It says a lot about Pravin Gordhan that hardly anybody rejected his Budget Speech outright. It turned out, unsurprisingly, to be a delicate balancing act that other political parties only seek to tweak. It’s a great testament to the finance minister’s vision. While the ANC often gets deployments horribly wrong, this is not one of them. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

The tolls are coming! Add an "r" and a plot line about a bridge, and you have a story to frighten most three-year-olds. But toll roads frighten Gautengers like nothing else. There has been no other socially cohesive issue in recent years like this one. Everyone, except government, is united against it. Cosatu, business big and small, various political formations, the Gauteng ANC, the DA, most economists... we could go on. It's probably for this reason that finance minister Pravin Gordhan was the man Cabinet decided should go and make this announcement. He has, as they say in the trade, gravitas. It's another way of saying he's trusted. Still, that doesn't mean we like his message. By STEPHEN GROOTES.

Finance minister Pravin Gordhan’s Budget speech on Wednesday was peppered with appeals to all South Africans to contribute to the economy amid warnings that government’s ability to spend its way to general prosperity are increasingly limited. By PAUL BERKOWITZ.

LINDIWE: The trouble with the ANC is that they have no dreamers in their ranks. Sometimes I close my eyes and dream of a better South Africa, a South Africa where ...
'The hills are alive with the sound of music
With songs they have sung for a thousand years
The hills fill my heart with the sound of music
My heart wants to sing every song it hears'

South Africa is a place of contestation. We contest our presents, our pasts, our futures, our identities, our views, our opinions, sometimes even our very right to exist. And there are dark times when we wonder whether even this fair land should exist. Of all the things that we contest, it's our history that is the most contentious. By STEPHEN GROOTES.

They might seem unlikely bedfellows but AfriForum Youth joined the Khoisan community on Tuesday in a protest over the indigenous group’s land rights. With both minority groups feeling they have no representation in the current government, they might have more in common than you think. By GREG NICOLSON.

Slash useless government departments. Put faith in the free market, not state capitalism. Drop the NHI, it’ll never work. The Democratic Alliance’s alternative budget is a big departure from what finance minister Pravin Gordhan will deliver. It may be a smaller party, but the DA’s idea of how the national budget should be offers up an interesting counterfoil to the ANC’s own plans. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

Fresh from having flexed its anti-corruption muscles in Cassel Mathale’s Limpopo, Cosatu has turned its attention to the Free State. The trade union federation, through its affiliate the South African Municipal Workers’ Union, fired a shot across the bow of Premier Ace Magashule’s troubled ship on Monday. Magashule is sure to heed it. By OSIAME MOLEFE.

Our fearless leader has a look at the good book, Helen Zille introduces her new baby and hurray, it’s Bob’s birthday!

Ever since taking over from Barbara Hogan, public enterprises minister Malusi Gigaba has worked to stamp the ANC's transformation mandate deep into state-owned enterprises. On Monday, he announced another project aimed at fulfilling the government's black economic empowerment mandate: a black-owned firm has been appointed to be the external auditors of Transnet. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

Gauteng is supposed to set an example to the other provinces. It's the economic powerhouse of southern Africa, never mind the country. It's where people from the other provinces come to work. It's supposed to, you know, work. So it wasn't setting a very good example when its premier, Nomvula Mokonyane, stood up exactly one hour and 54 minutes late to start her first big speech of the year. By STEPHEN GROOTES.

Monday, 20 February, is officially the President’s Day holiday in America – celebrating George Washington’s birthday on 22 February as well as recognising Abraham Lincoln’s birthday 10 days earlier. The day seems to be a particularly appropriate one, therefore, to evaluate where the Republicans are in the picking of their candidate, and what strategy Barack Obama and his campaign advisors are developing to win again. By J BROOKS SPECTOR.

On Sunday, the Israeli High Court in Jerusalem announced it would hear Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan’s case against his “administrative detention” on Thursday. If he survives until Thursday. By KHADIJA PATEL

The week that was(n't) in beloved South Africa. Seriously. By JOHN VLISMAS & DUNCAN HARLING.

