On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, Trump’s Mount Rushmore address chose fear over celebration, revealing how the nation’s darkest political impulses have often shadowed its greatest ideals, writes Tony Leon.

To draw a parallel between Bell Pottinger and the ordinary, transparent work of helping a lawful business make its case to the government is not just inaccurate – it is a malicious inversion of the truth so complete that it should give every citizen pause, writes Tony Leon.

Tony Leon draws on Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came”, warning that the country’s decaying institutions, political ambivalence, and rising anti-immigrant mob justice are creating a dangerous echo of the scapegoating and silence that enabled atrocities elsewhere.

Bafana’s dismal World Cup opener against Mexico is more than a football story, writes Tony Leon. He argues that it’s a damning metaphor for a nation where accountability is absent, mediocrity is rewarded, and the gap between 1995’s Springbok glory and today’s decline grows ever wider.

From Bismarck to Blair, the art of political triangulation has delivered landslide victories – but as Cyril Ramaphosa’s hollow pivot on immigration shows, co-opting the politics of others is no substitute for the courage to change your own, writes Tony Leon.

From the shock of Wakkerstroom in 1924 to the DA’s razor-thin eight-vote victory in a 98% black township nearly a century later, South Africa’s by-elections have often signalled shifts in the political weather long before the storm arrives, writes Tony Leon.

While South Africa faces xenophobic blowback from its African neighbours, the ANC’s Nomvula Mokonyane spent Africa Day in Moscow – a telling snapshot of a party whose foreign policy is mired in Cold War nostalgia, writes Tony Leon.

While Cyril Ramaphosa traded shame and fury in Parliament over SA’s jobs catastrophe, three of the world’s foremost historians - Francis Fukuyama, Peter Frankopan and Sam Dalrymple - gathered in Franschhoek to offer the kind of honest reckoning our leaders refuse to have with themselves, writes Tony Leon.

Two leaders, two continents, one embattled defiance – Keir Starmer and Cyril Ramaphosa are clinging to power, but while Britain’s crisis is political, South Africa’s cuts far deeper, writes Tony Leon.

On the 30th anniversary of South Africa’s Constitution, a UCT lecture reflecting on the country’s dwindling Jewish minority offers a telling measure of whether the constitutional promise of minority rights – made in Parliament on 8 May 1996 – is being honoured for all South Africans, writes Tony Leon.