Andrew Muchineripi World Cup Seventy years after Frenchman Jules Rimet “sold” the idea of a quadrennial football championship to a surprisingly sceptical world, the country of his birth has reached the final for the first time. Semi-finalists in 1958, 1982 and 1986, Les Bleus finally realised the dream by coming from behind this week to […]
Andy Capostagno Rugby If God had meant man to live in England, he’d have given him gills. That line kept recurring in my thoughts during two trips to the Cape last week. On Saturday Clive Woodward’s prayers were answered as the heavens opened and soft, suppressing rain fell on his England team at Newlands. On […]
Phillip Kakaza Live music Back in the 1980s South African music made a radical turn – the locally created home-brew kwaito took the music scene by storm. Its tsotsi taal- flavoured lyrics and irrestible dance rhythms are still heard blasting in clubs, shebeens and parties. Recently, much in a similar way, BMG (South Africa) is […]
Jeremy Cronin These are the South African Communist Party’s concerns about the government’s growth, employment and redistribution strategy (Gear): l In the first place, and consistently since June 1996 (when Gear was first unveiled), the SACP has been critical of the process that led up to Gear. In contrast to the reconstruction and development programme, […]
Swapna Prabhakaran and Mungo Soggot Court papers have implicated top KwaZulu-Natal government officials in a fraudulent conspiracy involving a businessman who allegedly exposed high- level corruption in the province. The businessman, Sateesh Isseri, is now allegedly on the state witness- protection programme. He is suing KwaZulu-Natal Premier Ben Ngubane and the province’s head of expenditure […]
Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg `So, how was the play?” asks a friend over dinner. How was the play? How do you describe Closer? A couple of hours after seeing Sello Maake ka Ncube’s production of Patrick Marber’s acclaimed contemporary British play, the whole thing is really only just beginning to sink in and […]
Stuart Hess Minister of Justice Dullah Omar has asked for a report into Western Cape Attorney General, Frank Khan’s decision not to prosecute a former police superintendent accused of sexually harassing a colleague for six years. Khan twice declined to prosecute Mario Laubscher, on the grounds that he was suffering from depression. Carol van der […]
Jacques Magliolo If you’re in the enviable position to have enough money to invest in unit trusts, chances are you’ve been encouraged to invest part of your portfolio in bonds. But bonds appear to be complicated, jargon-laden creatures with names like the “benchmark” R150. Actually, they are simply loans. For instance, if the South African […]
Diane Coetzer For weeks, I tried to prise a CV out of YFM station manager Randall Abrahams. When I met with him at the station’s funkily appointed offices in Gauteng’s Bez Valley, we never really got to the details of Abrahams’s radio career so far, beyond discussing his early days on the University of Cape […]
Who was . . . Moshood Abiola? Richard Synge The extraordinary life of Moshood Abiola, who has died aged 60, apparently of a heart attack, while meeting an American delegation, matches the tumultuous pageant of Nigeria’s political life in which he played such a pivotal role. Abiola first came to prominence as an accountant for […]