The th!nc Foundation

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...