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Numerous South African political parties have a social media presence to create more awareness around the political issues which they stand for, and thus to attract more voters. Nowadays political parties act as political brands and adopt brand strategies to gain a competitive advantage over opposition parties. This article proposes adopting a social identity theory as a novel approach to how political brands could drive political issues on social media. It is further suggested that due to the complexity of the South African political scene, more attention could be paid to how political brands could leverage political brand stories in conjunction with an online political brand persona on social media to position themselves in a chaotic online political space. To test this, semi-structured expert interviews were conducted with communication professionals in South African public relations agencies who were responsible for creating content for political parties' Facebook and Twitter accounts. Four themes that became evident in the data collectively indicate that political brands will successfully drive political issues on social media only when they are able to connect emotionally with the political consumer. In this regard, an online political brand persona may be critical in not only eliciting an emotional reaction from political consumers but also establishing a long-term connection with them based on how credible the political brand is in terms of what they care about and their ability to solve issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a study which emanated from an extended study that explored how name-calling serves as a communicative strategy in political discourse. As an extension, and with a distinct focus on selected political cartoons entrenched in the South African press, the current article details name-calling as a communicative tool in South African political discourse. The study adopted a triangulation theoretical framework, due to its espousal of multiple naming theories. The researchers opted for qualitative discourse textual analysis methodology coupled with exploratory-explanatory research design. Document collection and semiotic analysis were used in succession, as data collection strategies. From the accessible population of ten cartoons, purposive sampling strategy was employed in selecting five cartoons that served as the sample for the study. Name-calling constructs were sequentially extracted from linguistic and visual discourse segments, and were qualitatively analysed through the semiotic analysis, and the theoretical tools underpinning the study. The findings of the study revealed that most of the name-calling stemmed from political corruption. Disclosement and reaction instigation were found to be the most used naming-communicative strategies during name-calling. Additionally, ideological character and aggressiveness were the most common semantic-pragmatic inherent categories of political discourse reflected. To this end, the study submits that cartoons in the South African press employ various name-calling constructs to express viewpoint, persuade, reprimand and construct arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socio-economic inequality is associated with differentiated levels of health and poor health affects political participation; inequalities are embodied in political life. This contribution, focusing on South Africa, attends to the impact of exposure to environmental hazards and stigmatisation of unhealthy bodies on political participation. The corporealisation of a healthy democratic politics demands not (only) the inclusion of different bodies, but opportunities to radically contest the prevailing socio-political institutions, economic mechanisms and disciplinary norms that make some bodies healthier than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two contradictory conceptions of customary law, as either fundamentally democratic or autocratic, and their impact on the constant reconstruction of and resistance to chiefly authority in modern-day South Africa. In the last 15 years or so South Africa has witnessed a strong legislative agenda to centralise the power of senior traditional leaders. The new traditional authority laws' ahistorical, authoritarian understanding of customary law – as something to be defined and imposed on rural communities by senior traditional leaders – is directly opposed to the Constitutional Court's interpretation of customary law as something to be determined with reference to practice from and acceptance by the people whose customary law is under consideration. This article studies the net result of these contradictory processes on local contestations over chiefly power in the Eastern Cape. It displays the state's concerted efforts to impose a model of traditional authority that empowers senior traditional leaders, even in contexts where local communities strongly contest this model, arguing that it contravenes their custom and history, as well as their democratic rights. The article highlights the enduring legacy of apartheid constructions, and the powerful role of contemporary governments in their recreation. New laws are an important tool in this process. They entrench an apartheid model of traditional leaders and minimise rural democracy. It is only with serious efforts of community mobilisation and legal education and