Mapula Sibanda South Africa’s nine regions have been in place for more than six months, but old provincial sports structures — as many as 22 in rugby, for example — play on. Some officials respectably cite the “hampering of development” or “confusing” provincial name changes for this laxity, but the more frank attribute it to […]

Weekly Mail & Guardian Reporter A SCREENING of the Citizen Kane of Egyptian cinema, The Night of Counting the Years, will open the Egyptian Film Festival next Friday at the Seven Arts Cinema in Norwood. Directed by Shadi Abdel Salam, the film is set at the opening of the tombs of the pharaohs in 1881 […]

John Velzian coaches the Kenyan athletes so he’s well qualified to reveal the secret of their success ATHLETICS: Julian Drew IT was on a Friday evening in July 1954 at London’s White City that the barefooted figure of Chepkwony from Kenya went to the line for the six miles at the English AAA championships. In […]

Will Kader Asmal’s new disciplinary committee be able to curtail the ‘corrupt and hungry elite’ that has put the ANC into a tailspin? Eddie Koch reports KEY members of the ANC are holding thumbs that a new high-powered disciplinary committee, headed by Water Affairs and Forestry Minister Kader Asmal, will be able to pull the […]

The government will want to send the right signals to investors in next week’s Budget. Reg Rumney looks at its options Will the Budget stimulate the already blossoming economy, depress it, or have no effect? Whether the March 15 Budget will be — to put it in economic jargon — contractionary, expansionary, or neutral is […]

Gauteng’s new director general is a former student leader who spent his time dodging the police. He spoke to Annie Mapoma A LEADER of the 1976 Soweto students’ uprising dubbed “master dodger” because police never arrested him is now Gauteng’s new director general, with a R13-billion budget and 130 000 administrative staff under his Vincent […]

Gaye Davis A LEADING candidate for the post of Public Protector, Brian Currin, has withdrawn his nomination. The former national director of Lawyers for Human Rights told the Weekly Mail & Guardian he was no longer available as he had had to take other employment. He said he had not expected he would land the […]

Clive Simpkins Years of recession and the new reconstruction-and- development-programme spirit have bred a healthy clutch of street intersection entrepreneurs — but buying from them is not for the incautious or the unwary. The bunch-of-flowers brigade are particularly slick operators. I recall a businessman friend of mine with all the Seigel-Sand-nous that comes from eastern-block […]

OPERA: Coenraad Visser DONIZETTI’s comic masterpiece Don Pasquale fares very well in Pact Opera’s restaging of its 1990 production. Against the backdrop of Anthony Farmer’s beautiful sets and with the characters splendidly and sometimes zanily dressed by Lindy Grindlay, Neels Hansen’s production sparkles with many deft comic touches deriving from the music. Hanli Stapela is […]

ANTON Harber has been named sole editor of the Weekly Mail & Guardian. Harber has been co-editor since the paper’s launch a decade ago. The other co-editor, Irwin Manoim, has been appointed to head the planning for a new publishing venture that is part of the WM&G group’s development “Changes in South African politics and […]