She is the first South African Public Service Minister to declare a dispute with powerful public service trade unions — and Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi’s audacious move a week ago has now divided the representatives of 900 000 public servants. Public service unions are on the back foot as the minister plays hardball.

Seventeen-year-old Francine Walkenshaw tried to go back to school last year, but gave up when better-dressed pupils jeered at her: ”Why do you live like a squatter? What did you do wrong?” Francine, her father Casper and her two brothers live in Lochvaal Emfuleni, on the outskirts of Vanderbijlpark on the Sasolburg road. It is one of at least three white squatter camps that have sprouted in the Vaal Triangle.

The killing of a 19-year-old boy in Phoenix, Durban, two weeks ago by city council security guards has again cast a spotlight on the measures state authorities use against impoverished communities in protest. Marcel King was shot dead by a member of a security company hired by the Durban council to disconnect electricity that had apparently been illegally reconnected in the Durban suburb.

Lisa has her monthly period, which means she can’t work. Her cellphone screen flashes incessantly with the names of her regulars, but she only answers her boyfriend’s calls. Her boyfriend, Pieter, knows her line of work, but condones it because he is unemployed. The M&G takes a first-hand look at SA’s burgeoning poor white problem and finds a world turned topsy turvy for a formerly favoured nation

”How do you stop a black man from drowning?” asks a sneering white man. ”You take your foot off his head.” ”You’ve got two Afrikaners; one is fat and the other is thin. If they both jump off a cliff, who will die first?” asks a black man coolly. ”Who cares?” Provocative TV ads for the Apartheid Museum are stirring emotions and have been banned from the airwaves.

On average South African workers would have to toil for 111 years to match what their bosses earn in just one year. While the salaries of the country’s business heavyweights have skyrocketed over the past 10 years, their workers’ wages have hit record lows — a trend that spells out a grim future for tackling South Africa’s soaring unemployment levels.

A legal battle is looming between the Inkatha Freedom Party and its ally in the Coalition for Change, the Democratic Alliance, over who is the official opposition in the KwaZulu-Natal legislature. The dispute is likely to threaten the continued survival of the Coalition for Change. At the heart of these tensions is whether the minority partner IFP can also be the official opposition.

Outside Jim Nonyama’s house in Tabong township in the Free State police Hippos cruise the streets. ”They’ll come. They’ll stop at my front gate and they’ll tell me that I don’t own my house any more,” he says. A Free State township has been simmering since the eviction of defaulting bond holders started last year.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) were excluded from President Thabo Mbeki’s Cabinet selection process and were informed via a letter about his premier choices. Less than a month after the ANC’s election victory, Cosatu is flexing its muscles.