This brief focuses on how the Budget proposals impact on development. The short term outlook for economic growth is relatively poor, so a better framework for development is needed to offset resource constraints of the current economic outlook. The Budget speech announced steps to improve investment, including investment in human capital and infrastructure, contain corruption, and lower the burden of regulation.
A summary of the HSF's legal interventions regarding the Hawks.
The recent unlawful suspension of senior Hawks officials has centered on alleged renditions of Zimbabwean Foreign Nationals and the Reports made by the Independent Police Investigative Directorate to the National Prosecuting Authority. Some confidential documents have leaked into the public domain.
South Africa has been a segmented society for centuries. It still is. For example, marriages across ethnic and religious lines are relatively rare. Ethnic identities were crystallised into a system of racial classification by the apartheid state. This is a context in which identity politics might have had disastrous consequences and it was often predicted that apartheid would end in a general conflagration. Despite substantial political violence in the decade before 1994, this did not happen. For the last century and a half, infectious disease has been the more important killer. Deaths from AIDS in the opening few years of this century – some of which could have been avoided by more rapid roll out of treatment - exceeded all the mortality from war and political violence since 1850.
Globally, the Cold War era has been succeeded by both the salience of market oriented economic development and the growth of identity politics. Understanding the relationship of liberalism and identity politics is a key issue for our time globally and specifically for understanding South African politics.
This morning judgment was handed down in the Pretoria High Court by Prinsloo J following an urgent application brought by the HSF in the wake of the suspension of the National Head of the Directorate of Priority Crimes Investigation ("the National Head") (“Hawks”). The HSF was of the view that this suspension was irregular, and that the Minister of Police (“Minister”) had acted unlawfully.
The HSF has approached the High Court in Pretoria to declare invalid the suspension of the National Head of the Hawks and the appointment of an Acting Head.