Travelling down the DA’s Country Road

Early last year I complained that the DA’s image was too rich, too old, too white. I wrote, “Clearly brand DA is in need of a major overhaul, a major injection of cool. Its fusty look is rather reminiscent of what Woolworths was like 10 or 15 years ago when people under 30 refused to [...]

Why there’s not much hope for Cope

This op-ed was written on the eve of South Africa’s elections in April.
When Mosiuoa ‘Terror’ Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa announced they were “serving divorce papers” on the African National Congress (ANC), their political home, there was a frenzy of speculation that this would result in a tectonic shift in South Africa’s political and electoral [...]

ANC will savage any opposition to its bid for perpetual rule

Leaked plans by the ANC to destabilise and distract from opposition leader Helen Zille from fulfilling her duties as premier of the Western Cape shows the contempt that our ruling party has for democracy.
After several years of the ANC’s chaotic mismanagement and paltry delivery, the Western Cape’s voters decisively elected the DA to run the [...]

“Two-thirds gevaar” was reasoned, not racist

In a recent ANC Today, President Kgalema Motlanthe rehashes an article he wrote in the run up to the 1999 elections in which he criticised the then DP’s calls to prevent a two-thirds majority as “a fear of democracy”. In that decade-old piece he said:
Lacking a coherent or realisable vision for a better South Africa, [...]

Debunking the Daily Mail’s doomsayer

On Sunday 29 March, a devastating article by Peter Hitchens on Jacob Zuma and South Africa’s future was published in Britain’s Daily Mail. Couched in a sickening, sensationalist discourse swirling with racist and colonialist undertones, the story employed gross misrepresentation, selective truth-telling, distortion and stereotyping to depict South Africa as about to collapse into the [...]

Cape Town counters lies damn lies of tripartite tricksters

The ANC and its alliance are desperately trying to stave off losing the Western Cape in the upcoming elections by resorting to lies, smear tactics and false accusations in an attempt to undermine the service delivery record of the DA-led coalition government that runs the City of Cape Town .
Clearly the fact that the current [...]

ANC TV ad: this is what you get when Ogilvy’s your agency

This is the beautiful TV ad created by the ruling party’s award-winning advertising agency Ogilvy Johannesburg.

Combining simplicity with a compelling narrative, it’s a stunning, slickly executed advert (making the the DA’s  “Somewhere over the rainbow” TV spot look like an amateurish stock photo slideshow by comparison). Too bad the ANC commercial [...]

Zille is Western Cape premier candidate

Helen Zille, the leader of the DA and the current mayor of Cape Town, announced this morning that she will be her party’s Western Cape premier candidate in the upcoming elections. Her governance track record in Cape Town is strong and doubtless she will make a fantastic premier, but the burning question is who will [...]

Why Zuma allows Malema to show democracy the finger

Isn’t it astounding? That a man who incites people to murder and violence, who uses hate speech and insults senior members of his party is still around and playing a prominent political role in the ruling party, nogal?
Indeed, most people can’t seem to fathom what lies behind Jacob Zuma’s limp excuses for the outrageous, undemocratic [...]

Godin’s marketing lessons from the US elections… SA parties take note!

Seth Godin, branding guru and author of — amongst other things — The Purple Cow, has done a fascinating analysis of the marketing lessons we can learn from the US elections. With South Africa’s own just around the corner, perhaps this is something that the ANC, DA and Shikota SANC SADC ???? parties can take [...]