”Regina Chinyandi (21), of Zimbabwe, arrived at the Alexandra police station on Monday with her one-day-old baby, Prince, wrapped in a napkin. Upon her return home from the hospital after giving birth, she had found her shack in ruins and all her friends from the township missing.” Surika van Schalkwyk speaks to refugees at Gauteng police stations.
Ronnie Kasrils, Minister of Intelligence, said on Tuesday that "we are not just seeing spontaneous xenophobic attacks". "There are many social issues at the root of the problem, but we have reason to believe that there are many other organisations involved in sparking the attacks. We are currently analysing the situation."
Alarming figures from the Department of Labour show a shortage of 220Â 000 farm workers on South Africa’s farms. Traditionally, agriculture has been a huge employer of people in rural areas, but research by several land activist groups shows that more and more workers are being evicted from farms.
South Africa faces a growing food crisis with declining domestic wheat production threatening to escalate food prices. Critics say the drop is because of a combination of factors, primary among them is government’s decision to open up the domestic market to global forces. But transport and infrastructure problems also make it costly for farmers to use the railways to export their product.
Inflation has broken through the 10% barrier — raising fears that South Africa is entering a period of "cost push inflation" as trade unions warn they intend to ask for double-digit increases for workers. Cost push inflation occurs when rising inflation pushes up prices, including wages, which in turn drive up other prices.
South African employers have short-changed the country’s intellectually impaired by employing only workers with physical disabilities and not intellectual ones. An oversight in the Employment Equity Act groups the intellectually impaired with citizens with other disabilities for job opportunities. Employers tend to opt for the physically disabled over the intellectually disabled.
The number of South Africans wanting to move abroad has risen sharply this year, according to emigration consultants — and they say Jacob Zuma and Eskom are to blame. South Africa is afflicted by the world’s biggest skills exodus and has the worst skills shortages of 55 countries, according to last year’s Competitiveness Yearbook and Productivity SA.
Surika van Schalkwyk looks into a training programme that aims to protect
mentally disabled children from sexual abuse, and says with derogatory language still so recently used in the legal system, South Africa still has a long way to go to ensure equal rights for its intellectually disabled citizens.
The Christian Motorcycle Association (CMA) is an organisation dedicated to spreading the word of Christ through motorcycling. ”We go where no one else goes,” says Stan Wilson, president for the Pietermaritzburg CMA branch. The CMA is not a club, but a ministry.
Driving drunk can change lives forever, yet many South Africans — perhaps lulled by a lack of effective law enforcement — do it every day.