With Iran less than a year away from full nuclear capability, and the Ahmadinejad regime unbowed by the West’s strategy of ever-harsher sanctions, the window for avoiding a Middle Eastern catastrophe is closing. While British and US diplomats scrambled to avert the crisis on the weekend, Israel’s Benyamin Netanyahu watched his self-determined fate as “the new Winston Churchill” unfold before his eyes. How worried should we be? By KEVIN BLOOM.

Protestors marched to the high court in Johannesburg on Friday demanding the rights of women be respected and for the end of harassment at taxi ranks. GREG NICOLSON joined the crowds of men watching the miniskirt march and wondered about their role in preventing abuse.

Our politics is a strange land. What do our Constitutional Court and the ANC's national disciplinary committee and its national disciplinary committee of appeal have in common? Normally, not a lot. But think a little harder and, actually, they're in almost exactly the same position. By STEPHEN GROOTES.

The financial mess that is Limpopo didn’t happen overnight. People have been suffering service delivery failures in the province for years. The Communist Party’s Gilbert Kganyago advises that more haste is less speed. The only way to root out the rot forever, he says, is a careful and considered approach which will take time. By MANDY DE WAAL.

It’s fight night: Zuma the Jedi Master vs. the Constitution; Racism vs. Misogyny, Pink vs. Blue, and their Word vs. Mine. Plus, don't miss our exciting new gameshow 'Race to the Bottom'!

Civic organisations scored a major legal victory against the department of home affairs when a Port Elizabeth judge ruled that a refugee reception office, illegally closed by government late last year, be reopened and restored to full functionality immediately. The verdict’s message to government is unambiguous. By MANDY DE WAAL.

The Bank, as the wonks call it with exaggerated simplicity, is losing headman Robert Zoellick in July. It's up to US President Barack Obama to replace him, and he'll have hell to pay from Santo-Romney should he pick a non-US citizen. Bill Clinton fits the, um, bill. By RICHARD POPLAK.

The ANC Youth League resolved at its lekgotla not to subject itself to the discipline of the ANC. Which is strange, because that's exactly what its leaders have done by cooperating with the disciplinary committees that they were summoned to appear before. Fighting words though they may be, this latest statement is, more than anything, a not at all disguised middle finger waved at Jacob Zuma and Gwede Mantashe. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

Maybe it’s the “fire island” of the Sioux, maybe it’s the corn, but whatever draws China’s heir-apparent to Muscatine, Iowa, it holds special significance in building new bridges between the US and China. J BROOKS SPECTOR probes beneath the bucolic country ambience.

Funtimes with Obama and his China, Boers blitz their own book, Gaga wears white in a tribute to Whitney, and you'll remember WaterGate, now be prepared for Juju's MitiGate.

There are one or two interesting results from Wednesday’s by-elections. The DA won a ward from the ANC in Polokwane and came extremely close to winning another. The margins of its success and failure are surprising. PAUL BERKOWITZ unpacks the results.

We've become used to the cynical manipulation of our institutions. Yes. That is a political statement, but we hold it to be true. Nowhere have the stakes been as high, and the apparent manipulation quite so shocking as in the strange case of the Zuma corruption charges. The whole thing was appalling then. It's still appalling now. By STEPHEN GROOTES.

A cunning gamble by Obama could see him in a win-win position – if nothing in the next eight months goes wrong. By J BROOKS SPECTOR.

Julius tries not to panic, Zille rides high and the Alaskan betcha's back!

For much of the past year, the Daily Maverick has focused on the presumptive Republican Party frontrunner for that party’s nomination, Mitt Romney, even as we’ve looked at those who have faltered such as Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman and Herman Cain. But now, of course, the field has narrowed to four – Romney, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. Santorum: who is this latest challenger? By J BROOKS SPECTOR.

The rot in the province ruled by Cassel Mathale has been fermenting for years, but only when Limpopo was technically bankrupt did the government step in to do something about the financial fiasco. In Limpopo’s streets, schools and hospitals people continue to pay the price of a province engineered for personal profit. By MANDY DE WAAL.