Congolese represent the largest slice of the almost 200Â 000 applications for asylum in South Africa since 1994, with Burundians and Rwandese also prominent. Unlike other African countries, South Africa offers neither accommodation in refugee camps nor assistance to recognised refugees or new arrivals seeking asylum.
North West province’s agriculture department has effectively collapsed after the arrest of four top officials on corruption charges relating to the issuing of tenders and fraudulent claims. The woes of the stricken department have led to a war of words in the North West government.
A vitriolic attack on the Treatment Action Campaign as ”fronting for the pharmaceutical industry, drug-money laundering and pushing toxic drugs” still featured on the website of controversial vitamin peddler Matthias Rath — in violation of a recent court order forbidding him from further defaming the TAC.
The rape trial of former deputy president Jacob Zuma will finally go ahead on Monday after his lawyers indicated that they would not oppose the appointment of Judge Willem van der Merwe to hear the case. Transvaal division Judge President Bernard Ngoepe announced that Judge van der Merwe, a white Afrikaner best known for sentencing former apartheid hitman Eugene de Kock to life imprisonment in 1996, would preside over the case.
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/ 24 February 2006
Estate agents insist that foreign buying is not a factor in Cape Town’s property price spike — but circumstantial and anecdotal evidence tends to contradict them. The 10-person Panel of Experts on the Development of Policy on the Regulation of Ownership of Land in South Africa by Foreigners failed to find hard evidence that foreigners had driven up prices.
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/ 20 February 2006
More than a year after two damning reports of financial mismanagement at the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), potentially costing R150-million, no action has been taken against the senior staffers indicted in the report. In fact, Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Thoko Didiza stepped in to reverse the suspension of the ARC’s chief financial officer, Lazarus Gopane.
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/ 17 February 2006
<b>Yolandi Groenewald</b> sifted through pages and pages of manifestos to offer an abridged guide on where the parties stand on key issues.
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/ 16 February 2006
Finance Minister Trevor Manuel indicated this week that the troubled Road Accident Fund is in line for major surgery. But the government’s fix is facing heavy opposition from lawyers associations and politi-cal parties who say the new policy might be challenged in the Constitutional Court. The Treasury has given the fund a R2,7-billion bail-out to keep it going.
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/ 14 February 2006
Encroachment by subsistence farmers is threatening the survival of the delicate ecosystem of the coastal peat swamp forests of the St Lucia Wetlands Park in Maputaland, on the border of KwaZulu-Natal and Mozambique. But park authorities are reluctant to take action against the farmers.
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/ 10 February 2006
A World Bank land expert and a prominent left-leaning South African academic have both dismissed the idea that the government is planning large-scale expropriation of private farmland. President Thabo Mbeki said in his State of the Nation speech that the Land Affairs Department would review the ”willing-seller, willing-buyer” principle to speed up land reform.