Focus

This edition of Focus is devoted to exploring some of the issues which confront state and society in South Africa. It self-consciously looks forward to the State of the Nation Address by the President which will be delivered in February 2013. It also seeks to remind readers of Focus of the wider social context in which the drama of South African politics is played out.

“According to the European Commission, the importance of ICT lies less in the technology itself than in its ability to create greater access to information and communication in underserved populations. Many countries around the world have established organisations for the promotion of ICTs, because it is feared that unless less technologically advanced areas have a chance to catch up, the increasing technological advances in developed nations will only serve to exacerbate the already-existing economic gap between technological “have” and “have not” areas.” This is the crux of why the Helen Suzman Foundation has chosen to look at the subject.

This edition of Focus is devoted to exploring some of the challenges, both social and political, which have confronted South African liberalism as it seeks to deepen the notion of liberty in our daily life. Balancing the demands of economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty is, as Keynes so neatly pointed out nearly a century ago, the central political problem.

This edition of Focus reviews the electrification of South Africa, but goes beyond straightforward supply side issues and considers alternative energy sources, sustainability, and the social impact of the energy sector.

This edition of Focus is dedicated to the broad topic of Sustainability, and is immediately concerned with COP 17 or, to give it its full title, the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to be held in Durban in November and December of this year.

This edition of Focus is dedicated to exploring some of the relationships between religious belief and society. In a modern and supposedly secular age, religious belief and practice have a curious and intriguing persistence – the assumption being that religion has no real place in a modern or modernising world: when it occurs, it is, no doubt, a legacy of some sort of archaic sensibility.

This edition of Focus is dedicated to Arts and Culture. The question may well be posed as to why an organisation whose mandate is the promotion of liberal constitutional democracy should be spending time and resources on the Arts. At the Helen Suzman Foundation (HSF), we believe that the development of both human and social capital is central to the tasks of building a society where both individual excellence and community development are valued.

This edition of Focus continues with the theme of ‘Making South Africa Work’, first explored in the previous edition where issues surrounding Human Capital Development were addressed. This edition surveys aspects of regulation and their impact on the economy and society.