Focus 55 Chapters
Issue Nineteen - May 2011 - Making Local Gavernment Work
Francis Antonie, Director of the Helen Suzman Foundation and Chair for the evening, began by noting that as the evening’s roundtable takes place on the eve of the Municipal Elections, questions around the efficiency, effectiveness and the role of local government are up for discussion. He laid the foundation for the discussion by outlining several questions to frame the debate. These included questions around the capacity of local government, funding issues, the appropriateness of the structures of local government for dealing with corruption, and the susceptibility of the administrative structures to pressures from economic and political elites. He ended by posing the question, “Have we not set local government up for failure?”
Focus 62 - August 2011 - Religion & Society
This edition of Focus is dedicated to exploring some of the relationships between religious belief and society. In a modern and supposedly secular age, religious belief and practice have a curious and intriguing persistence – the assumption being that religion has no real place in a modern or modernising world: when it occurs, it is, no doubt, a legacy of some sort of archaic sensibility.
Issue Twenty - July 2011 - Funding The Arts
This particular Roundtable emerged out of ongoing discussions held with the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust (OMT) and with Business and Arts South Africa (BASA). Given the importance of the Arts in uniting, enlightening, and developing a rich and vibrant South African society, the Roundtable discussion explored how funding of the Arts can become more streamlined, co-ordinated and effective in order to enhance the sustainability of the Arts sector.