Peta Thornycroft It’s been a long time coming, but Dirk Coetzee has had enough. He now regrets having spoken out in 1989 about killer squads in the South African Police. His confession six years ago about his own role in sanctioned murders and his breathtaking exposure of the rot deep in the South African security […]

Jacquie Golding-Duffy The task team appointed by Deputy President Thabo Mbeki to look at the media will be reviewing the South African Communications Services (SACS) — government’s current communications model — in a bid to find new and more effective means of disseminating government information to the public. A brief for Friday’s meeting sent by […]

President Nelson Mandela’s high-profile Children’s Fund has netted more than R12- million since its inception last year, with a further R24-million pledged to it, while humbler NGOs are battling for money. Marion Edmunds reports Non-government organisations are frightened that President Nelson Mandela’s midas touch is proving so successful that it is threatening their own ability […]

Vuyo Mvoko THE taxpayer is going to pay legal costs for former defence minister Magnus Malan and 10 senior officers in their murder trial which begins in early March in Durban. General Malan and his co-accused, including former SADF chief General “Kat” Liebenberg, are accused of complicity in the massacre of 13 civilians at KwaMakhuta […]

Rehana Rossouw MURDER-accused Allan Stokes was 369 miles from Cape Town on Wednesday aboard the monohull Sunday Star, participating in the Cape-to-Rio race after a court postponed his trial to April 5 to accommodate his racing plans. Stokes is accused of murdering trainee diplomat Nithianandan “Elvis” Govender at the Vaal Dam last November. Govender’s family […]

Raymond Mhlaba, Eastern Cape Premier, in The Mark Gevisser Profile You catch the similarity first in the tone: the ponderous and spare mode of delivery, a schoolmasterish stress on each syllable. Then you catch it in the ability — perhaps borne of a half-lifetime in captivity — to control a large, even gangly, frame with […]

Lungile Madywabe profiles four of the top footballers who will be thrilling soccer fans in the African Nations Cup SOME of the world’s greatest players will from this weekend grace South African soccer pitches. This is despite the debacle surrounding the withdrawal of champions Nigeria have the largest contingent of players plying their trade in […]

John 8:32: “The truth shall make you free.” It is widely recognised that liberation takes many forms and that “freedom” was not finally won with the assumption of power by Nelson Mandela on May 11 last year. The horrendous matric results signpost the long walk to freedom still demanded of millions of our children before […]

An uproar at the Peninsula Technikon following the administration’s failure last year to discipline a student for sexual harassment has once again highlighted this hidden problem, reports Rehana Rossouw SEVERAL months after a student at the Peninsula Technikon in Cape Town reported she had been lewdly fondled by SRC president Solly Lamini, there has been […]

Brendan Martin questions who will benefit from privatisation of state assets There would have been no prizes for predicting, a year or two ago, that the fragile unity of the new South Africa would founder on government action to secure “black economic empowerment”. But how many sages foresaw that it would be the ANC’s alliance […]