Green energy requires the use of scarce resources, just as fossil fuel energy does. We must rapidly come to terms with this. This article gives us an example. By 2050 we may not only have reached peak silver; we may have consumed most of the world’s reserves. Silver...
This article has been jointly published with Daily Maverick. Let us not forget that the public sector strikers are workers who have come off a year of zero increase. They have effectively taken a wage cut two years in a row, a loss of nearly 10% of their buying power....
Bruce Baigrie interviewed the author, Matt Huber Amandla!: Your recent book is titled Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. Can you explain what you mean by that? Why is class so important here? MATT HUBER: The title is very explicitly...
Amandla! spoke with Anele Selekwa Amandla!: Could you give us a little bit of the history of Soundz of the South (SOS), like when you started, why you started, where you are from as a collective? Anele Selekwa: We started in 2008 as a loose collective of activists,...
LULA HAS RETURNED TO THE presidency of Brazil and - with his victory - to the spotlight of the global media. This is news longed for by Brazilians with a saudade (thirst) for democracy. For those who live in other Latin American countries it represents the opening of...
SOUTH AFRICA’S ENERGY CRISIS IS set to proceed as usual, with Eskom’s recent announcement of another round of high-intensity stage four load shedding due to the exhaustion of its diesel budget. At the same time, the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference...
ALL DISCUSSIONS ABOUT WATER scarcity in South Africa begin by telling us that the county is water scarce. It’s the 39th driest country in the world and, due to el niños and el niñas, droughts and floods have become distinctive features of the climate. They have become...
WE NEED TO DEVELOP a perspective and strategy for financing a public pathway to an energy transition; it must be capable of addressing energy poverty and climate protection. The current neoliberal approach to climate finance is based on loans, whether at...
EASTERN CAPE HAS FACED DRASTIC droughts since 2005 due to the global crisis of climate change, with dams reaching all-time lows. This of course has impacted the quality and cleanliness of drinking water, which requires our municipalities to make a concentrated effort...
TEN YEARS AGO, IN JUNE 2012, AT the Rio+20 global climate talks in Rio de Janeiro, trade unions attending the meeting raised the critical need for an alternative narrative to the “green growth” model of addressing climate change. Those discussions were the beginning...
ON 31ST OCTOBER 2021, A WEEK before COP27 in Egypt, South Africa’s oldest standing coalf ired power station, Komati, was closed. Commissioned in the early 1960s, Komati, rated at 1GW, formed part of the extensive network of coal-fired power stations which account for...
AT THE LEVEL OF THE UN, THE North long ago acknowledged its ecological debt to the South, and its responsibility to channel finance towards the South to help developing countries both reduce their emissions and adapt to a warming world. The North has nevertheless...
JUST WEEKS BEFORE THE BEGINNING of COP27, Inger Anderson, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, made a staggering assessment of the global response to the climate crisis: “We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over....
ONE OF THE KEY RESOLUTIONS OF Numsa’s 2013 special congress was to bring into existence a United Front to act as a popular, working class-based alternative to the ANC. By 2016 it had run its course. In 2018, following a successful one-day strike, Saftu initiated the...
The latest edition of Amandla is out! Issue 85/86 of Amandla magazine has a special feature on the Just Transition. Highlights of some of the articles: According to Andile Zulu, AIDC Energy Democracy Officer, South Africa’s climate finance deals, and its current...
DURING THE WINTER OF 2010-2011, the Tunisian people rekindled a flame that was thought to have been extinguished forever - that of a popular revolution against corrupt and dictatorial regimes. The shock wave spread in the region (Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Syria, Yemen,...
This is an edited version of an article first published in Daily Maverick. THE 27TH MEETING OF THE UN’S Conference of the Parties – otherwise known as COP – is now only months away. So it is timely to ask: who benefits from these gatherings of world leaders who...
The elections 2022, and the recent history of Brazil, are an example of how social constructions such as political parties are able to survive and succeed over long periods of history. They can do this if they are rooted in the social, economic and political structure...
ON 5TH SEPTEMBER 2022, THE Supreme Court of Kenya upheld President William Ruto’s victory in the recently concluded general election that was held on 9th August. Ruto’s main competitor, Raila Odinga, stood as the candidate of the Azimio La Umoja One Kenya Coalition....
IT WAS AUGUST 18TH, SIX DAYS before the election. Incumbent President João Lourenço was delivering a speech to a rather apathetic public in Benguela province, southwestern Angola. In it he described the country’s unaligned civil society as “lumpens and thieves”. Such...
Brazilian politics have been polarized between Lula and Bolsonaro. The urgency to defeat the latter has been invoked to close off critical thinking. However, Bolsonaro embodies social forces that will not go away with an electoral defeat, while an eventual Lula...
THE RECENT CORONATION OF Zulu King Misuzulu kaZwelithini was witnessed by people well beyond South Africa’s borders and widely welcomed by commentators. However, few reflected on what it might mean for rural residents living on land held under the Ingonyama...
HOW DID THE END OF APARTHEID affect South Africa’s white workers? An excellent question. And the answer can go a long way towards explaining some of the more virulent politics evident today. But the question is rarely asked because – so the assumption goes – there are...
AS WE EMERGE FROM THE pandemic, the impact of Covid-19 has exacerbated the converging social, economic, and ecological crises, which emerge from the systemic and colonial legacy of extractivist patriarchal capitalism. These crises include climate, ecological and...