support that local communities can successfully access the courts to challenge the actions taken by an alliance of chiefs and state. Ultimately, our analysis highlights an understudied link between the functioning and legitimacy of chiefs in democratic states and the autocratic or democratic conception of the customary law underlying the powers of such chiefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I discuss the story of Kgosi Nyalala Pilane of the Bakgatla-Ba-Kgafela in South Africa as an illustration of the extent to which some traditional leaders have become nearly unaccountable sovereigns in post-colonial South Africa. In particular, I trace the intersection of Kgosi Nyalala's world with that of neoliberal monopoly capital. This story is based largely on evidence produced before the 2016 Commission of Inquiry into the affairs of the Bakgatla-Ba-Kgafela community, which investigated, among other things, how the community's extraordinary wealth disappeared. I explore how Kgosi Nyalala used the law, and in particular customary law, as an effective shield against attempts to hold him to account and show how, by situating himself in the gap between the 'corporate' and the 'customary', he was able to evade legal obligations in both spheres. Finally, I argue that Kgosi Nyalala was ultimately able to become a ruler sufficient unto himself because he was enabled by both public and private sector actors who stood to gain from his success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shifting relationship between physical monuments and the public memory that they seek to construct is explored through a photographic and textual examination of the social and political forces behind the construction and subsequent relocation of the Irish Brigade Monument in South Africa. Unveiled in 1975 in Johannesburg, the monument celebrated the memory of the Irish Brigade: "physical force" Irish nationalists who fought on the side of the Boers against the British in the South African War (1899–1902) in what has been celebrated as an early act of anti-imperialist solidarity. The design of the monument and its location on the west of Johannesburg represents a crisis in both the strategy of memorialization and a particular moment within Afrikaner nationalism. In 2001 part of the monument was unilaterally relocated to the white-separatist settlement of Orania by a grouping of white right-wingers in order to save it from demolition. Against the background of the 2015 #RhodesMustFall protests by black students in South Africa directed against the public symbols of previous regimes, this essay argues the Irish Brigade Memorial was the product of a strategic alignment between Irish settler nationalism and Afrikaner nationalism in response to the success of the international campaign to isolate the apartheid regime in the 1970s. The subsequent history of the monument, and its relocation to Orania in 2001, reflects the changing balance of forces within Afrikaner politics and the emergence of a modernist separatist tendency within that politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The academic field of postcolonial studies is founded upon the idea of comparison across nations that experienced colonialism. This cluster of essays raises the question: among the many possible pairings for comparison, what justifies the comparison of Ireland and South Africa as a field of study worthy of a special issue? Given the different colonial histories of the two nations, such a project could aim to show that they are not as unconnected as might at first appear, sharpen our understanding of both by showing their distinctive responses to similar conditions, or demonstrate the complexity of global networks of influence and exchange in the sphere of culture. These essays accomplish all these goals, considering, among other topics, the backing given by Irish nationalists to the Boers in the Anglo-Boer War, the strong support for the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, the significant role of South African figures in Irish political negotiations, and the links between Irish and South African literary works. As is pointed out by Parsons in his introduction, the asymmetry of the relationship is evident in most of these areas. Taken together, the contributions to this cluster demonstrate the varied ways in which a postcolonial lens can bring into focus connections forged across extended geographical distance and in spite of substantial historical differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Without overplaying the convergences in the discriminatory and oppressive practices carried out during the twentieth century by the states of South Africa (1948–1994) and Northern Ireland (1921–1998), it is difficult not to see prisons as one of the spaces where the power of the state was hotly contested. Physically isolated either by the countryside or by the ocean, the notorious prisons of Long Kesh/H Blocks and Robben Island housed vast numbers of political prisoners whose resolve and resistance the prison and state regimes attempted to break, deploying a variety of brutal strategies to do so. These violent infringements on prisoners' human rights also occurred in prisons situated in more central areas, but regardless of the physical situation of the prison, its inhabitants were (and of course still are today) rendered invisible and inaudible. This essay will focus on prose and