The Treasury should be commended on managing to balance the books during the economic downturn. But that’s all they should be commended for. This year’s Budget called for bolder approaches to reducing unemployment and boosting infrastructure spending. Gordhan and his team weren’t up to the task. By PAUL BERKOWITZ.

It is increasingly tough being a young Muslim in South Africa. So much of my religion’s clear views on tolerance of debate and opposing views are misunderstood – often as equally by those inside the camp as outside it.

Let’s take a step back for a minute and imagine a scenario where South Africa approached sex with the mindset the country takes with drinking water – everyone has the right to a clean source, delivered direct to their homes. I don’t think this is a valueless flight of fantasy. It may add some much-needed nuance to a subject that’s otherwise been dealt with brusquely.

In the world almost addicted to labelling or pigeonholing people (as with almost everything else) – mostly by strict and comforting definitions – it should be worrying for “believers” and “non-believers”, theists and atheists that the “Don’t Really Know” is so cluttered and so overwhelming.

Ad hominem attacks, guilt by association, and other rhetorical vilification strategems ought to signal a puerile, unsophisticated, and frankly, losing argument. Why is it so popular – and effective – to stoop to petty insults?

An MTV reality programme documenting a party thrown by two young Capetonians made for nauseating viewing in a country riven by yawning economic inequalities. By REBECCA DAVIS.

There are potent analogies to be drawn from the sensational case of Johann Kotze, dubbed the “monster of Modimolle”, with the unhealed wounds of apartheid and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. These metaphors are thrown into stark relief by the backlash following comments by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Is South Africa open to the lessons of a comparison?

Pieter Mulder and those who share his opinions are an excellent reminder of just how terrible the old country was.

Why is it that people in power will sometimes stubbornly refuse to understand that it is time to leave? Even when they are confronted with overwhelming indications that their tenure is over? Is the business of leadership so intoxicating that an incumbent leader must hold on at all costs?

I sit cross-legged on the floor of the village hall awed by the women I am with. It is in the Rangapur Manchala Mandal, a few hours’ drive from Hyderabad. There are scores of women all in brightly coloured saris, older women whose faces are etched with the hardships of poverty, younger women beginning motherhood. All are intent and focussed.

Cynthia Nixon of Sex and the City fame says she's gay "by choice". But according to some LGBT activists, normally concerned with freedom to express yourself, she's not allowed to be. That’s against the rules.

It won’t be when Julius Malema is turfed out of the ANC. It certainly won’t be because Big Business wills it. No, this will only be over once the ordinary members of the ANC on the ground say it’s over.

The risk of triggering earthquakes is perhaps the most valid line of attack by the anti-fracking lobbies (and the media) against natural gas drilling. Yet it is not exactly overwhelming. Sure, fracking could, in theory, cause mild seismic activity. But, as always, context matters.

I would like to be honest and say I have observed the discussion, the outrage about the decimation of our rhinos with distant interest. For me, as for many, this has been a largely elitist issue, one that has occupied the minds of the rich and mostly white people of this country. I have regarded the issue as one of those designer trendy topics, engaged in by those with too much time and money on their hands and nothing real to occupy them, you know, a discourse for kicks.

The Kentucky Airport Hotel in Harare must be one of the dreariest places in the world to celebrate an earth-shaking event like Nelson Mandela's release. But that's where I was when it happened.

In her rebuttal to an article published while I was in Addis Ababa, Janice Winter told me where “the truth” regarding Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi lies. Having recently returned from that fascinating country, I rebut back.

From Barack Obama to Jacob Zuma, every politician is out there making promises about the millions of jobs they are going to create. Zuma is shortly going to come face to face with his pledge a year ago that 2011 'The Year of the Job' would produce at least 500,000 jobs. The truth is rather that jobs have been lost and unemployment is more serious now than it was before he began working on it.

Our country keenly awaits your direction and decisive leadership. As a South African citizen and an activist of our mass movement, led by the ANC, we all fought tirelessly for the democracy you now lead.

Daily Maverick’s The AU Summit: A rare ring of truth by Kevin Bloom lauds Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi as being unique in speaking “trenchant truth” at an AU gathering in the 49 years since its establishment (initially the OAU). Taking exception to this interpretation, JANICE WINTER exposes where the truth lies.

