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London Calling: 26 Years Later, the Good, the Bad and the £7 Pint!

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  There are few things more enlightening than returning to a city you once called home, particularly when that city has spent the better part of three decades being described as either the greatest place on Earth or a civilisation teetering on the brink of collapse. London, apparently, is both. According to the steady stream of news, social media commentary and WhatsApp wisdom that reaches us in South Africa, Britain has become a crime-ridden, immigrant-overrun, economically crippled disaster zone where nobody can afford to live and civilisation is hanging on by its fingernails. Naturally, I was curious; and a little afraid! Having lived in London in 1999 and 2000, and returned several times since, I recently spent two weeks reacquainting myself with the old girl. My last visit was eight years ago, so I was expecting a few changes. What I wasn't expecting was to find a city that, in many respects, looks and feels better than I can ever remember. Although, as I soon disc...
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Making a Plan: Our Greatest Strength or Our Biggest Weakness?

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  There are few phrases more South African than: “Don’t worry, we’ll make a plan.” Car won’t start? We’ll make a plan. Power’s off? Make a plan. Water’s off? Make another plan. Pothole swallowed the left front wheel? Someone knows a guy. It is one of the things I love most about South Africans. We are resourceful, adaptable and almost pathologically unwilling to be defeated by circumstances. Give us a problem and, before most countries have established a commission of inquiry, someone in Boksburg has built a solution out of two extension leads, a pool pump and something he found in the garage. It’s magnificent. But lately I’ve started wondering whether our remarkable ability to make a plan has also become part of the problem. Because if citizens continually find ways around dysfunction, what incentive is there to fix the dysfunction in the first place? The Country of Plan B South Africans don't really have backup plans anymore. We have backup lifestyles . Electricity unreliable? So...
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The University Myth: Are We Preparing Children for University... or for Life?

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  For decades, South African parents have been sold a very simple equation: Good school = Good Matric = Good University = Good Job = Successful Life. It's beautifully neat. It's wonderfully reassuring. And it's becoming increasingly outdated. Because while schools are still obsessing over getting children into university , universities themselves are busy asking a completely different question: "How do we prepare graduates for a world that no longer looks like the one we built our degrees for?" It's a little like training someone to become an expert horse rider... just as the rest of the world invents the motorcar. The University Pedestal Ask almost any parent what they want for their child and somewhere near the top you'll hear: "I just want them to get into a good university." Not... "I want them to become resilient." Or... "I want them to be adaptable." Or... "I want them to be emotionally intelligent." University...
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Exam Fever: How We Turned Children into Tiny Corporate Executives

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  There’s something deeply bizarre about modern exam season. Perfectly rational adults - people who can normally operate motor vehicles and use coffee machines unsupervised - suddenly transform into high-performance academic stockbrokers the moment their child writes a test. The house changes overnight. Whiteboards appear. Timetables emerge. Stress levels rise to DEFCON 1. And somewhere in the distance, a Grade 4 child is quietly wondering why everyone is behaving like they’re preparing for open-heart surgery instead of a simple cycle test. Welcome to exam season: the annual tradition where society collectively forgets that children are, in fact, children. The irony is magnificent. We talk about holistic education, emotional well-being, resilience and “21st-century learning” - and then the moment exams arrive, we throw all of that out the window faster than Eskom throws out a load shedding schedule. Suddenly, the message becomes: Marks matter most. Pressure equals success. Panic...
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What it Means to be South African

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  How to Smile While the WiFi, Power and Government Collapse Simultaneously Being South African is difficult to explain to foreigners. You can try, of course. But somewhere between explaining load-shedding schedules, bakkie culture, hadedas, potholes, traffic-light “entrepreneurs” and why we braai during a thunderstorm, their eyes glaze over and they assume we’re making it up. Which, honestly, sounds fair. Because South Africa is not a normal country. It’s more like a social experiment run by a committee that lost the instruction manual; or a national improv performance where nobody received the script! It’s a place held together with duct tape, optimism and a WhatsApp group. And yet… somehow… we love it here. Deeply. Passionately. Confusingly. We Live in Permanent Improvisation Mode South Africans have developed a survival skill unmatched anywhere on Earth: the ability to adapt instantly to complete nonsense. Power goes out? Generator. Water cuts? JoJo tank. Traffic lights broke...
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Stress Is Becoming the Silent Saboteur of Schooling

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  We talk endlessly about standards, results, pass rates, curriculum coverage and “academic excellence”. What we talk about far less is the thing quietly wrecking all of it: stress . Not the occasional, healthy pressure that sharpens focus. I mean the chronic, grinding, ambient stress that sits in classrooms like bad lighting. The kind that follows teachers home, wakes students at 2am and turns schooling into survival rather than growth. And that matters because anxiety is not just unpleasant. It is anti-learning. Research consistently shows that stress and anxiety can impair working memory, attention, learning and memory retrieval – sadly, the exact mental functions schools rely on most. So, when we build school cultures around relentless pressure, we should not be surprised when children disengage and teachers leave. We designed the conditions ourselves. The South African School Stress Problem South Africa is not dealing with one neat, tidy version of school stress. We have multi...
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