poetry produced by political prisoners during incarceration and, in some cases, after their release. I would like to explore how the various aesthetics developed by both well-known and anonymous writers participate in a very political reconfiguration of both the carceral space and the wider biopolitics of the state. I suggest it is in the very stylistics of the texts that their implicit political message can be deciphered, and the prisoners' agency asserted. Paradoxically, then, in spite of attempts to push the prisoners out of sight, their resistance becomes all the more visible and audible, and forces a redistribution of the sensible through dissensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the history of South African imperialism and claims over a white Southern Africa, throughout the period between 1910 and 1963, and how it affected colonial rule and practice in the Belgian Congo. The article thereby adds to our knowledge of South African claims in the wider Southern African region and calls for a better understanding of external, and trans-imperial, anxieties underlying colonial rule in the Belgian Congo, and particularly in the mining province Katanga. The central hypothesis is that the South African danger confronted colonial rule in a dual way: in its territorialism, but also in its utopia of a white controlled Southern Africa. Either could lead to a loss of empire. Focusing in particular on Katanga, the article argues that migration, labour, development and settlement policies increasingly aimed at preventing the creation of a 'white man's country' akin to South Africa. The immediate postwar years, 1918–1922, were a defining moment, when South African influences and trans-imperial white labour solidarity in Katanga were particularly strong. Ultimately, this article analyses two clashing models of empire in Africa – one of autonomous white settler rule against centralised European metropolitan interests – and their implications for racial relations and colonial practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Hani Memorial, an annual state-led ceremony held in Ekurhuleni on the anniversary of Chris Hani's assassination. By analysing the memorialisation, appropriation and performance of Hani's legacy at this site, it seeks to contribute to debates surrounding the production of liberation struggle historiography in southern Africa, to expand upon Richard Werbner's 'post-colonial memorial complex', and to probe how, through these practices, the Tripartite Alliance has attempted to consolidate political power in post-apartheid South Africa. It takes its cue, though, from Jenny Edkins' notions of 'state time' and 'trauma time', which I read as representative of, or analogous to, different modes of organising or disrupting the ways in which people experience time and therefore make sense of the world. According to Edkins, the time of the state is that of 'linear, procedural time of process and organisation, history, heroes and nations', whereas trauma time is representative of a 'collective scream', 'a protest against the way people have been treated, a demand to hold open the temporality of trauma and a demand for a different politics'. This article argues that remembering Hani extends far beyond the temporality of the state, its tangible monuments to the past, and its forms of governmentality. In other words, Hani's legacy cannot be contained or governed by the discursive frames, monumental projects, and temporality of the state, which ultimately seek closure and the end of a politics that has the state as its target. Furthermore, the very performative and operative character of memorials themselves makes them particularly vulnerable to alternative memorialisation and invocations of the past. In short, although national memorials are conventionally understood as sites of state power, authority, governmentality, and historical certainty, they are more generatively understood as sites of temporal rupture through which the 'time of the state' is exposed and challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South African government acknowledges that services could become a major driver of economic growth and has called for the development of a comprehensive strategic framework and action plan for the export development and promotion of South Africa's service sectors. This article contributes to this goal by proposing a broad strategic framework to help leverage the power of services, particularly services exports. Based on a study of South Africa's services trade and the nature of the services economy in the country, the article offers policy advice for the key stakeholders in the country's services network. It also offers insights for other developing countries that are grappling with the challenge of developing their services sector as a way of diversifying their economies and finding new forms of competitive advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars have begun to explore the complex afterlives of "new realism" in Europe and the Americas following the collapse of Weimar democracy, its reception on the African continent has received far less attention. Looking to the unheralded documentary work that Anne Fischer, a German- Jewish refugee to Cape Town, produced in the early years of the Second World War, this essay examines how she and South African contemporary Constance Stuart Larrabee variously employed German modernist photographic