Take a vast chasm, a tightrope, pea-soup mists and swirling, vicious gusts of wind – then a person steps onto that rope, destination unseen. Such are the ingredients for the kind of 'recipe for disaster' if a country embarks on creating charter upon charter of special privileges for one or more interest groups – no matter how profound the interest.

South Africa wants to adopt 'the Chinese economic model', President Jacob Zuma is expected to announce this week. This would be a very grave mistake. The Chinese miracle is not what it seems. Just like with the American and European debt crises, this will become painfully clear soon enough. But sadly not by Thursday.

The ANC has its work cut out if it wants to prevent the emergence of a successor to Julius Malema. Merely reining in the ANC Youth League won’t do. The party needs to reconnect with its biggest constituency: the poor. It needs to convince them, once more, that the party is on their side.

“They say football's a matter of life and death – but it's more important than that,” Liverpool's Bill Shankly famously quipped long ago. We still don’t know exactly what happened at the Port Said stadium that cost 73 football lovers their lives. Whatever it was, it was not football. “Football can go to hell if this is the situation,” Mohamed Aboutrika, 'the smiling assassin', Al Ahly’s star playmaker said afterward. To hell with football indeed: Aboutrika announced his retirement from football on Thursday evening.

The job of CEO has become very tricky. Now activist shareholders and the increasing demands of the market are reshaping the job of the chairman. A genial hands-off approach is not cutting it any more.

Corruption is public enemy number one, apparently. But I’m not entirely convinced it deserves the title. And even if it did, there are more pernicious goings on, particularly in the public sector that, by focusing solely on corruption, will slip by unnoticed. Maybe Cosatu is aware of this in its elevation of corruption to SA’s most wanted.

It’s sometimes difficult to escape the feeling that we’re living under the tyranny of the perpetually indignant. Taking the time to think things through and developing a measured response to some hot-button issue is a luxury we’re infrequently allowed.

There’s a saying in isiXhosa that I reveal with great circumspection - it might even be frowned upon to do so - but I’ll take my chances. The saying is, “Umlungu mdala”, directly translated as, “the white man is old”, although a more fitting translation would be, “the white man is wise”. It’s a saying old people use and maybe still let out in amazement at the inventions assumed to originate from white people.

The Green Revolution remains one of the most successful drivers of economic development in the 20th  century, enabling food production to keep pace with a doubling of global population from 3-billion in the 1960s to 7-billion in 2011. Increases in staple food crop yields tripled during that period, reducing the percentage of malnourished people from 41% in 1960 to 16%  in 2000 in Asia alone.

A string of high-profile bankruptcies in the US demonstrates that shovelling millions into “green technology” is a waste of taxpayer money. The South African Renewables Initiative is our very own pig trough. It should be scrapped before it has a chance of doing the same harm.

On Wednesday, Donovan Moodley will hear whether he’ll be granted a retrial for the kidnapping and murder of Leigh Matthews. Having spent more than six years in jail, he’ll probably be pretty anxious about the verdict. In the long and proud tradition of offering advice to politicians, we thought we’d spread our wings and dish out a few words of wisdom to a self-confessed murderer. I spent years covering the Leigh Matthews case and could just be the man for the job…

Set aside the fashion of cynicism and be grateful to the organisers of the World Economic Forum in Davos for giving prominence to the African continent. There is a desperate hunger to know all there is about Africa.

So much has been said about the DASO poster there’s little to add, except to congratulate the organisation on an effective campaign and to tease some of its more sincere supporters. By PAUL BERKOWITZ.

Forget all the emotive arguments for and against self-regulation of the media. The numbers alone paint a clear picture: 70% of the top 50 countries in the Reporters Without Borders and Freedom House press-freedom rankings practice self-regulation.

When it was announced that Alan Knott-Craig is to be the next CEO of Cell C, we were all somewhat bemused. Not that the owners of Cell C had made a bad decision. Quite opposite.

It’s easy to forget that arguments in favour of unfettered free speech often come from positions of privilege. Such privilege could be economic, social, intellectual or educational, but whatever its origin, the result can be bewilderment at the thought that anybody could find mere words offensive enough to censure.