Reports that HIV-positive prisoners at Durban’s Westville Correctional Centre are receiving inadequate HIV/Aids therapy have caused a stir. The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the South African Human Rights Commission (HRC) disclosed last week that they had received reports from prison inmates detailing their plight.

A 21-year-old female student was raped at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) last week. It was not the first rape on campus this year. Riven by fear and anger, the university community on the Howard College campus is now festering with recrimination. Allegations of ”hidden political agendas” and racism are being thrown around.

The 2010 Local Organising Committee and KwaZulu-Natal government heads have dismissed the construction workers’ strike at Durban’s Moses Mabhida World Cup stadium as an ”internal labour matter”. It was a ”natural” trade union strategy to make gains, they said. On the other hand, workers and labour rights activists said the strike went to the very core of South Africa’s claim to being a developmental state.

While the 24 multinational corporations facing litigation over their apartheid-era business activities in the country remain poker-faced, the South African government’s intervention on their behalf is appearing, increasingly, as the joker in the pack. Three weeks ago the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a 2004 New York district court dismissal of the action brought by the Khulumani Support Grou.

”I’ve been in the army since 1989 and besides basic training, the only course I’ve been on is a driving course,” says 39-year-old Lance Coporal Daniel Mkwanazi. ”I’m frustrated and humiliated because my career is going nowhere.” Mkwanazi is one of several black soldiers, who were part of the old South African Defence Force, who are becoming increasingly disillusioned by their lack of progress in the new South African National Defence Force.

In 1976 Sindiswa Nunu, then a pupil at Gugulethu’s Isaac Mkhize Secondary, was shot in both legs by the police during the wave of student uprisings that swept the country. She could not walk for three months. Eight years later, while pursuing her diploma in teaching, she was teargassed and detained when Nyanga Bush, a squatter camp near Crossroads in Cape Town.

At a time when there is more chance of being abused by one’s own party members than by the opposition, the cordon of police officers tramping through Beauty Mdlolo’s sodden front yard in Estcourt’s Wembezi township seems inappropriately excessive. It is day two of Thabo Mbeki’s presidential imbizo in the uThukela District Municipality in western KwaZulu-Natal.