Development, Part 3b A bridge for the poor? “Barking dogs and building bridges” is Lauren Royston’s subtle and patient demolition of the simplistic bourgeois platitudes of Hernando de Soto. De Soto is a Peruvian and the author of a book called “The Mystery of Capital” published in 2000. He later visited South Africa. He was broadly advocating globalised capitalism, and claimed to have found a way of incorporating the poorest of the poor within a regulated, universal framework of property and economic practice. Royston does not take a heavy axe to de Soto but recognises that he had achieved a remarkable propaganda success (by now, in 2010, largely forgotten) in a field where academics like herself and the advocacy groups “Leap” and “Afra”, among many others, had found themselves being ignored for years, or decades. Though they may have hated de Soto’s ideology, yet they were in some measure happy that de Soto had secured wide publicity for the “extra-legal” (i.e. outside the l...
Umsebenzi Online, Volume 9, No. 15, 4 August 2010 In this Issue: Do we need an independent media tribunal? Red Alert: Do we need an independent media tribunal? By Jeremy Cronin It is generally considered unwise for a politician to debate critically with the media through the media about the media. You don't exactly enjoy home-ground advantage. This has been obvious in recent weeks with the re-surfacing of the debate around the ANC's 2007 national conference resolution on an independent media tribunal. There has been a back-lash barrage of negative editorial comment directed against the three or four ANC and Alliance comrades who have had the temerity to raise the tribunal proposal again. Yet beneath the negative barrage some interesting issues have emerged. In the first place, notice how senior journalists are divided on whether to respond positively to ANC Secretary General Gwede Mantashe's invitation to have an open and fr...