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News & Views by Terry Bell
Browsing All Posts filed under »Reports abroad«
Mandela: already dead — or slowly dying?
Initial feature published in the Bulletin&Record, Zambia. Is Nelson Mandela dead? Did he die as early perhaps as June 11 and was then maintained in a “permanent vegetative state” only by means of a life support machine? And if he did effectively die, as now seems possible, within days or weeks of his admission to […]
Why SA is no more ‘the gateway to Africa’
March 18, 2013
In what must be seen as a major wake-up call, some mining analysts rank the current potential of crisis-wracked Zimbabwe higher than that of South Africa. So why is SA no longer perceived as the investment "gateway to Africa"?
Inauspicious start to the ANC’s year
February 9, 2013
It was a not very auspicious start to 2013 for South Africa’s governing African National Congress (ANC). Not only did a host of unwelcome baggage from the past come tumbling into the new year, but other, new, difficulties also emerged before the year was even a month old.
Less gold at SA’s rainbow end
January 28, 2013
Once upon a time and not very long ago, South Africa, as the continent’s largest economy and with a first-world banking and financial sector, was regarded as the potential gateway to investment in Africa. This is no longer the case: investors are tending to look north, to Ghana and even Zambia.
A Cold War shadow looms in South Africa
November 6, 2012
In the face of the ongoing global economic crisis, with massive unemployment and a wage and welfare gap perhaps second to none anywhere, South Africa is now confronting the shadow of the Cold War. And it looms large in the background, despite most of the current media focus on the recent strike wave and the impending elective conference of the governing African National Congress.
Exposing the race/class fault lines in SA society
October 5, 2012
The racial and class fault lines in South African society, papered over by rainbow nation platitudes and disguised for global consumption by the myth of a negotiated miracle, have been brutally exposed. When, as it has now emerged, special para-military units of the police opened fire on miners at Lonmin’s Marikana mine on August 16, the resultant bloodshed washed away the last traces of hypocritical camouflage; it also acted as a catalyst creating conditions in which dangerous and opportunistic political viruses thrive.
A wake-up call SA will ignore at its peril
September 5, 2012
What happened at Marikana should not be seen in isolation. It is merely the most tragic of many unrest incidents around South Africa, but it is a wake-up cll the country will ignore at its peril
Terry Bell Writes 
December 4, 2013
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