provinces Ian Clayton Plans by the African Natonal Congress to downgrade provincial governments in favour of stronger municipalities will result in a constitutional fight that the party is bound to lose unless it has a clean sweap of Parliament and provincial legislatures in the June 2 election. Even then, it will take a major rethink […]
Wally Mbhele The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) announced this week that it was ready to deliver South Africa’s second democratic elections and promised that the 1994 chaos that saw the shortage of ballot papers would not occur on June 2. They are expecting more than 20-million potential voters go to the polls. Confident IEC officials […]
TWO teachers, including a school principal, opened fire on a group of their pupils in KwaZulu-Natal on Thursday, killing one and seriously wounding three. The incident happened when pupils from a high school in the Cele district, south of Durban, stoned their teachers to protest the bus fare required for a school outing, The Starreports. […]
Anthony Minnaar >From 1994 to 1998, an average of 240 police members were murdered every year – almost one a day, a total of nearly 1 200 in four years. This is one of the highest figures in the world. Only China, and to a lesser extent Russia, approach this annual figure. The United States […]
THE Angolan state oil company, Sonangol, has signed a $575-million loan agreement with Union Bank of Switzerland, state television said in a broadcast monitored by the BBC. It said the four-year loan to Sonangol, backed by an oil sale contract between the Angolan oil company and British Petroleum, was signed in London on Tuesday.
THE task team which was appointed to investigate axing of employees at the South Africa Broadcasting Corporation, including that of journalist Max du Preez, has defined its terms of reference, the SABC board announced on Wednesday. The investigation will include the failure to renew Du Preez’s contract. Du Preez presented the award winning programme Special […]
MORE than 200 students at a teachers’ college in Mpumalanga have won a battle for better food after boycotting the campus caterers for two days. Rector of Mgwenya College of Education, Ian Steenkamp said on Thursday that the 240 students would now get good meals. Students had complained that vegetarians, for example, were fed only […]
Tangeni Amupadhi Namibian artists are outraged over what they call “apartheid-style censorship” rearing its head in their democratic country. The outrage was sparked by the Namibian government’s decision to withdraw financial support for a popular play scheduled to be staged at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg next week. The Ministry of Basic Education and Culture […]
Mail & Guardian reporter The state has dismally failed South African women who are raped, according to a new study. Coming at a time when the lobby seeking to protect the interests of rape victims has become more vocal, the research shows that the number of people convicted for rape, as a proportion of rape […]
Was Belgium’s King Leopold II a mass murderer on a par with Adolf Hitler, or a greedy despot who turned a blind eye to a few excesses? Stephen Bates reports As the sun sank slowly over Brussels, its fading rays glinted off the glass domes and towers of the magnificent Victorian greenhouses in the grounds […]