THE fate of 11 senior Mpumalanga officials accused of lying about their qualifications will be announced on Friday when the Public Service Commission hands its investigation report on the issue to Premier Ndaweni Mahlangu. The 11 unnamed officials reportedly over-stated or invented their qualifications to secure high-paying government jobs. PSC chairman Stanley Sangweni will personally […]
Sasol could soon join the great trek that has seen several top South African companies list abroad Belinda Beresford Sasol, the oil and petrochemicals company which was synonymous with countering anti-apartheid sanctions, has outgrown the country of its birth. The industrial weakling that was nurtured to shelter the apartheid regime from the vagaries of international […]
Dale McKinley CROSSFIRE South Africa is a strange place to be if you count yourself as a political activist and/or commentator. It often seems as if this sizeable sector of our population is caught in a linguistic time warp, what with echoes of vain, glorious, nationalist verbiage ringing in our Southern African ears, resistant strains […]
Paul Kirk and Jaspreet Kindra The mayor of KwaNongoma, who was slain this week, had been running a protection racket in which he and his associates allegedly beat residents of the KwaZulu- Natal town if they did not pay him R50 a month. The assassination of mayor Bhekuyise Sikhonde, an Inkatha Freedom Party strongman, instantly […]
For one week during 1971 the small Free State town of Excelsior was crawling with reporters from all over the world. A sex ring had been uncovered in which local farmers and businessmen were engaged in steamy escapades with their black maids. Zakes Mda reports I have recently become a frequent visitor to Excelsior, since […]
Paul Kirk The deputy mayor of Durban has been charged with assault after being accused of attacking four teenagers with electrical garden equipment, sjamboks and knobkieries. Mveli Mavundla, the African National Congress deputy mayor of Durban Metro, appeared briefly in the Umlazi Magistrate’s Court this week after allegedly assaulting four teenagers accused of being thieves. […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 4.30pm. THE rand moved weaker on Friday, touching a low of R7,06 to the dollar, but retraced some of its losses later in the day. By late afternoon it was trading at R7,01 to the US currency. Traders said weak bonds and continued concerns about the situation in Zimbabwe weighed […]
exploding David Shapshak For once, you couldn’t really say that the film betrays a great novel. L Ron Hubbards’s novel Battlefield Earth is an epic mostly because it’s 1E064 pages long, not because it’s one of the great science- fiction novels of the genre. Hubbard is not the Tolkien or Asimov of his field and […]
present Ben Joseph Wayne Barker and Claire de Jong have mounted an exhibition at the NSA Gallery in Durban entitled Lost & Found. The work is characterised by bold neon statements, such as Loss, Hunger, Memory, mounted on large constructions of disfigured books and wax. Suggesting the work of some of the pop artists, objects […]
Howard Barrell OVER A BARREL If you want to risk feeling profoundly depressed – and some people do enjoy a state of hopelessness – then I have a suggestion for you. Go the African National Congress’s website (www.anc.org.za) and read the discussion documents for a meeting of its national general council due to be held […]