The th!nc Foundation

    The debt of humanity to nature seems to be only payable through death. How nature comes back to us and makes a demand for our exit from its eternal peace, is what humanity has been unable to predict and control. We are thus all in a natural space that has many dates with us; these are the date to be born...up to the date to depart. In the interceding period we have so many other dates to have various encounters with fellow men and fellow citizens of nature. One of the dates that Zweli Mphehle had was one that I remembered the day he or I knew him. I met him as a neighbor in Doornpoort, where we both lived until I left him there. I then met him as a fellow parent at a crèche where our children were in the same age cohort. These dates were to be further expanded in our professional lives when we met as active members of the South African Association of Public Administration and Management. It is this SAAPAM date within which I had a better revelation of the mortal Zweli and ...

WHAT IS CULTURAL HERITAGE  Cultural heritage is something of value, something handed down to us from previous generations. It carries the stamp of those who came before us. This is inherited property. It is inherited for its historic, cultural, or natural significance. The heritage can either be physical artifacts such as buildings, monuments, landscapes, biodiversity, books, works of art or intangible attributes of a group of people or society as a whole such as language, knowledge, norms, and values.  Cultural heritage is a window through which a nation sees and understands itself, by learning from an inherited body of knowledge, attitudes, norms, and values. From cultural heritage, we learn the ways of life of the past, the meaning of words, appropriate behavior, and conduct. Because of its important cultural heritage is preserved or looked after with care so that it can be handed down to future generations. People travel miles across the globe to see, marvel, and learn fro...

William Shakespeare submits that “all the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts”. In this submission, Shakespeare speaks of the theatrical quality of our social life as human beings inside the theatre called humanity. In this theatre of humanity, we wear a variety of masks in order to cover our faces, conceal our real beings, and project what the scene in the act demands of us as actors. As ‘consummate actors’ we have learnt through our lifetime, irrespective of age, to extort or elicit one behaviour or the other from other beings through our acting or posture.    It is interesting that inside this humanity theatre, we take on acting roles without an assigned script, for we are both the script, the audience and in most instances the directors of the drama. In a quest to display our acting prowess, we oftentimes take on the prizes and burdens that come with our role in the...

In his contribution to the theory of dictatorship, Ernst Fraenkel, a NAZI Germany’s era legal mind introduces the concept of duality in a previously troubled State. He introduces the concepts of a Normative State, which he explains as one where the rule of law regulates the allocative power of the state through its primary agent, government-as-a-politics-bureaucracy-complex; and a Prerogative State which he explains as one wherein the unlimited arbitrariness of those in leadership of the state assumes the role of being its primary agent in the exercise of the allocative power of the State through its machinery, a in-government-bureaucracy. He submits in his rendition that these conditions have a capacity to co-exist in a democracy that is en-route to a dictatorship by a particularized elite group in society.   He argues that in conditions that resemble a post-1929 Great Depression-era and a pre-Second World War Germany, the likelihood of a dictatorship concretizing at the al...

COVID19 has become a departure point for many an analysis about governance, economies, the global order, and even family life. High impact and academic journals are clogged with a variety of articles purporting to be crystal balling into a post-COVID19 world. The rush might be inspired by humanity’s innate character of wanting to anchor status quo thinking as the non-negotiable background of permanence for any future thinking. In this quest humanity tends to forget that after any disruption, what has been, can no longer come back, and efforts at resurrecting that will be in vain. In South Africa, the ANC, arguably the foremost nexus of its political economy life, would not escape post-COVID19 interrogation by society. As a liberation movement and a custodian of most of the struggle system that defines todays South Africa, the ANC had gone through a number of phases that shaped its form and character. In this journey, it has not been a roller coaster ride, but a journey of deepe...

INTRODUCTION As government battles the scourge of COVID-19, and results of mass testing are dripping in, education as one of the key systems that drive sustainable development, emerges as an area that needs more work for any post-COVID19 reconstruction to undergird long-term societal resilience. The unprecedented early lockdown announced by President Ramaphosa, with its attendant slowing down of ‘official’ infection rates, indicate a possibility of a review of the education process for the teachers and occurrence for the learners. Yet there is now much work more work to be done for basic education institutions to resume normal schooling that should at the same time respond to the social effects of the crisis.   HOW COVID-19 AFFECTED BASIC EDUCATION The COVID-19 pandemic has hit basic education in an unprecedented scale. It may result in the redefinition of teaching as we knew it before the pandemic. It has disrupted the idea of teaching in respect of methods, way of doing ...

The advent of a post-COVID 19 world is an inevitability all of us should start dealing with. The management of the crises through the pandemic is a public affairs management project whose outcome will redefine life and its attendant faculties into posterity. The speed and reach of the virus to global destinations, its rapid human to human infection, and how it has made it difficult for international collaboration on its vaccination, makes it an unprecedented virus of seismic global proportions. As the COVID-19 wreaks havoc to national economies, the social fabric and creating worldwide fear and uncertainty, it is at the same time establishing a new order and disrupting global public health governance, and thus public affairs, as we know or knew them. Countries are experiencing convulsions out of which both a desire and compulsion for something new is an inevitability. The containment of humanity into its most basic domicile, home, in order to disrupt patterns that spread COVID-19, is...

COVID-19 has in South Africa brought to bear Laski’s assertion that ‘a State divided into a small number of rich (monopolistic) and a large number of poor will always develop a government manipulated by the rich to protect the amenities represented by their property’. Laski’s statement centres inequality as an epistemic site from which to interpret a state’s capacity to respond on behalf of all its citizens during times of crisis such as COVID-19. In responding the State will, and depending on who does the judgement’, be judged on how it increases access to care for those that would otherwise have afforded in contrast to those of whom limited access is a normality. As the increase in reported cases of COVID-19 claws itself towards a 1000 mark in South Africa, and as at its second week since the first report, the established patterns of in-country regional   and spatial poverty are getting into a territory of their most consequential review. These conditions generates questions on...

A stable order is a rare thing in the world. The idea of freedom in South Africa remains the most elusive of Democratic experiments that emerged from a negotiated settlement, as opposed to those that settled through a after war treaty. In negotiating the enfranchisement of Bantu Blacks from 1990 to 1996, when a Democratic Constitution was adopted, the Liberation Complex led by the ANC knew that it was beginning a process of undoing one of the well managed race-based order in the world. An order is said to be functional when it progressively grows into a means by which conflicts of interests are registered, resolved, altered and or maintained. It is on the basis of this balance being difficult that the rarity of a stable order is permanent watermark in human political co-existence   The Apartheid-Colonial order was, and still is, a sophisticated order that got funded out of the world richest mineral endowments extracted by a global empire with an eternal plan to dominate the gl...