Author Profile

Gareth van Onselen

Gareth van Onselen

Columnist

Gareth van Onselen studied at Wits University, obtaining a master's degree in sociology before entering the world of politics in 2001. Until 2012, he worked for the Democratic Alliance in various capacities, most of which involved communications and political analysis. He then worked for the Sunday Times as a senior reporter and for the Institute of Race Relations as head of politics before joining market research company Victory Research as its CEO in 2019. He writes a weekly online column for BusinessLIVE, and sometimes for Business Day, something he has been doing since 2010. He is a liberal, a humanist and a published author but, most of all, a political animal with a deep love for ideas, statistics and argument.

More by Gareth van Onselen…

GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The opposition vortex

Amid mistrust and social media grandstanding, opposition parties struggle to find the glue to bind them to form a united front against the ANC

GARETH VAN ONSELEN: What happens if the ANC gets 51% ?

How the ANC has clung to power this long is already a modern miracle. It is the antithesis of everything a democracy is supposed to produce

GARETH VAN ONSELEN: SA voters are the problem

The problem is not that voters don’t have a choice, it is that they refuse to make one

GARETH VAN ONSELEN: SA’s two-bubble problem

The greatest force in SA politics remains ethnic nativism, and no party as yet has managed to penetrate both bubbles

GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The non-politics of Rise Mzansi

Politics is about winning hearts and minds. Rise Mzansi seems exclusively focused on the mind, at the expense of the heart

GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The EFF’s incompatible worlds of democracy and revolution

The party has stopped growing in any meaningful way and its formal brand is now powerfully and negatively associated with anger and violence

GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Accepting the unacceptable

Saying something is ‘unacceptable’ is just the way the ANC feigns a moral compass — from ‘absolutely’ to ‘totally’ to ’utterly’, nothing really changes

GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The great undeclared war

The truth is that SA’s war is too complex a phenomenon for most to properly contemplate

GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The new Afro-pessimism

In Africa, expecting less is how you sanction mediocrity, and the ANC is well aware of this

GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The DA leadership race

Is John Steenhuisen presidential material? That is a hard sell. But then he is in a different league to Jacob Zuma

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