Riaan Wolmarans asks Arno Carstens about the Samas, gigging in Britain and working with the Nudies again.
In her debut novel, Pamphilia Hlapa recounts a traumatic journey into womanhood, but leaves aesthetics aside in favour of reliving the lead character’s ordeal in harrowing detail. Kwanele Sosibo reviews.
<b>MOVIES OF THE WEEK:</b> Shaun de Waal reviews two movies with a more thoughtful take on family.
The South African Communist Party (SACP) is battling to contain serious internal divisions over the party’s stance on African National Congress deputy president Jacob Zuma, with rumours circulating that next year’s SACP congress will be used to weed out the anti-Zuma lobby in the party.
President Thabo Mbeki has bounced the Icasa Amendment Bill back to Parliament, striking a blow in support of the independence of South Africa’s telecommunications regulator. The Bill was the subject of heated debate after amendments that stakeholders accused of undermining the regulator’s independence were passed by the National Council of Provinces.
Waiting for grants: International community representatives on the board of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria have voiced concerns that, unless the process of calling for grants begins soon, grants may not be disbursed this year.
Hereunder are a set of what could well turn out to be yet more hoax e-mails. They seem to relate to current political turbulence in the Mother City and came into the possession of <i>Loose Cannon</i> investigators as a result of diligent backbiting among interested municipal bureaucrats at all levels.
Let’s be grown-up about this — South Africans should not condone or romanticise the violence of striking security guards or the mayhem unleashed during other recent labour disputes. It is not a case of heroic class struggle or justified worker counter-violence against repressive capitalist bosses and their state lackeys.
"Nothing short of a skills revolution by a nation united will extricate us from the crisis we face … The most fatal constraint to shared growth is skills," said Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka at the launch of the Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa).
Up to 50% of the South African banking industry’s revenue comes from bank charges carried by consumers, some of the highest in the world, the Competition Commission has found in a groundbreaking report. The report, called <i>The National Payment System and Competition in the Banking Sector</i>, was released on Thursday.