Introducing PRISM

I have been putting out a new monthly special publication through the Cape Independent for R50 a month. The news site is still free.

I have been posting here rather infrequently recently, predominantly because I have been busy focusing on the Cape Independent.

The magazine itself is beginning to have influence, and recent articles exposing local corruption have attracted sustained responses form local administrations, a good indication that it is now regarded as influential, at least regarding municipal issues.

We also keep track of what the Solidariteit movement (including AfriForum) are up to, as well as other civic organisations opposing our present regime.

But to monetise this website, we thought it would be counterproductive to put up a paywall on material we want to promote to hold the local administrations accountable.

So, I came up with a special monthly publication which is less Cape-focused, and more national in scope. PRISM is something which follows my general approach of supporting all centrifugal forces in the political system, but is more in-depth, explaining recent developments in both extraparliamentary opposition, and in the regime itself.

You can get access to PRISM at this link. You will need to create an account to read the magazine, and the monthly subscription fee is just R50. Should we manage to get enough subscriptions, we will be looking at a print edition too - the magazine runs to roughly 70 pages, so it is comparable in size to The Economist.

The structure of the issues is fairly simple - the first three pages is a quick rundown of significant news items from the past month, and then after the bulk of the articles, a short appendix with some nice graphs and charts, highlighting data that has good explanatory power, and may be novel or overlooked.

Our first issue was focused on covering all the main vectors of opposition to the South African government - Cape Independence, Afrikaner nationalism, Zulu nationalism, and private rights organisations like Sakeliga and Paratus.

This edition has focused on the economic elite and their cronyist synergy with the ANC’s regime. BEE has created cadre deployment in the private sector so deep, that even now, when the private sector is seizing unprecedented control over the political process, racialist policies have only gotten more stringent, and the private sector has been eager to facilitate the process.

The main market players have sorted themselves into narrow cartels, shutting out SMEs and new entrants from the policy process, and use a variety of mechanisms to drive up the cost of doing business, including certain pernicious provisions of the Labour Relations Act.

We cover AgriSA’s sinister collusion with the state and banking sector against farmers, the metalworking sector’s cartel-like structure and how organised labour keeps it afloat, and we discuss the radical and unprecedented capture of state processes by B4SA and the Resource management Fund under leadership of Rothschild &Co’s Martin Kingston.

Next month’s publication will focus on history, in honour of the anniversary of the Cape Purchase in 1672, a woefully overlooked event in the history of the Cape which created the basis for the society that developed at the Cape by establishing land-sharing terms and a common security pact between the VOC and the Goringhaicona.

We will be looking at a variety of historical events and trends that impact the prevailing narratives informing our present, particularly the overlooked elements which complicate the simplistic black-and-white narrative we are generally exposed to.

Submissions are welcome, just email us at editor@thecapeindependent.com

Unfortunately this is still a bit of a shoestring operation, so we can’t afford to pay you for your submissions just yet, but all contributors will get free access to the publication.