With no money left to burn, the South African government’s throwing poor and working-class black people into the fire to keep the economy chugging along. — Watching the superb-but-harrowing Snowpiercer series during the CoViD-19 pandemic and #BlackLivesMatter protests has been edifying. The series goes further than the movie in detailing the intricacies of the capitalist hierarchy aboard the iron ark: following a man-made global environmental catastrophe, poor people at the back of the 1,001-car great train…

Lockdown orders did not create the growing humanitarian crisis; they revealed its extent and the inadequacy of the pre-existing and newly expanded social safety net — The historian Howard Phillips observed that there arose “reformist zeal” in the Union of South Africa in the immediate aftermath of the 1918 Spanish Flu — which killed over 300 000 people in the country and threw into sharp relief the virtual non-existence of the white supremacist regime’s welfare system…

This is text and visuals from my talk at the TEDxJohannesburg salon on social enterprise. The video will be out in December and, obviously, there will probably be differences between the text and the delivered version. Art direction by Pola Maneli. I am going to ask a few difficult questions…

HuffPost South Africa has done a series on black tax — the monthly remittances black South Africans send to family members who are not part of their immediate household. …