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From Doringbaai to Port Nolloth, West Coast communities are pushing back against mining and offshore oil and gas expansion.  (Liezl Human/Groundup)

‘No one asked us’: West Coast fishers oppose offshore oil and gas development

From Doringbaai to Port Nolloth, West Coast communities are pushing back against mining and offshore oil and gas expansion. Residents, activists and fishers say consultation…

The proliferation of illegal credit providers is not just a regulatory failure but a symptom of the broader inequalities entrenched in the country’s financial system

South Africa’s credit crisis: The fight against predatory lending

The proliferation of illegal credit providers is not just a regulatory failure but a symptom of the broader inequalities entrenched in the country’s financial system

Working together, governments, the private sector and regional bodies can solve the infrastructure problems hobbing the growth of the mining sector in Africa. Photo by Emmanuel Croset/AFP

30 YEARS OF DEMOCRACY: SA’s economy neither Gear nor there

Amid directionless policy after 30 years of democracy, the country’s prospects continue to be driven by the whims of miners and their financiers

Chairman of the Constitutional Assembly Cyril Ramaphosa holds up a copy of the country’s new constitution freshly signed by President Nelson Mandela in Sharpville 10 December 1996. In 1960, this otherwise unremarkable township of Johannesburg was the scene of an apartheid police massacre of 69 unarmed black civil rights protesters. (Photo by ADIL BRADLOW / AFP)

Ramaphosa’s economy and Mandela-era nostalgia

Instead of prompting us to recapture our past, our current economic plight suggests we should break from it This content is restricted to registered users and subscribers. Get…

Will the dollar hit a Brics wall?

The architecture of the global financial system hurts emerging market economies but the alliance has yet to offer an alternative

Upwardly mobile: Lindiwe Sisulu hugs President Cyril Ramaphosa at an ANC National Conference in 2017. Sisulu dropped her own presidential campaign shortly before the conference. (Gulshan Khan/AFP)

Andile Zulu: Sisulu obfuscates the true nature of power in South Africa

Power in post-apartheid South Africa lies with the party, the state and capital. The tourism minister masks her complicity with bad governance, and being part of the economic and…

Protests: Turkey has seen opposition to the country’s declaration of   ‘an economic war of independence’ by refusing to rein in inflation using higher interest rates and other measures.  (Yasin Akgul/AFP/Getty)

Lessons from Turkey to SA: Economic independence is a battle

Without tighter capital controls, regulating the flow of money in and out of their economies, Turkey and South Africa are vulnerable to the whims of the financial markets

In the tale of two burning rainforests, there is a common thread: As the flames roar through the Amazon and South-east Asia, hopes of limiting greenhouse gases are going up in smoke. (Ricardo Moraes/Reuters)

As Bolsonaro incinerates the Amazon, urgent action is needed for climate justice

As South Africans, we must support the fight to save the Amazon, but also take a strong stand on environmental concerns that are closer to home

President Jinping warned that the trade war between China and the US will not see any winner.

At Brics think tank, scholars get drunk on their own rhetoric

One of South Africa’s highest-profile intellectual vehicles appears to be a victim of drunken driving by scholars

Quiet fury: Economist Sampie Terreblanche did not go gentle into that good night

SA economist whose work went global wrote with a deep idealism

‘Terreblanche wrote with a deep idealism in a country frequently with the highest levels of inequality’

Loss? Copper

Looting of Africa calls for action

Top-down regulatory measures come to naught, so the battle must be fought from the bottom up

Some Chinese companies that have concluded contracts with farmers in Zimbabwe have been accused of super-exploitation.

Marxists plot new course for Mzansi

The friction between different schools of socialist thinking has produced more light than heat for South Africa.

Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene has warned of ‘a new age of pain’ – and now the new research is being ‘spun to serve the austerity cause’.

World Bank’s flawed report kicks SA’s poor in the teeth

The institution has failed to retract a document that neoliberal politicians and commentators are using to advocate state spending cuts.

The United States left the Paris accord on Wednesday, becoming the first country to ever withdraw from an international climate change pact as the fate of its presidential election hangs in the balance.

Divestment will shake up climate policy paralysis

The window to halt runaway climate change is closing fast this decade, with world-wide emissions cuts of 50% needed by 2020, and 90% by 2050.

The clear signs of human-induced climate change reached unprecedented levels in 2024, with some consequences expected to be irreversible for centuries

Climate change: The secrets of our collusion

The environment minister has cut funds to monitor climate change and contraventions, showing her tendency to collaborate with corporate power.

It’s class apartheid, stupid

Official data tell us that class apartheid, born in April 1994 with features that include durable racism and patriarchy, is now a malevolent juvenile delinquent.As with racial…

Mbekism sophistrified

Is Ronald Suresh Roberts’ <i>Fit to Govern</i> fit to defend Thabo Mbeki from (mainly) "illiberal" critics of different hues? Roberts has positioned himself as a radical…

Whose Zimbabwe economy?

For the country’s first post-Mugabe government, perhaps as early as next March if elite deal-making unfolds as promised, job number two, after restoring a semblance of democracy,…