“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.

The furore over the rather trivial matter of a pay-TV adult offering reminds us that old-fashioned patriarchal moralists didn't die with the National Party. Now Cosatu is leading the charge.

Folks, we’re in denial about how fat we are, say the experts. But I think the real story may be a little more nuanced than a straightforward denial and has more to do with our nation’s particular views on body image and stigma.

We know of no other species in the Universe with the capacity to hold diametrically opposite views in fragile harmony than ourselves. At times it appears almost as if it’s a precondition of being “human” to hold the Yin and Yang of life in balance. So it is with the perennially explosive issue of abortion.

I admit, I stole that headline from a news article about a Swedish professor of delusional idiocy who spoke in Cape Town this weekend. It seemed too outrageous to pass up. It is not the most alarming claim the prof made, but it is worthy of study.

Former president Thabo Mbeki is not making a political comeback. The evidence to support such claims just does not exist. But even if one applies one’s mind to the idea, it doesn’t wash. The sad fact is that there is going to be more – not less – of these speculations in a year when the African National Congress, the Democratic Alliance, Cosatu and the South African Communist Party all hold elections for leaders.

South Africa post-democracy bears an uncanny resemblance to many scenarios in post-apocalyptic fiction. Massive existential shake-up? Check, apartheid’s spectacular collapse. Survivors rebuilding and trying to find ways of living in a much-changed world? Check. A cast of would-be heroes, actual heroes, anti-heroes and villains? Check, check, check and check. So it might not be unreasonable to think these fictional accounts of the future might cast some much-needed perspective on where we are. 

The ANC’s centenary celebrations were marked by another instance of an uncomfortable collision of cultural norms in the ritual slaughter of a bull. But is cultural habit a sufficient justification for such rituals?

The first few days of 2012 have seen much-needed conversations about race and the nature of racism. Unfortunately, these debates have also been marred by a particular defensiveness and a failed attempt to understand, never mind empathise with, the experiences of racism put forward by non-white South Africans.

A new bill before Parliament will effectively outlaw weather information that is not provided by the state-owned SA Weather Service. Warn someone that a storm is brewing, and you could go to jail for many years, or pay millions in fines. Has the government gone mad?

South Africa’s history of race relations can be puzzling for a foreigner. Dazed and confused, I spent the holidays asking what colour I was, has apartheid been internalised and do you really want me as a roommate?

You’ll be hearing a lot about the ANC’s need to return to its roots. I see a straight line from its intellectual founders to its high-living leaders today.

Helen Zille and Simphiwe Dana are at each others’ throats again. Dana alleges that Cape Town is a “racist city” and demands that the DA clean up the town. But is it really so bad?

Last year’s global accolades were not enough to spare Cape Town an ignominy it has so far been unable to shake off. A trend on Twitter in South Africa, #CapeTownIsRacist annoyed Western Cape Premier Helen Zille and many other (mostly white, I suggest) Cape Town residents. What’s Africa’s “little Europe” got to do to catch a break on this perennial bugbear?