Boardroom Talk: Eskom cloaking a reverse triumph for democracy and timely reminder SA’s pals aren’t

By Alec Hogg.Democracy is a National State in which its citizens vote to determine policies, leaders and laws. That's widely appreciated. Not as well known is that this is not a typical circumstance for our species. Instead, dominance by elites and, at best, 'benevolent' dictatorships has been humanity's norm..___STEADY_PAYWALL___.It's worth remembering the roots of democracy stretch back two and a half thousand years to Athens, where it lasted a century, and then the half a millennia of the Roman Republic. Unfortunately, this system of citizen equality died with Julius Caesar and was only resurrected 17 centuries later with the short-lived Corsican Republic (1755-1769)..Bloody uprisings that led to the founding of the United States of America (1776) and the French First Republic (1792) brought democracy back – but certainly not universally. For instance, SA's BRICS partners China and Russia have never embraced it, preferring their autocracies. Given Pretoria's admiration of Xi and Putin, it's worth letting that sink in..Like most rational beings at BizNews, we believe power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Democracy is not perfect. Nothing man-made ever can be. But democracy does provide an effective check on absolute power. Something we saw again yesterday after public outrage reversed a deliberate cloaking of Eskom malfeasance. Constitutional Democracies like SA's are relatively rare and mostly fragile. Worth fighting for..More for you to read:.Premier Winde on why Western Cape outperformance on growth, jobs, security set to continue. Click here. Doomsayers get a lot of the attention, and perma-bulls get the rest. But in the past 11 months, they've all been wrong, stock market Cassandras and Pollyannas are stuck in limbo. Click here. Fallout from the Banking Crisis: What's Ahead? During a recent LinkedIn Live event, a panel of Wharton experts noted that the fallout from Silicon Valley Bank's failure will likely be contained within the commercial real estate sector. Click here..The Democratic Alliance's 'Governance Prospectus' is flourishing. The Western Cape province, the only one of nine run by South Africa's official opposition, is already well established as an economic growth and security outlier. Of the 169 000 net new South African jobs created in 2022, 167 000 were in the Western Cape. Those with the means are 'semigrating' in growing numbers, with a net 129 000 people moving into the province last year. But how sustainable is this oasis of prosperity in a sea of stagnation? Provincial Premier Alan Winde makes a solid case for the Western Cape experiment continuing and being adopted elsewhere, during this in-depth interview with Alec Hogg of BizNews.

Boardroom Talk: Eskom cloaking a reverse triumph for democracy and timely reminder SA’s pals aren’t

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