Marion Edmunds Skilled officials from the Department of Public Enterprises — including its chief accounting officer, Professor Sipho Shabalala — are abandoning their minister, Stella Sigcau. Sigcau’s representative, Wandile Zote, confirmed this week that Shabalala, public enterprises deputy director general, had resigned and would leave at the end of the month, in what appears to […]

Aspasia Karras While New York will be able to offer its citizens innumerable time-saving services on the World Wide Web by the year 2000, local government in South Africa is far from doing the same. Headway is being made, however, with a government-sponsored project to develop a model for interactive local-government websites. Local government is […]

Robert Kirby : Loose cannon Granthurst High Security Pre-Release Cellblock North Hampshire January 19 1998 My dear Mr Mandela I have heard that you might well be soon looking for a new political heavy to run one of your richer provinces into the ground. One of your UK talent scouts advised me to apply to […]

By Sechaba ka’Nkosi People’s power without the gravy train When the new African National Congress deputy secretary general, Thenjiwe Mtintso, was asked last month what her ambitions in the party were, her answer was simple: “I would like to see our slogan, ‘All power to the people’, implemented in reality.” This may sound mundane, the […]

Marion Edmunds An Israeli conman, posing as a devout Orthodox Jew, has duped Cape Town-based entrepreneurs into investing millions of rands in a fraudulent investment scheme and skipped the country. The SAPS’s Commercial Branch is investigating Shmuel Deri (29), who is alleged to have left about 65 investors, many from Sea Point and Clifton, out […]

Lesley : Cowling Material While the country is warming up to the Year of Science and Technology, the science councils are still in the dark about their funding from the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. Representatives of the councils, charged with organising certain “thrust” areas, say the funding allocations for their projects have […]

Zimbabweans have come to learn that mass action counts for more than policy. Iden Wetherell reports Zimbabwe’s beleaguered government this week responded to the crisis engulfing it by a familiar mix of bravado and brute force. But the steps it has belatedly taken only serve to expose a pattern of misrule where populist impulses substitute […]

Martin Kettle in New York When a songwriter is as good and as famous as Paul Simon then, from one way of looking at it, he has nothing left to prove for the rest of his life. But when, like Simon, you cut your first record at 16, are a superstar at 26, and have […]

Andrew Worsdale The first South African “movie” was produced in 1896, 10 years before Hollywood even kicked off the ground. Edgar Hyman simply filmed scenes of Johannesburg and President Kruger and showed the film at Oom Paul’s home in 1899. In 1916 Harold Shaw wrote and directed the first local epic De Voortrekkers. He was […]

Just the suggestion of producing an Afrikaans film with an all-white cast in South Africa in 1998 is enough to make a boardroom of grown businessmen burst into uncontollable laughter. “Nee hartjie,” said the men in suits to film-maker Katinka Heyns when she was doing the circuit to find financial backers for her latest project, […]