aesthetics to both critique and uphold public fictions of race in the decade leading up to the advent of apartheid. In considering these women's work, the text sheds light on how issues of race, class, and gender inflected Fischer's experience of exile and, in turn, how she mobilized her lens in her new colonial context as a young pariah among parvenus [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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After the end of apartheid in 1990 and the new constitution of 1994, the genre of the contemporary South African novel is experiencing a heyday. One reason for this is that, with the end of censorship, the authors can go about unrestraint to take a critical look at the traumatized country and the state of a nation that shows a great need to come to terms with its past. In this context, trauma and narration prove to be a fertile combination, an observation that stands in marked contrast to the deconstructionist view of trauma as 'unclaimed' experience and the inability to speak about it. Michiel Heyns' Lost Ground (2011) and Marlene van Niekerk's The Way of the Women (2008) are prime examples of the contemporary South African trauma novel. As crime fiction, Lost Ground not only tells a thrilling story but is also deeply involved in South African politics. The novelist Heyns plays with postmodernist structures, but the real strength of the novel lies in its realistic milieu description and the analysis of the protagonist's traumatic 'entanglements'. The Way of the Women is mainly a farm novel but also shows elements of the historical novel and the marriage novel. It continues the process of the deconstruction of the farm as a former symbol of the Afrikaner's pride and glory. Both novels' meta-fictional self-reflections betray the self-consciousness of their authors who are aware of the symbolization compulsions in a traumatized country. They use narrative as a means of 'working through', coming to terms with trauma, and achieving reconciliation. Both novels' complex narrative structures may be read as symbolic expressions of traumatic 'entanglements' that lie at the heart of the South African dilemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to explore the theoretical knowledge and its application by the BA CEMS degree graduates at the work place. The degree is in keeping with the South African government's commitment to the maintenance and promotion of African languages and multilingualism as articulated in its Constitution of 1996. The BA CEMS degree aims to develop students into bilingual specialists who can compete effectively for employment in South Africa's multilingual terrain. In this regard, the rationale for the study is to investigate ways through which BA CEMS programmes support its graduates through the curriculum as well as prepare them for the workplace. We strongly believe that such a degree can help to foster good citizenry at the work place in terms of the ability to use both the hegemonic language (English) on the one hand and indigenous African Language on the other. Methodologically, we interviewed graduates from the programme at their work places to better understand their practices/experiences on multilingualism and how they are coping with diversity. The main findings indicate that their dealings with diversity were based on trial and error rather than on the theoretical knowledge from their BA CEMS programme. The article makes a case for interrogating the curriculum so that the efficacy and the efficiency of the programme may be improved to provide graduates with the most relevant skills to handle diversity at the work place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides the history of South Africa with its governmental implications. It highlights the estimate of South Africa's total population around million people, and Indigenous groups who make up approximately one percent of figure; also focuses on deconstructing the racial categories of the Apartheid system.

Winnie and Nelson Mandela had one of the most iconic political marriages in history. For most commentators, this was a one-sided marriage in which Nelson was by far the more significant actor and Winnie was the burden he had to bear. However, it is not possible to conceive of the public persona of Nelson Mandela after his imprisonment on Robben Island without also understanding Winnie's role, not merely as upholder of the family name but also in terms of the ways in which she built an independent career out of her position as Nelson's wife. This article reads the marriage at two levels. First, it argues that there were two actors in the marriage, both central to its narrations and both with political ideas and ambitions. Winnie Mandela was building a genealogy of heroic nationalism for herself from at least the 1960s, in parallel with that of her husband, and her rise to political status was both dependent on the marriage and at odds with its demands. Understanding Winnie as an actor, treating her own biography as seriously as that of Nelson, changes the way in which the marriage is read politically. Second, it draws on the small archive of letters between the spouses that are publicly available to show the ways in which Nelson's benevolent, patriarchal (albeit loving and compassionate) approach to his wife contrasted with her increasing independence and political power. The separation caused by almost three decades