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/ 18 January 2008
Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota was on Friday sentenced to a R5Â 000 fine or 12 months’ imprisonment for reckless and negligent driving. Wearing a dark suit, glasses with gold frames and accompanied by his bodyguard, Lekota pleaded guilty to exceeding the national speed limit. Last Sunday Lekota was arrested for driving at 189km/h in a 120km/h zone.
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/ 5 December 2007
What does President Thabo Mbeki like to do in his spare time? Ballroom dancing? Playing the piano? No, the man likes to work during leisure hours, says his spokesperson. As the ruling party’s national conference in Polokwane approaches members of the South African Cabinet certainly need ways to unwind.
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/ 6 November 2007
Cyril Ramaphosa is the candidate most suitable to become the next president of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist Helen Suzman said on Tuesday. Suzman, an MP for more than three decades — much of that time as the only voice in Parliament against the apartheid — was speaking a day before her 90th birthday on Wednesday.
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/ 25 October 2007
A trial within a trial will be held to decide on the admissibility of certain evidence in the drunken-driving case of Pretoria High Court Judge Nkola Motata. ”I’m of the view that the objection by the defence for the state to tender evidence in the manner it requests is to be sustained,” Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court magistrate Desmond Nair ruled on Thursday.
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/ 17 October 2007
Transformation and community engagement in the mining industry is a painful but crucial process, the Chamber of Mines sustainable development conference was told on Wednesday. Richards Bay Minerals’ strategic manager, Thabi Shange, said: ”Transformation is painful, cumbersome … It does not imply an easy ride of free will.”
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/ 11 September 2007
The working-class movement in South Africa is eating itself alive because of its leadership squabbles, Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) president Willie Madisha said on Tuesday. ”The way many are conducting themselves is not proper,” he told a Food and Allied Workers’ Union conference in Randburg.
Publishing allegations of alcohol and power abuses by Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang formed part of a national debate, the Sunday Times contended on Tuesday. ”There is a debate in South Africa … as to whether or not the first applicant is a fit occupant of the high office she holds,” the paper says in an affidavit.
The fear of communism coming to South Africa justified committing acts during the apartheid era, which he has subsequently admitted were wrong, former police minister Adriaan Vlok said in Pretoria on Friday. ”We believed we were fighting a very, very bad enemy,” he said at a press conference at the end of the court case against him and four others.
The Sunday Times had not filed anything by Thursday evening in reply to court papers seeking the return of Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s medical records. On Thursday afternoon, the health minister and the Medi-Clinic company filed a notice of motion for an urgent application in the Johannesburg High Court.
President Thabo Mbeki does not have to give reasons for why he dismissed deputy health minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, the Presidency said on Thursday. A decision by Mbeki had been taken and it had been implemented, said presidential spokesperson Mukoni Ratshitanga. ”The president doesn’t have to provide reasons.”