The Land Claims Court has the power to override the new Minerals Act, an advocate presenting the Richtersveld community’s multibillion-rand claim argued in Cape Town on Monday. The 2002 Act makes mineral resources the common heritage of all the people of South Africa, and does away with the notion of mineral rights.
Former Independent Democrats Western Cape leader Lennit Max on Thursday sought to link the party’s national leader, Patricia de Lille, to the Travelgate affair. De Lille heatedly denied any wrongdoing, and said that as one of a number of clients of one of the implicated travel agencies, she had given her full co-operation to investigators.
The former acting vice-chancellor of Vista University, Professor Sipho Seepe, has accepted responsibility for ”sloppiness” in an essay he wrote after it was pointed out that certain passages are identical to those on a number of websites. The essay was published in the book Towards an African Identity in Higher Education.
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/ 18 February 2005
A Cape High Court judge has upheld a bid by the governing body of Cape Town’s Mikro Primary School to preserve its Afrikaans-only status. However, the matter could end up in the Constitutional Court if the Western Cape education department has its way. The department ordered the school to created a special English-medium grade-one class this year.
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/ 16 February 2005
The head of communications in the Presidency, Murphy Morobe, has urged the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) to continue to speak out on the issue of HIV/Aids. ”You are our conscience,” he told several thousand TAC supporters who marched on Parliament on Wednesday to hand him a memorandum of demands.
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/ 8 February 2005
Western Cape education minister Cameron Dugmore and his officials had acted like schoolyard bullies in the Mikro primary-school affair, the Cape High Court heard on Tuesday. Mikro’s governing body is asking the court to overturn the provincial department of education’s instruction to create an English-medium class at the school.
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/ 25 January 2005
Director General of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Chippy Olver is to quit at the end of February, the environment ministry announced in a statement on Tuesday. ”I guess his own feeling is he has been in government for the last 10 years and he wants a bit of fresh air,” departmental spokesperson JP Louw said.
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/ 24 January 2005
Forty members of Parliament implicated in the travel voucher scandal will be informed from Monday that they will be prosecuted. National Prosecuting Authority spokesperson Sipho Ngwema would not say what political parties they belonged to, or whether the state would be demanding that they pay bail.
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/ 19 January 2005
Rugby’s squabbling administrators have brought the game into disrepute, the chairperson of Parliament’s sport portfolio committee said on Wednesday. His comment, during a presentation by SA Rugby’s 2011 World Cup bid committee, came as the Democratic Alliance accused the minister of sport and recreation of ”taking sides” with his brother in the row.
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/ 17 January 2005
The United States wants to resolve the issue of the debt burden that is crippling the growth of many African countries, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown said on Monday. He was addressing journalists in Cape Town, where he is attending a Commission for Africa meeting. Progress in this area, he said, is possible in the next few months.