Our interaction as citizens of South Africa has often been along party political lines in the past except for the few times that we meet on the sporting fields for a major event, then we unite for a while and forget our differences.

At evening soirees, the rich and powerful delegates at the 23rd World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Cape Town gathered to share canapes. Politicians, like President Jacob Zuma and Nigerian's Goodluck Jonathan, were in great demand.

The stakes are high in the stand-off between the national planning commission (NPC), the department of energy (DoE) and deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe over government's R1trillion nuclear expansion plan.

South Africa is potentially a great country. We felt a glimpse of this when we managed to get through the initial tides of transition in the early 1990s.

The DA, as it prepares for the 2014 elections, has produced a document containing 80 Powerpoint slides that "expose how the ANC and the NP governments are parallel".

It’s more or less a year before South Africa enters the 2014 national and provincial elections and already political parties are in campaign mode and by the looks of it, electoral reform is going to be one of the top items on the agenda.

It was bound to happen, wasn’t it? Trevor Manuel’s comments at a public servants’ summit recently have set off an explosion.

It is often easy to become pessimistic, or even fatalistic, about South Africa. It is also hard to escape the fact that there are, sometimes, valid reasons for such pessimism and fatalism.

Reflecting on the state of human rights seems appropriate 23 years after the trajectory of South Africa’s history was altered in a single speech, and 19 years after our first democratic elections in April 1994.

Bheki Shongwe, chairman of both Evraz Highveld Steel and Flow Communications, and a former MD of Kaizer Chiefs and Metrobus, believes businesses have an obligation to speak up and contribute to the political and economic paths being laid.