of imprisonment had done more than impose a physical and emotional absence. Their politics, too, had taken extremely divergent paths in which she became a representative of radical politics while he was positioned as reconciliatory visionary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay probes the value of Nelson Rohihlahla Mandela's career and life's work as an ongoing object lesson or theory-in-practice. Using two case studies – of the 2019 'Official Exhibition' and of a poem by Koleka Putuma referencing Mandela – the essay asks how South Africa's first democratic president's way of doing politics and his facility of interacting even-handedly with political enemies and friends lay down models for the country in the future. In particular, what might Mandela's story continue to teach us about social justice, empathy and political transformation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-apartheid democratic South Africa experienced the pitfalls of one-party dominance when the country's fifth democratically elected parliament (2014–2019) faced growing corruption, state capture, undermining of parliamentary oversight and the abuse of political power and state institutions. These events threatened the country's constitutional democracy and its principles of an accountable government as the ruling party undermined parliamentary oversight structures through majoritarianism to evade accountability by the Legislature and Executive. This led to the growing coexistence and cooperation of opposition parties (despite their ideological differences) in parliamentary oversight as a means of challenging the African National Congress' (ANC) one-party dominance. This process resulted in the establishment of formal and informal coalitions for governing key cities such as Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay. Against this backdrop, and building on a case study of these three metropolitan municipalities, this paper analyses the coexistence of the opposition parties in parliamentary oversight and in the governance of key cities as a means of challenging the ANC's one-party dominance. The analysis delineates the prospects and challenges of using coexistence as a strategy for challenging the ANC's one party-dominance post the 2019 general election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political Science research on the President's role in South African politics has been limited and therefore poses a research challenge. In this article, the President's election by the National Assembly is linked to a number of factors. The legislative electoral system has a direct impact on it; also, South Africa's government is a hybrid, presidential/parliamentary system; and political party electoral procedures are followed to elect party leaders. The presidential electoral system has several implications for legislative-executive relations, including presidential accountability, approval of the Presidency's budget by Parliament, and Parliament's power to remove the President from office. Special attention is paid to the 2019 party campaigns, to the extent of their co-existence with presidential campaigns, and to the parliamentary electoral procedure. Conclusions identify the implications of the fact that the President's election is primarily determined by the power balance between the main political parties. Especially since 2007, it is also determined by internal party dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines and analyses Biko's contribution to the liberation struggle in South Africa from the perspective of politics and religion. Through his leading participation in Black Consciousness Movement and Black Theology Project, Biko has not only influenced the direction of the liberation agenda, but he has also left a legacy that if the liberated and democratic South Africa were to follow, this country would be a much better place for all to live in. In fact, the continent as a whole through its endeavours in the African Union underpinned by the African Renaissance philosophy would go a long way in forging unity among the continent's nation states. Biko's legacy covers among other things identity, human dignity, education, research, health and job creation. This article will have far reaching implications for the relations between the democratic state and the church in South Africa, more so that there has been such a lack of the church's prophecy for the past 25 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban interventions, such as state-led housing provision in India and South Africa, establish new legal landscapes for urban residents (formerly slum/informal dwellers), who become home owners, legal occupiers of spaces, ratespayers and visible citizens although not in ways that are necessarily contingent. These material-legal processes are also acutely gendered underscoring wider calls for a feminist approach to legal geographies. Informed by a comparative empirically driven study, this paper explores how in both contexts, urban interventions work to enhance gender equality through improving women's material shelter in the city, and introduce tenure security, often prioritising very poor women. Yet, their implementation is riddled with slippages as well as operating within a broader poverty–patriarchy nexus. This means that these legally framed benefits have occurred alongside complex and perverse outcomes including unemployment, gendered