In 1997 ‘The White paper on the Transformation of Service Delivery’ aka Batho Pele (‘people first’), came into law. Like the name suggests, the former’s principal objective was to improve the standard of public service. The Batho Pele vision was backed by other Acts to further encourage compliance. On the contrary, in retrospect, like many other public policies, the desired outcome has not been achieved. The purpose of this piece is to review the Batho Pele vision, juxtaposing it wi...

On 20 April 2010, time stood still as one of the biggest oil drills owned by BP exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, making Deepwater Horizon the world’s largest inadvertent marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry (Robertson, 2010). Originally built by Hyundai Heavy Industries in the South Korean city of Ulsan in 1998, it was destined to withstand severe pressure and engage in extremely deep operations. To prove just that, in September 2009 Deepwater Horizon drilled the deepest...

On 17 December, 2010 a series of street demonstrations broke out in Tunisia, it soon engulfed the entire nation; soon it was a full-blown revolution. Scholars and reporters have dubbed it the Jasmine Revolution, in comparison to the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia that infamously created a domino-effect, spreading all through Eastern Europe in 1989 (All Africa, 2011). The reasons for the uprising have been cited as unemployment, food inflation, corruption, freedom of speech, poor livi...

Transitional justice is a process by which Transitional States employ a range of approaches to address past human rights violations. This process is usually done with in a legal and state framework that is aimed at achieving justice in a context where both victims and perpetrators are given an opportunity for justice and amnesty as a means of achieving national reconciliation. Post Apartheid South Africa is an ideal case study of a Transitional State; this is a result of the political comprom...

On November 2, 2010 the United States held a referendum called Proposition 19, the so called Regulate, Control, and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010.  The  latter aimed to legalize the growing, selling and smoking of marijuana for those older than 21 in the state of California. Liberal and conservative voters were divided and in the end the bill was not passed. However, the biggest concern did not come from the interior, it came from Latin America.

In the past the United States has come down harsh...

Only seven weeks into the New Year, yet so much activism and hunger for change has presided all over Africa; both regionally as well as at the local level. On the regional level, a nascent revolution, manifested in a surge of public demonstrations, now marks the Northern region of Africa. This movement is proving to be contagious, and is influencing all those neighbouring the riotous states.

The uprising can be traced to the West African state of Ivory Coast, aka Cote D’ivoire, where the...

Located in North Africa and flanked by Egypt to the north and Ethiopia to the east, Sudan is predominantly the biggest country in the African continent. British colonial powers partitioned the country in two when it decreed in the 1920’s that Northern and Southern Sudan should remain separate. The initiative behind this arrangement was to keep the Islamic population to the North, while the South is predominantly more Christian and culturally leaning towards that of Kenya and Uganda (Gettlem...

The political definition of a partition fails to capture the essence of the act; however the law definition seems to capture the act more appropriately.  It is defined as a term used in the law of real property to describe an act, by a court order or otherwise, to divide up a concurrent estate into separate portions representing the proportionate interests of the tenants. One could argue that the above mentioned definition is of particular importance to Sudan because the people of the South h...

South Africa has entered a number of bilateral as well as multilateral trade agreements. The India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) trilateral pact, signed in 2003, was a strategic plan to further promote South- South co-operation. In years to come a trend of Newly Industrialising Economies (NIEs), alternatively referred to as ‘emerging economies’ or ‘economies in transition’, soon followed. The former consisted of advancing Less Developing Countries (LDCs) whose economies were transit...

Once a mystical and distant nation that formed the foundation of the Spice Trade, to one of the first colonies to be attained by the affluent British Empire - India today inhabits one of the poorest and unequal societies in the world. According to the World Bank, more than 80 percent of India’s population of 1.1 billion people lives on less than two-dollars a day. This implies that a third of the world’s poor resides in India (CIA World Fact Book, 2008).  Yet, during 2008 four Indian men ...

The end of 2010 was characterised by worldwide reports of the contentious website called Wikileaks. The website gained overnight notoriority for the damming information it was releasing on the World Wide Web.  Wikileaks not only had incriminating information on key political figures, it also gave unlimited excess to confidential documents that were not even known to exist.  The website has been said to have released over 400.000 leaked documents about virtually every single corrupt or rather ...