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/ 3 September 2004
More than 50 000 South Africans who have been disabled by work-related accidents in the past 11 years are challenging the government in court. They claim the government has reneged on its statutory obligation to provide them with a financial lifeline. Most of them have had no source of income since they were injured and either rely on extended families for support or eke out a living on the streets.
Half of the country’s population does not participate in the economy because they cannot afford the hefty bank charges to run a savings account — built-in insurance against ”high-risk” clients. In the first of a series examining the apparent cartels that increasingly dominate our lives, we look at banking — an essential service from which millions are excluded.
Prepaid water meters are at the centre of a war for water waged by a group of informal settlement residents who will challenge Johannesburg Water in court over the lawfulness of these devices. The residents have enlisted leading constitutional lawyer Wim Trengove, SC, to fight their corner. The case is likely to be precedent setting, with implications for municipalities and the delivery of services around the country.
On Wednesday miners and their bosses marched to demand lower interest rates. On Thursday the Reserve Bank lowered rates. Also drawing attention to the currency were last week’s comments by Bobby Godsell, CEO of AngloGold Ashanti. The Mail & Guardian asked four pundits to respond to Godsell’s three pertinent posers.
Operation Gcin’amanzi (conserve water) was launched by Johannesburg Water last year as a fail-safe solution to retrieve billions of rands in arrears that accumulated from the flat-rate system used during apartheid. Gcin’amanzi’s centrepiece is the roll-out of prepaid water meters to "conserve water and stop the bleeding in arrears", says Brian Hlongwe.
Since 1994 no fewer than 24 major cases of political corruption have rocked South Africa. The latest, the parliamentary travel scam, is testing the South African public’s respect for the rule of law for the umpteenth time. South Africa has respectable institutions of accountability — but there is a murky underworld of corruption that is barely being tapped, say commentators.
Companies are focusing too much on changing the colour of their shareholders and not enough on broadening the base of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), warn business analysts. Of the 10 biggest BEE deals over the past two years only five have made provision to give management and employee stakes in the form of employee ownership trusts, says rating agency Empowerdex.
New research by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) has shown that 57% of South Africans are living below the poverty line of R1Â 290 a month for a family of four. And the ”poverty gap”, which measures the required income transfer to all poor households to lift them from poverty, grew from R56-billion in 1996 to R81-billion in 2001.
The government is shifting its policy on informal settlements away from relocating residents and towards upgrading and developing programmes that would make shack communities a permanent feature of the South African landscape. The plan includes recommendations to "formalise the informality" of South Africa’s burgeoning shack communities.
Concern about the concentration of black economic empowerment (BEE) deals in the hands of a few big players is set to increase after Standard Bank’s announcement that it will be selling an effective 10% of its South African banking operations to Safika Holdings and Millennium Consolidated Investments (MCI), among others.