The dribble of voters casting their ballots for the Western Cape’s only by-election being contested in Tafelsig, Mitchell’s Plain, was expected to increase when people returned home from work on Wednesday. The by-election is seen as a two-horse race between Democratic Alliance candidate Sheval Arendse and the Independent Democrats’ June Frans.
While it is generally agreed the African continent must be developed, the challenge is in the capacity to do so, President Thabo Mbeki told the World Economic Forum’s summit on Africa on Wednesday. ”Basically our challenge is the capacity to implement what we’ve agreed,” Mbeki said.
Cape Town mayor Helen Zille joined an anti-crime cavalcade through the streets of Mitchell’s Plain on Sunday and urged people to take back the streets. Zille said she felt privileged to join the symbolic stance against what she called a ”terrible” and ”brutal” wave of violence sweeping the country, particularly the Western Cape.
South Africa faces a massive task in reaching the Millennium Development Goals for child survival in 2015, with trends showing that the mortality rates of infants and children under the age of five were increasing rather than decreasing. ”Currently, the prospect of having to reduce the child-death figures … by two-thirds by 2015 seems dismal,” a two-day conference heard.
The horror stories have become platitudes — a nine-month-old baby allegedly gang-raped, a pensioner raped by her grandson — to make the interminable list lend weight to perceptions of South Africa as a world rape capital. In the Western Cape, police statistics show that rape was the only contact-crime category to increase, by 8,2%, from 2003/04 to 2004/05.
Upholding the city of Cape Town’s decision to revoke a contract extension for city manager Wallace Mgoqi, the Cape High Court on Friday agreed that former mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo had had no power to do so. Mfeketo’s decision ”was fatally flawed and hence unlawful and invalid”, said Judge Deon van Zyl.
Ending three days of legal jousting, the Cape High Court reserved judgement on Thursday in a case that will decide the future of axed Cape Town city manager Wallace Mgoqi. Judge Deon van Zyl said he would need time with his two fellow judges on the full bench to consider the arguments of both sides.
A hiatus in South Africa’s biodiversity legislation, dealing with a proposed national electronic permit system, is inadvertently aiding a run by traffickers on the country’s endangered wildlife. According to Traffic, the world’s largest wildlife trade monitoring organisation, global wildlife trade was huge, with an annual turnover estimated at billions of dollars.
Pan Africanist Congress leader Motsoko Pheko has until April 28 to account for missing parliamentary travel vouchers or face possible civil proceedings, the Wynberg Magistrate’s Court heard on Thursday. Pheko’s appearance on Thursday was the latest in the Travelgate liquidation saga.
The Department of Correctional Services does not know how rife HIV/Aids is in South Africa’s 240 prisons, but will shortly undertake a national HIV prevalence survey in a bid to ”allay speculation”. The survey will be piloted in Gauteng during April and May. Based on these results, it will be expanded nationally.