answered: Response Paper to Financial Times podcast, “Whatever happene

  

Response Paper to Financial Times podcast, “Whatever happened to Mandela’s dream for South Africa?”
Link: https://www.ft.com/content/62adf884-e4c6-421b-bdff-cfe1fcae8dcd
Links to an external site.
Instructions: Write a 750-word paper on the following question: South Africa’s problems are at base institutional.
Discuss.
Political activist and intellectual Songezo Zibi argues that the country’s problems are at base institutional. What does
he mean? Do you agree?
For the structure, divide your policy paper into three sections:
1. Define institutions.
2. Critically analyze Zib’s definition of institutions.
3. Evaluate whether South Africa’s challenges are in fact institutional or rather economic, political, or something else.
NB: there is no right answer!
You may choose how you structure paragraphs in each section, however the STRUCTURE MUST BE FOLLOWED
EXACTLY, everything in the three points about has to be in the main structure of the paper
Be careful (I would rather you not say that at all) when mentioning whether a political institution “succeeded” in
something or “failed”! Such terms are not really suitable, as a political institution can “succeed” in terms of their
ideological beliefs, however these beliefs might be not morally-correct for you, BUT that would not mean that they
“failed”, rather than “succeded”.
Do not talk about culture and religion as poilitical institutions, as they can be a tricky to argue about
You do not need to use any other sources other than the podcast, but if you do use Chicago style citations, and do
not use too many sources
This paper is very short (750 words), so getting to the clear and precise point is the most important part!
Citation style: use Chicago; parenthetical citations (Hall 1986, 124), as it saves words.
Writing style: Attend closely to it. Good tricks of the trade include short sentences, using the active tense (“The
soldiers shot civilians” and not “The civilians were shot by soldiers”), avoid word repetition in adjacent sentences, and avoid adjectives and moral language – shocking, surprising, interesting, fascinating, etc.. It’s a matter of opinion not
fact, but Heather Cox Richardson and Richard Rorty are strong writers. George Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English
Language’ is good to read before you write.