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/ 23 February 2007
Seventy percent of the money belonging to widows and orphans apparently lost by financial institution Fidentia could have been recovered, according to the lawyer who advised the Mineworkers Provident Fund trustees on three occasions last year to move the money out of Fidentia’s clutches.
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/ 22 February 2007
There are strong pro-poor and pro-employment initiatives in the 2007 budget. These include tripling the housing budget and expanding the welfare grant system. It is notable that there are now as many people in the jobs market as there are on welfare: social grants will fund about 12-million beneficiaries in the coming year.
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/ 19 February 2007
The South African nuclear community has taken the government’s recent support for nuclear energy as a cue to plan local uranium enrichment. Processing uranium will secure South Africa’s nuclear fuel supply in the event that the domestic nuclear energy market grows. Experts highlight the soaring price of uranium internationally and project a supply shortage as incentives to process uranium locally.
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/ 19 February 2007
Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni on Thursday announced that the repo rate would remain unchanged at 9%, following the two-day meeting of the monetary policy committee (MPC) this week. Banks are expected to leave the prime lending rate unchanged at 12,5%.
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/ 5 February 2007
Commentators have interpreted the number of staff leaving as a “purge” of those who disagree with Snuki Zikalala, news and current affairs director. The Mail & Guardian‘sTumi Makgetla speaks to SABC spokesperson Kaizer Kganyago about this and the resignation of John Perlman.
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/ 2 February 2007
Low energy reserves have forced South Africa to ease up on air conditioning and find new ways to conserve electricity. But in the little town of Bethlehem, in the Free State, construction is under way to insulate the town’s inhabitants from South Africa’s electricity crunch.
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/ 2 February 2007
The straw that broke AM-Live presenter John Perlman’s back was the fact that his bosses did not include him in a decision about who his new co-presenter would be, an SABC insider told the Mail & Guardian. Nikiwe Bikitsha announced her departure and Perlman expected to be included in auditions for her successor.
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/ 2 February 2007
President Thabo Mbeki on Sunday stalled South Africa’s self-assessment process under the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) for six months, citing technical problems, which civil society has dismissed as “nonsense”. His decision stalls a process that had been rushed to meet a nine-month time frame.
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/ 2 February 2007
Two black auditors at Nedbank have vowed to pursue court action over a manager who allegedly said he could not employ blacks, because they “sit on their bum”, despite the company’s decision to clear him. The auditors, Rhoda Yedwa and Michael Vilakazi, said that the Nedbank disciplinary finding was fatally flawed because they did not participate in the hearing.
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/ 29 January 2007
Eskom is de-mothballing old stations, rolling out new capacity and achieving vast energy savings, but with such run-down and stretched power resources, there will be little wiggle room in electricity provision for a long time to come. Recent outages saw Eskom lose 25% of the power on the national grid in the peak of summer.