The South African National Taxi Council demands the scrapping of the National Land Transport Act and the government’s taxi-recapitalisation programme, the organisation’s president said on Friday. ”If the Act still exist in its current form, you will suffer for it,” AJ Mthembu told protesters at the Union Buildings.
Mamelodi police and the principal at Gatang Secondary School addressed pupils on Wednesday after violence erupted in the area following a schoolgirl’s rape on Monday. ”Mamelodi police leadership and the principal are talking to pupils about what happened yesterday [Tuesday],” said police spokesperson Constable Brenda Kgafela.
A group of about 800 protesting former miners from the Eastern Cape who were evicted from the Tshwane city hall on Monday were being cared for by residents on Tuesday. ”The group has been separated into two smaller groups of about 300 and 500 each and they are staying in open halls in blocks of flats in the Pretoria CBD,” said Willie Fuledi, spokesperson for the Ex-Mineworkers’ Union of SA.
A mechanism to force security-sector groups into negotiating is needed to resolve the current labour dispute, Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana said on Monday. ”People are constantly calling on the minister to intervene in criminal activities. What do they mean when they say intervene?” Mdladlana said in Pretoria.
A Mozambican national spent more than a year awaiting trial for rape and attempted murder in South Africa, while forensic evidence clearing him had been available four months after his arrest. Charges of rape and attempted murder were withdrawn against Lui Emmanuel Sipoge in the Pretoria Regional Court on Tuesday.
Three of South Africa’s five border posts with Swaziland were completely blocked to traffic in organised protests against the kingdom’s leadership, the Swaziland Solidarity Network (SSN) said on Wednesday. Members of the SSN, the Congress of SA Trade Unions the South African Communist Party and the Young Communist League were gathering at South Africa’s border posts with the kingdom to protest the curtailing of political freedoms.
South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal border with Swaziland was completely blocked on Wednesday in a protest against the kingdom’s leadership, said the Swaziland Solidarity Network. ”The Golela border post, which is the border between South Africa and Swaziland in KwaZulu-Natal, has been blocked to traffic by our protesters since 5am,” said spokesperson Lucky Lukhele.
Police statistics showed a correlation between a decrease in car theft and an increase in aggravated robbery, a study presented in Pretoria on Wednesday suggests. ”What does a car thief do when they are not stealing cars? My feeling is that they may be involved in other forms of criminal activity when they are not stealing cars,” said Institute for Security Studies researcher Antony Altbeker.
Protesting security guards in Pretoria began to disperse on Thursday afternoon after their strike turned violent earlier, with a security vehicle set alight and rubbish strewn in the inner city. At one stage police fired rubber bullets at the protesting guards in an effort to calm the situation.
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/ 22 February 2006
The violent protests in Khutsong prior to the municipal elections on March 1 are an exception and not the rule, Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) chairperson Brigalia Bam said on Wednesday at the opening of the IEC’s 12 000-square-metre national operations centre in Pretoria.