Fifteen months after then newly sworn in Western Cape Premier Ebrahim Rasool proclaimed, ”The circus is over!”, it is the provincial African National Congress that looks sorely in need of a ringmaster. A sequence of tender scandals is destabilising the Cape Town City Council; executive mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo and Rasool are skirmishing openly.
Levels of acrimony have escalated sharply in the Pick ‘n Pay pay strike, amid trade union threats of a consumer boycott against the retail giant. Pick ‘n Pay CEO Sean Summers has cited a coffin emblazoned with his name and ”RIP”, carried during one of the protest marches, as an example of strikers’ “inappropriate and sad behaviour”.
Plans to commemorate Cape Town’s history of the dispossessed, after a burial ground with thousands of remains, including those of slaves, was unearthed at an inner city construction site in 2003, have been stalled amid bureaucracy even as construction of a luxury residential property at that site gets under way.
A R400-million film and residential project called Dreamworld is turning into a conservationist’s nightmare. Headed by film mogul Anant Singh, and backed by the Western Cape government, the project aims to attract millions of celluloid rands to Cape Town and create 8 300 jobs.
The unique fynbos in the Sandveld, on the Cape western coast, is degenerating into a desolate lunar landscape after years of rapidly growing potato cultivation, largely to meet the fast food industry’s demand for French fries. Potato farmers’ irrigation needs, combined with inadequate winter rains, have destroyed 55% of the vegetation, say conservationists.
A tit-for-tat war of words is under way after race-based comments by the Cape Town mayor’s media adviser were exposed and criticised as ”harmful and undesirable speech” by the South African Human Rights Commission. In an editorial, Blackman Ngoro said that Africans are ”culturally superior” to coloureds, who, unless they underwent an ”ideological transformation”, would ”die a drunken death”.
The taxi industry is organised along Mafia lines, with powerful, barely accountable associations collecting massive levies to fund war chests and pay for members’ funerals, a commission of inquiry in Cape Town has heard. The probe into the underlying causes of instability and violence in the Cape Town taxi industry was set up in May after clashes over routes to the newly opened Cape Gateway Mall.
The government should launch an immediate investigation into the police’s use of rubber bullets and tear gas against peaceful Treatment Action Campaign demonstrators in the Eastern Cape, Human Rights Watch said on Thursday. In a statement from New York, the organisation’s Jonathan Cohen called the police action a ”shocking irony”.
Recently, ministerial housing delegates from South Africa, Brazil and India put their heads together in Cape Town to come up with a united proposal for slum eradication ahead of the United Nations meeting on Millennium Development Goals in September. The political fight at that meeting is expected to be over the proposed reduction by 10% of the estimated 100-million slum-dwellers worldwide.
The National Intelligence Agency’s tight security measures to pre-empt expected protests at the International Housing Research Seminar in Cape Town this week left delegates baffled and ”humiliated”. ”This is not a valid South African identity document,” read one computer, in what turned out to be a finger-fuddle by one of the data capturers.