http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/60020

South Africa's success is about ‘we’, not ‘me’
William Gumede

Almost every developing country that has become rich since the Second World War has done so by lifting the majority of people out of poverty collectively and not the elite only. In fact, the developing countries that have been successful since the Second World War, particularly those from the East Asian developmental states, have done so by empowering the widest number of people – at the same time, not just an elite. Those developing countries where only a small elite became prosperous, have as countries stagnated.

Bring SA’s security apparatus under civilian control
William Gumede
2009-10-22, Issue 454

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59686

As is now becoming increasingly clear from the many court trials, towards the end of the presidential term of Thabo Mbeki, elements of the security apparatus increasingly started to behave like their apartheid predecessors in their muzzling of rivals and legitimate criticisms of the state, and in the abuse of power for personal and factional interests.

The leadership succession battle of the ANC, ahead of the party’s December 2007 Polokwane national conference, saw rival factions inside the ANC often using state security agencies, the police and intelligence services, to try to eliminate each other. At the height of the tussle, a state of paranoia reigned, where smear campaigns, deliberately planting stories and entrapment – such as the attempt by rogue intelligence agents to plant drugs on a Mail & Guardian journalist – were used as a devastating weapon to discredit opponents.