The National House of Traditional Leaders is to appoint a four-member task team to get ”first-hand information” on ongoing problems with traditional circumcision ceremonies. The resolution follows the deaths of 16 youths and the hospitalising of dozens more in the Eastern Cape over the past few weeks.
Human rights in health care is not just an apartheid-era issue, but one that still challenges health professionals in South Africa today, the director of the Steve Biko Foundation, Nkosinathi Biko, said on Wednesday. ”There is a tendency to think of it mainly in relation to politically derived violations of human rights,” he said at a conference on the subject.
Minister of Safety and Security Charles Nqakula’s remarks on crime were almost on a par with Jimmy Kruger’s pronouncement on the death of black activist Steve Biko, Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said on Saturday. Leon was speaking to several hundred people at a DA rally in Cape Town’s coloured suburb of Tafelsig.
A former boss of one of the travel agencies implicated in the parliamentary travel voucher scam spent an hour-and-a-half behind bars on Monday for his lack of co-operation in a liquidation inquiry. David Phokeng, an ex-director of the now-liquidated Bathong Travel, was detained in the holding cells of the Bellville Magistrate’s Court at the request of the attorney acting for the liquidators, Bernhard Kurz.
Desmond Tutu, the former chairperson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, says he has doubts over the prospects of success in prosecutions of apartheid-era perpetrators of gross human rights. ”I worry that we could … have cases that go on for a long time, that evoke all kinds of emotion, then the people are acquitted,” he said.
It is time for politicians and security-force officers to face the music for their role in apartheid-era human rights violations, a Cape Town conference heard on Thursday. Former Truth and Reconciliation Commission member Yasmin Sooka said she would like to see ”those who created this milieu” brought to book.
It is an ”objectively determinable factual reality” that beans make you fart, according to the Advertising Standards Authority. It made the ruling in rejecting a complaint by the Dry Bean Producers Organisation against a television commercial for Wildeklawer Sweet Onions.
Lies, and lies within lies, were the topic of the day as the LeisureNet trial entered its second week in the Cape High Court on Monday. The liquidated group’s former in-house architect Dawid Rabie was being cross-examined on his evidence that joint chief executives Peter Gardener and Rodney Mitchell pressured him into handing over  000 in kickbacks.
Life assurer Old Mutual was on Thursday ordered to pay a yet-to-be-determined amount of compensation to a black employee labelled a ”kaffir” by a colleague. ”At the heart of this matter lies a view, shared by far too many people, that the word ‘kaffir’ is not as hurtful as some others [Africans in particular] would have it,” Labour Court Judge Elna Revelas said in a ruling handed down in Cape Town.
As the screws started tightening on LeisureNet’s bosses, they instructed their former in-house architect to invest 000 in an overseas development he knew nothing about. The architect, Dawid Rabie, was in the witness box for a second day in the trial of former LeisureNet joint chief executives Peter Gardener and Rodney Mitchell, their business associate Hans Moser, and Mitchell’s wife Suzanne.