Emerging Markets Business and Economics. “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” Yogi Berra
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South African President Jacob Zuma, currently on a three-day state visit to Britain, has come in for a rough time in the British press, which has castigated him for his polygamous habits. Stephen Robinson, writing in The Daily Mail, calls him a “sex-obsessed bigot with four wives and 35 children” and wonders why Britain is “fawning over this “vile buffoon.” [click to continue…]
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The Johannesburg Mail & Guardian reports that two weeks of vandalism and violence in the townships show few signs of abating and that President Jacob Zuma appears unable to do much to stop it. Zuma was selected as ANC Party Chairman in late 2007 and won April’s Presidential Election on promises to do more to help the poor in one of the most unequal countries on Earth. Black South Africans still reflexively support the ruling ANC, the party that liberated them, but less enthusiastically than before, after 15 years of crime, and growing inequality. In the current protests people have held up signs saying that life was better under white rule.
In the Mail & Guardian’s words, “In the past week, scenes reminiscent of the apartheid era have returned to the townships — clouds of acrid black smoke rising from burning tyres, police turning on residents with rubber bullets, sirens wailing and — most symbolic — official buildings and vehicles being set on fire.” [click to continue…]
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The day after the U.S. Presidential election last November, the satirical weekly The Onion led with the headline “Black Man Gets Nation’s Worst Job”. The July 12 lead article in the South African non-satirical weekly, The Mail & Guardian, makes it clear that Barack Obama has no reason to envy South African President Jacob Zuma. [click to continue…]
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“The Vital Wave Consulting” blog has an interesting post from June 26 – “Is the Rest of the World Ready for a Unified BRIC?” - about last week’s summit in Moscow of the four “BRIC” countries: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. The article ponts out that trade among the four countries is too small to justify talk of a new trading bloc, but remarks that they have some common interests with respect to world trade, notably reducing reliance on the U.S. dollar. The BRIC countries are hard to overlook. Together they comprise about 43% of the world’s population and 15% of its GDP, and hold over 40% of the world’s gold and foreign exchange reserves. Their economies are growing at more than double the pace of developed economies. That they are holding a summit at all indicates that they are looking for ways to throw their combined weight around for mutual benefit. [click to continue…]
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Any time you can piss off the Communist party, the labor unions, and the Chamber of Commerce in one speech, you know you must have said something right. Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s Finance Minister for the past 13 years and now President of the powerful National Planning Commission, managed to achieve this in a speech he delivered last week to the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Cape Town, in which he castigated COSATU, the national umbrella labor union, for calling strikes to advance its socio-economic agenda, while at the same time slamming business leaders for failing to stand up to union extortion. [click to continue…]
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