Max du Preez

What do you call a socialist politician who travels in a car worth R800 000 with his R124 000 Louis Vuitton luggage, while wearing red overalls to signify solidarity with the poorest in society? A charlatan, I would say. It is a French word, originally meaning "a seller of (dodgy) medicines who might advertise his presence with music and an outdoor stage show". An entirely appropriate description of the EFF's deputy leader, Floyd Shivambu, then.

President Cyril Ramaphosa may as well be honest with us: there are indeed ways of pulling South Africa out of the quicksand, but the internal dynamics of the ANC make that impossible. What we see playing out in front of our eyes is yet another example of democracy's biggest flaw: short-termism – the tendency to be more concerned with the results of the next election than with the best interests of the country in the medium and long term.

If you're a South African with the surname Retief and you watched television scenes of the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia last week, chances are that you looked at the faces of some of your distant relatives. This is true of many South Africans, many of them slightly darker of skin than the average Retief. There are strong blood ties between South Africans and the people of the Indonesian islands. But first the story of the Retiefs.