Municipal elections in SA will be key in the year of being local.

Byline: Allister Sparks

At home and abroad Municipal elections in SA will be key in the year of being local THAT silly season is upon us again, when the whole world gives way to an addiction of prediction. Despite the warning of that great American sage, Sam Goldwyn, that & it is foolish to make predictions, especially about the future& we are at it again. With the new year here, everyone is predicting what this start of the second decade of the second millennium is going to bring.

They will all be wrong, of course. Because as that other great sage, Harold Macmillan, once observed, the trouble with politics is that & things happen& Unexpected things, like two airliners flying into the twin towers in Manhattan and turning all finely calculated predictions upside down.

But being something of a traditionalist I guess I must play the game, well knowing the folly of it.

Beginning, as one should, with the global scene within which we have to operate, it seems to me we are already seeing the efforts to rescue the global economy from the worst recession in nearly a …