tensions and acute loss of privacy for some. Housing interventions produce uneven legal geographies, with persisting gendered inequalities and poverty distorting residents' abilities to benefit from material-legal interventions aimed at improving their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to explore the multiple layers of representation which occur in the South Africa Pavilion at the Art Biennale in Venice in order to understand how they constitute and affect the state's political imaginary. By analysing three artworks (David Koloane's The Journey, Sue Williamson's For thirty years next to his heart, and Zanele Muholi's Faces and Phases) which were exhibited in the 2013 Pavilion, two key arguments emerge: 1) in this context artistic representation can be understood as a form of political representation; and, 2) these artists are simultaneously state and citizenry representatives. A tension emerges between the political imaginary desired by the South African state and the political imaginary enacted by its representatives. The article draws on seven months of participant observation fieldwork at the Biennale, which involved 76 interviews with people associated with the South Africa Pavilion, including government representatives, exhibition organisers, artists, and visitors. Part I explores the concept of representation in order to establish the two philosophical trajectories (political and artistic) with which this article engages - with particular reference to Michael Saward's framework of the representative claim. Part II explores the multiple representative claims which the three artists and their artworks enact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, organizations representing key voting constituencies--youth and the economically marginalized--are becoming major forces of opposition to the ANC-led government while explicitly framing their activities as non-political. They prefer instead to talk in terms of "rights" and "activism." Drawing from fieldwork and online publications of three opposition organizations--#RhodesMustFall, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and Afriforum-- this article argues that the abandonment of "politics" is more than rhetorical positioning. By framing their actions as non-political, these groups engage in a deep-seated critique of the possibilities presented by democratic politics and a lack of perceived efficacy or legitimacy of institutionalized contestation. Perhaps more importantly, it means that opposition politics are occurring in an environment without institutional incentives for cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that democratic deepening is shaped by shifting civil society-state relations that can only be understood by disaggregating democratic deepening into its component parts of participation, representation, and stateness. This frame is used to explore the divergent democratic trajectories of Brazil, India, and South Africa. Through the examples of local government transformation and social movement mobilization, I argue that a "project" civil society in Brazil has deepened democracy and transformed the state. In contrast, in South Africa and India civil society is increasingly being subordinated to political society. In South Africa, an active civil society has largely been sidelined as a politically consequential actor (containerization) and in India much of civil society has been fragmented and instrumentalized (involution). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa has a politically and emotionally charged debate on unresolved race-based imbalances in patterns of land ownership and access to socio-economic opportunities. The main pillars of South Africa's post-apartheid efforts to address these inherent inequalities have come to be underpinned by invocation of a predominantly neoliberal yet narrow and inward-looking approach that overlooks the discourse of previously marginalised black people. This reified and reductionist view on social transformation is evident in the framing of Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE), land reform programme and associated elements of the transformation agenda. This article seeks to uncover those neoliberal imperatives of South Africa's social transformation agenda and how they do not sit well within the aspirations and desires of the wider South African population. The specific focus is on what the linguistic and discursive elements of land reform and B-BBEE policies hide and reveal about social transformation. I conclude by suggesting that the discourse and praxis of social transformation in South Africa needs to be conducted in a language that takes into account marginalised voices that speak from non-institutional spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the launching of the national household vaccination coverage survey by the South African National Department of Health (SANDoH). Topics include the reports from the Expanded Programme on Immunisation of South Africa (EPI-SA), fully immunised under one year old coverage target and research projects for the vaccination coverage surveys.

The article discusses the processes and structure of the scientific assessment on livestock predation in South Africa (PredSA). Topics include the best practices for scientific assessment, role of Process Custodianship Group (PCG) and the key messages of the scientific assessment to the policymakers.

