Belinda Beresford The power of compounding interest is on your side when you make extra payments on your bond. Say you have a R150 000, 20-year bond at 22% interest with Standard Bank. The total cost – capital and interest – of the bond would be R668 542, and the monthly repayment would be R2 […]
Chris McGreal Many will remember Chief Moshood Abiola as a political martyr denied presidential power, even though he came to prominence as an opportunist businessman, prepared to do deals with Nigeria’s soldiers until the very end. In the days before he died, Abiola had been ready to forsake his presidential claims, according to the various […]
Howard Barrell: OVER A BARREL There are, I’m sure, many reasons to admire communists. One which dwarfs all others, though, is their talent for rationalisation. Their ability to explain away past failures in such a way as to be able to retain a set of ill-fitting core beliefs is quite remarkable. The origin of this […]
Stuart Hess Minister of Justice Dullah Omar has asked for a report into Western Cape Attorney General, Frank Khan’s decision not to prosecute a former police superintendent accused of sexually harassing a colleague for six years. Khan twice declined to prosecute Mario Laubscher, on the grounds that he was suffering from depression. Carol van der […]
Graham Farmelo Only the most foolhardy person would try to predict the future of the World Wide Web, but that didn’t stop its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, from trying some crystal-ball gazing last week. During Internet, Web, What Next?, a conference at the Cern atom-smasher laboratory in Geneva, Berners-Lee and others speculated on what they hoped […]
There was motive for the then South African government to kill Mozambique’s Samora Machel, and there is plenty of evidence to back up these claims.
Only a masochist would beg their bank to be allowed to shovel ever- increasing chunks of their salary in to the gaping maw of bond repayments, and to do it twice a month. Or someone who knew that, bizarrely, it could prove quite profitable. According to Standard Bank, by splitting your bond repayment in two, […]
Tracy Murinik On show in Cape Town Just in case you overlooked him, I can report that Caliban is, indeed, alive and well, and effectively leaving many a little speechless and thunderstruck in his eloquent wake. Mustafa Maluka’s latest solo exhibition in the Artsstrip at the AVA, entitled (the (UNSTOPPABLE) rapist), engages, through an elaborate […]
Larry Elliott and Alex Brummers A Second Look From the offices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in downtown Washington, DC, the ambush of the Thai baht by currency speculators a year ago this week looked like a brief but violent tropical storm. That great edifice, globalisation, had sprung a leak, but the problem was […]
Alex Dodd Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Lindiwe Sisulu has been accused of old-order politics by South Africa’s chief censor after she threatened to ban an art exhibition of child nudes at the Grahamstown arts festival. The row between the two was sparked by artist Mark Hipper’s exhibition Viscera, on show at the Rhodes University […]