kolli
If the governing ANC ignores the calls for Zuma’s resignation,it may undermine South Africa’s leadership on the continent. It creates the idea that he can undermine the constitution with impunity.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his wife Grace. Mugabe has been in power since 1980.
Reuters/Philimon Bulawayo
It is normal for resistance movements to adopt rough survival strategies and techniques while fighting an oppressive regime. Unfortunately that culture takes root and is permanently nurtured.
Allegations that President Jacob Zuma’s friends, the Gupta family, corruptly dictate cabinet appointments have plunged South Africa into a political crisis.
Shutterstock
Lobbying political actors to achieve particular outcomes is an acceptable practice in a democracy. But state capture, as is allegedly happening in South Africa, denotes holding the state to ransom.
Posters depicting the ANC in happier times.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
Democracy resulted in a sea change in the governing ANC. In the past, only highly committed idealists joined the party. Today’s splits and factions are about patronage and clientelism.
South African president Jacob Zuma in the country’s parliament, the one formal structure that could remove him from office.
EPA/Sumaya Hisham
Ironically, the only feasible way of removing President Zuma lies outside the prescribed formal structures of the constitutional processes – at the head office of the governing ANC.
If South Africans are to make the radical changes they must to become truly great, the new generation will have to find a way of understanding the country’s past in its profound complexity.
South Africa’s Constitutional Court has ruled that President Jacob Zuma failed in his duty to ‘uphold, defend and respect’ the Constitution.
GCIS
The Constitutional Court judgment in the opposition’s case against President Jacob Zuma represents the exercise of judicial authority and expertise at the highest level by international standards.
A river flows into the Indian Ocean along South Africa’s Transkei coast, where residents are resisting a titanium mining project.
Epa/Nic Bothma
South Africa’s finance minister means well, especially in his bid to cut public sector expenditure. But his success requires strong leadership and strategic alignment across the entire public sector.
South Africa’s Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan delivers his 2016 budget address to parliament in Cape Town.
Reuters/Mike Hutchings
South Africa’s finance minister delivered a good mix of macro and micro-economic strategies to ensure the country survives economic uncertainty, restores confidence and achieves some growth.
Cine Petro Atletica, once Huambo’s finest cinema, was destroyed during fierce fighting in Angola’s bloody civil war.
Reuters/John Chiahemen MH/WS
Apartheid South Africa started a war in which it could not maintain a strategic advantage. It misread the quest for national liberation and international opinion that undermined its effectiveness.
South Africans are increasingly taking to the streets to demand accountability from government.
Reuters/Mike Hutchings
South Africa has never reached an embedded democratic state. Its post-apartheid experience more realistically reflects ongoing oscillation between a deepening and a reversal of democratic liberties.
Robert Sobukwe developed the philosophy of African nationalism to even higher intellectual heights. The lesson for humanity was his ideological stand that there is only one race - the human race.
President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation address didn’t suggest any real urgency or energy.
Rodger Bosch/EPA
With South African local government elections coming up later in 2016, Jacob Zuma and his governing ANC must ensure that citizens still look to them as a party of hope.
South Africa’s Jacob Zuma is president of the country as well as the African National Congress. He is under pressure on all fronts.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
It is unlikely President Zuma will announce a structural changes in his State of the Nation Address. This, despite education being in dire need of fundamental restructuring and an economy in decline.
Much is expected of South African President Jacob Zuma when he delivers his 2016 State of the Nation Address.
Reuters/Sumaya Hisham
The general loss of faith in the economy is the most important issue President Zuma must address. More radical social and economic transformation, with emphasis on land reform will be most critical.
AIDS activists demand that the government of then-South African president Thabo Mbeki show a clear plan to fight the disease.
Reuters
One of the remarkable achievements of South Africa’s Constitutional Court has been its role in improving the quality of the internal democratic processes within the governing ANC.
Former South African President Thabo Mbeki is back in the public eye thanks to a series of open letters he’s written since the start of 2016.
Reuters/Phil Moore
Former President Thabo Mbeki’s critique of South African historiography, and his concomitant attempt to correct this body of work, has set off a significant public discussion.
Chief Research Specialist in Democracy and Citizenship at the Human Science Research Council and a Research Fellow Centre for African Studies, University of the Free State