Mungo Soggot INDEPENDENT Broadcasting Authority (IBA) councillor Lyndall Shope-Mafole insisted this week that she and her colleagues have done nothing wrong and have nothing for which to apologise. She was responding to the auditor general’s final report on the IBA, presented to Parliament on Wednesday, which criticised the organisation’s dire financial controls and misuse of […]
A FAR cry from the upper-class conditions and surroundings at Tara is the Zola Clinic in Soweto. Established ten years ago, the Zola clinic looks from the outside like a small shopping centre. A three-metre high brick-wall with razor wire running around the top surrounds the building. A few faded graffiti, mainly old political slogans, […]
FRIDAY, 2.30PM The truth commission Friday made an impassioned final plea to former apartheid defence minister General Magnus Malan to apply for amnesty before Saturday’s deadline. TRC deputy chairman Dr Alex Boraine said the commissione noted Malan’s decision not to seek amnesty with “deep concern”. “It is my opinion that he would be well advised […]
Luisa Dillner in London BRITAIN’S Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) is thinking twice about banning drivers from using their mobile phones while on the road. But lobbyists there want cellphones off the road, whether hand-held or mounted on a car kit. Is there any evidence that mobile phones actually cause accidents? “There’s […]
ON a hilltop overlooking Johannesburg’s northern suburbs, Tara -the H Moross psychiatric centre – looks like a five-star hotel with well-groomed gardens and lawns, a nine-hole golf course, two tennis courts and a swimming pool. Behind the glitzy appearance is a hospital providing intensive treatment of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, depression and anxiety disorders. […]
Peta Thornycroft A GABLED mansion in the heart of Kensington, the eastern Johannesburg suburb, served as a “safe” house for intelligence operatives in the Security Police. It was at this house in the late 1970s and early 1980s where reports submitted by journalists who were informers were scrutinised before being consolidated and sent on to […]
The dream of founding a new National Party is over for Roelf Meyer, courtesy of the NP’s elite, reports Marion Edmunds FALLEN National Party hero, Roelf Meyer, has been outmanoeuvred by his opponents. His more conservative colleagues, led by executive director Marthinus van Schalkwyk and Western Cape Premier Hernus Kriel, pressured leader FW de Klerk […]
Despite criticism, Cuban doctors work in places where South African doctors refuse to go, reports Dawn Blalock THE child on his mother’s lap is breathing in short quick breaths. The mother describes his symptoms in Setswana. “How many days with the fever?” the doctor asks in English. Although neither English nor Setswana is his native […]
A small Free State town provides a testing ground for South Africa’s three-year democracy. Stuart Hess and Dawn Blalock report
Stuart Hess and Mungo Soggot report on a case that takes the failure of the courts to protect the public to a new extreme MAMOKGETHI MALEBANA is missing. Lots of children go missing in South Africa. But the disappearance of this seven-year-old child from Katlehong is a shocking indictment of the country’s criminal justice system. […]