cc Taking inspiration from the late South African anti-apartheid poet–activist Dennis Brutus’s verb-play, Patrick Bond discusses the ‘mubaraking’ currently faced by a number of dictatorships across Africa.

‘The memory of Dennis Brutus will remain everywhere there is struggle against injustice,’ writes Patrick Bond, in a tribute to the late South African poet and freedom fighter, which was presented at the Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy in February.

Painting the country as both a contributor to and potential victim of global climate change, South Africa’s green paper ‘seems to fit within an all too predictable Pretoria formula’, writes Patrick Bond. It's up to civil society to demand genuine solutions.

Last week’s World Social Forum (WSF) in Dakar ended up riotously happy thanks to the eviction of a universally hated Egyptian pharaoh, after near-debilitating logistical disasters at the event’s outset, writes Patrick Bond.

With ‘the current ruling crew’ highly unlikely to respond with ‘genuine post-carbon strategies’, addressing to the huge environmental challenges that South Africa faces will rely on the rise of a mass democratic movement, writes Patrick Bond.

Positive spin about the global climate summit in Cancun is based on reaching international consensus and establishing instruments to manage the crisis using market-based strategies – even though these are ‘failing everywhere they have been tried’. Looking ‘soberly at what was needed to reverse current warming and what was actually delivered, negotiators in Cancun ‘failed by any reasonable measure,’ Patrick Bond writes from Mexico.

‘What may seem to some a progressive and brave government is upon closer examination a tyranny’, which despite ‘rhetoric about land redistribution, is ultimately very hostile to its own society’s poor and working people, women, youth, elderly and ill,’ writes Patrick Bond.

Will Africa end up paying for technologies that commodify life, or demand reparations for ecological damage done by the North, asks Patrick Bond.

In an interview with the Inter Press Service (IPS), Patrick Bond discusses the failings of South Africa’s drive towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the extent to which the country’s government continues to operate against the interests of its poor majority.

The South African Parliament has just released a report that investigates the service delivery protests that have rocked the country over the last decade. But, argues Patrick Bond, the report is ‘utterly inadequate’ and fails to identify the root cause of the protests.

Following a debate with chief World Bank economist Shanta Devarajan, Patrick Bond decries the bank’s ability to ignore its own research and continue to insist that Africa is growing richer per person. The bank’s emphasis on GDP (gross domestic product) entirely ignores the loss to African societies and environments from raw material extraction, while the ‘talk left, walk right’ stance of so many of its officials smacks of schizophrenia, Bond writes.

Now two years in the making, the South African state's War on Poverty (WoP) is ‘one of the most clandestine operations in South African history’, writes Patrick Bond.

As the World Cup draws to its much-anticipated finale, the democratic integrity of South Africa continues to be intoxicated, writes Patrick Bond. Bond recounts a recent anti-xenophobia rally in search of a better society, which was only to result in a run-in with the law. Bond unearths the deliberate distortion of South Africans’ constitution and freedom of speech to accommodate Fifa – soon to move on, leaving little benefits behind for its host society.

Added to the raft of problems soccer-loving cynics have predicted will plague South Africa as a result of the World Cup is the threat of 'another dose of xenophobia' from both state and society, writes Patrick Bond. Allowing immigrants to be blamed for crime and joblessness, says Bond, is a ‘scapegoat’ strategy for the government’s failure to address root causes of the social stress, from mass unemployment and housing shortages, to ‘South Africa’s regional geopolitical interests which create more refugees than prosperity.’

‘No South African threw themselves more passionately into so many global and local battles. But from where did the indomitable energy emerge?’ Patrick Bond pays tribute to troubadour Dennis Brutus, who died at the age of 85 on 26 December 2009, ‘battling cancer, climate change and capitalism.’

Patrick Bond collates excerpts of testimonials about the late Dennis Brutus, ‘a poet whose work will be celebrated forever, and whose wisdom in so many campaigns for social justice will be sorely missed’, from institutions, individuals and the media.

cc Alarmed at the fondness for neoliberal solutions to the global financial crisis among the Nobel Prize Winners Muhammad Yunus and Joseph Stiglitz, Patrick Bond suspects that the two economists are simply aiding rather than challenging the global capitalist system. With Yunus and Stiglitz both set to give talks in Johannesburg this week, Bond fears that civil society's calls for social and environmental justice will continue to remain overlooked.

Following the South African brokerage of a power-sharing deal between Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and Zanu (PF) Patrick Bond explores whether, in the face of myriad threats to the country’s democracy, the wishes of the Zimbabwean people – as expressed in the People’s Charter adopted at a convention in February – could prevail. As South Africa and the African Development Bank join the Bretton Woods Institutions in calls for Tsvangirai to repay Mugabe’s odious debts, and South African firms hover in the wings to buy up the country’s assets for a song, what is at stake says Bond, is who will win the new economic chimurenga (liberation war) being waged in Zimbabwe. This article was presented at seminars in February, prior to the introduction of the Short-Term Emergency Recovery Programme and revised 2009 Budget.

Patrick Bond in this essay argues that while Obama was elected on a platform of change, his cabinet and advisor picks point to a return to domestic Clintonian policy, and an extension of Bush’s foreign policy. Even though Bond acknowledges that “Obama may not run as extreme a militarist regime as Bush/Cheney or as McCain/Palin would have” still, being less militaristic while pursuing a neo-liberal economic agenda does not bode well for the third world.

Drawing on examples such as Thabo Mbeki’s role in damaging HIV/AIDS policies in the early 2000s and a current case in a San Franciso court against Chevron for 1998 murders in the Niger Delta, Patrick Bond argues that a similar process of critical treatment is appropriate for Barack Obama’s new leading economic advisor, Paul Volcker. Citing the opinions of a number of prominent political commentators, Bond reviews Volcker’s disastrous economic policy at the end of the 1970s, highlighting the deleterious effect of high US interest rates on developing countries’ debt repayments and economic development. But with Obama set to ‘accelerate Africa’s integration into the global economy’ under Volcker’s influence, the author argues that it is crucial the new president-elect seek alternative economic viewpoints to dominant neoliberal policy less rooted in brutal US national self-interest.