This article is about representations of poverty and governmental frameworks for addressing poverty in postapartheid South Africa. It is, therefore, also about "the poor," about their place in society and the ways they intervene in the making of the present. The article returns to a South African metaphor—Thabo Mbeki's "two economies" thesis—focused on the problem of poverty, its causes, and the governmental approach to combating it. This discussion shows how the work of Partha Chatterjee helps us understand the governmental problems Mbeki's representations reframe and their relationship to forms of contemporary capitalism and governmentality, as well as the emerging practices through which the poor "invade" the political and impact the frameworks targeting them. But the essay also suggests that, in following these threads, we need to push beyond Chatterjee's conceptual framework, with implications for how we think about the state, its relationship to capitalist development, and the political practices of subaltern classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Republic of South Africa has continuously experienced challenges of poor governance from all spheres of government, which has resulted in the poor delivery of essential public services. Government is considered as the main actor as far as governance and promoting citizens' rights. The poor performance of the public sector, on national, provincial and local levels, has always been a cause for concern in South Africa and one which has cast the issues of governance in South Africa in a poor light. This article advocates a new public management approach that aims at transforming public sector operations, to be business-like and efficient. It reveals that the lack of appropriate systems and mechanisms that promote and enforce effective governance continues to impact development negatively. Poor governance has resulted in wasted public resources, weak institutions, decreasing investment and growth and it has entrenched corruption. The article shows that corruption is a consequence of the failure of accountability in the governance system. Effective governance and good quality of public administration ultimately results in economic growth and development that benefits all citizens. Effective governance should always think and act in the interest of the public by responding to the needs of the people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the dynamics of land ownership under land-reform policy, indigeneity and nature management under neoliberal capitalism in Southern Africa. Topics discussed include the plans of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to accelerate land reform policy for the benefits of the Black Africans, the role of land and nature in the life of Indigenous peoples, and the growth of neoliberal capitalism throughout the region and its impact on the issue of equality among these tribes.

The national beef cattle improvement scheme was introduced by the South African government with the objective of improving the biological and ecological efficiency of beef production through genetic improvement and enhanced cattle management practices. This has been achieved through various structural and technological changes targeted at increasing beef production and promoting sustainable production systems. Despite the technical success of the programme, and the substantial investment made into it, there is limited information on the returns to investment made in the beef improvement scheme in South Africa. Using time series data from 1970-2014, the study uses an econometric approach modelled through the Almon Polynomial Distribution to estimate the lead period and rate of return from investment in beef cattle improvement research. The lag effect and absence of a lead-time suggest that research impacts beef production in the current year of investment. A marginal rate of return of 32 per cent implies that South Africa received R32 for every rand invested towards the scheme. This suggests that the research investment is worthwhile and motivates for continuation of the beef cattle improvement research given significant and positive economic efficiency measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An impressive portfolio of case-study research has now demonstrated how and through what means the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries have sought higher social status. However, this field of research lacks systematic means of evaluating this status-seeking. This article fills this lacuna by developing a mixed-methods framework enabling scholars to zoom in and compare individual states' relative status performance. Using diplomatic representation as a proxy for status recognition and comparing it to a country's status resources (wealth), the framework indicates how successfully countries have generated recognition from the international society. The findings show that China's economic ascent has been matched by increased recognition, and that South Africa enjoyed an almost immediate 'status bounce' following apartheid, turning it from a pariah to a significant overperformer. Russia should be understood as an 'overperforming status-dissatisfied power' while India's status performance has been around 'par' for a country of its economic resources. Lastly, Brazil underperforms more than any of the other BRICS, especially since its democratic transition. The findings highlight considerable variance in the type and duration of gaps between status resource and recognition and suggests that rather than treating these as 'inconsistencies' awaiting correction, they can and should be accounted for by case study analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current debates on citizenship and democracy highlight the salience of cooperative relations between government and its citizens. Scholars observe that governments and its institutions function better where there is cooperation and trust. However, evidence suggests that political interest is waning and trust in government, dwindling. More especially, concerns about the effects of youth disengaging from political life are increasing. This phenomenon is more worrying in young democracies, where democratic traditions and principles are still evolving. This study examines the effect of family politicisation on youth trust in government. This quantitative study used a cross-sectional correlational research design. A two-level approach was adopted. At the first level we examined the prevalence of political discussions in the home and the trust attitudes of the family (as indicators of family politicisation) and youth towards government. At a second level we conducted a regression analysis to determine relationships between parent-adolescent communication and youth trust in government; family trust in government and youth trust in government; and finally, parent-adolescent communication and family trust on youth trust in government. The results suggest that a combination of parent- adolescent communication and family trust in government in a model, significantly positively predicts youth trust in government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]