ANGOLAN President Eduardo dos Santos sacked his health minister on Thursday at the request of dissident members of the Unita rebel movement. Ruben Sikato had refused to join the dissidents, who in September disavowed Unita leader Jonas Savimbi, splitting the movement. The Luanda regime has broken off relations with Savimbi and now says it recognises […]

Sechaba ka’Nkosi This is Sisi Modise (not her real name). She is four years old and lives in Mapetla, Soweto. In April last year, she became a statistic in the growing list of children sexually abused by adults in South Africa. But in Sisi’s case, the man charged with indecently assaulting her, Leqhoba Tsotetsi, was […]

Ferial Haffajee speaks to Fred Khumalo, the editor of a new weekend newspaper which is set to roll off the presses in March The editor of Sunday World, Fred Khumalo, is the epitome of his new reader: black, stylish, discerning and upwardly mobile. He struts through the empty offices of his new empire, kitted out […]

Wally Mbhele and Justin Arenstein Discredited members of the Mpumalanga African National Congress provincial executive committee – including some who have been axed from the provincial government on charges of corruption – have sought to influence Deputy President Thabo Mbeki to oust Premier Mathews Phosa. According to senior ANC sources, the people heading a campaign […]

AUTHORITIES in Botswana have signed execution warrants for two convicted killers expected to be hanged on Saturday, the country’s deputy attorney-general said on Thursday. The hangings will bring to 34 the executions carried out in Botswana since its independence from Britain in 1966. The last executions took place in 1995 when five convicted murderers were […]

Cameron Duodu Letter from the North As the guns boom around Freetown and its starving citizens cower inside those of their walls that have not yet been burnt down, who would have thought that Sierra Leone was once one of the favoured spots in West Africa? Its Fourah Bay College, founded in 1827, was once […]

THE Cape Town Magistrate’s Court will decide on Friday whether to send for psychiatric observation a man who confessed to planting the New Year’s Day bomb at Cape Town’s Waterfront. Charles Manamela (25), a Nigerian who is a naturalised South African, was arrested on January 12 for a spate of bomb hoaxes in Cape Town. […]

Reflecting the changing face of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz is an economist who is a hero in some left- wing circles. Ferial Haffajee reports World Bank leaders have traditionally been whipping boys. In the ranks of the international left wing, there is no type of banker more maligned or caricatured as the cold-hearted architects […]

The David Gleason Column Last week I addressed some of the issues surrounding the putative takeover by Driefontein of Gold Fields, a stratagem devised to get around the problems posed by minority shareholders who want to be paid more than is likely to be put on the table. Since then a lot of hot air […]

Alex Dodd It is Tuesday midday. We are driving along the N1, returning to Johannesburg after taking in Jo Ractliffe’s End of Time show in Nieu Bethesda. It’s hot and the road seems to go on forever. Attention is anaesthetised by an immensity of nothingness – nothing but the blank Karoo landscape and the road […]