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 […]
Maputo It is four months since Robert McBride was arrested in Mozambique. Since then, many thousands of words have been spoken and written about it. This interview, conducted by his wife Paula McBride, represents the first time the voice of McBride himself has been heard since his arrest During the past few weeks I have […]
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 […]
It may be the cure for many sexual problems, but will Viagra get to the root of sexual relationships? Jennifer Steinhauer of The New York Times and David Shapshak report Viagra, the miracle impotence drug, may kickstart men’s libidos but it’s not the cure-all for dysfunctional relationships. While millions of men around the world have […]
Shaun de Waal It is, in my opinion, the best magazine in the country. Maybe I feel like that about SL magazine because about ten years ago I was involved in starting a magazine of South African “alternative” culture. It was short- lived. But things have changed enormously in the last decade. Rulers aside, what […]
Neil Manthorp in Amsterdam Cricket It is funny that we call ourselves a sports-crazy nation. There has never been a sports event in South Africa that has commanded, or even demanded, that the whole population sits up and takes notice. The Rugby World Cup final is an over- used example of when this was supposed […]
Only a masochist would beg their bank to be allowed to shovel ever- increasing chunks of their salary in to the gaping maw of bond repayments, and to do it twice a month. Or someone who knew that, bizarrely, it could prove quite profitable. According to Standard Bank, by splitting your bond repayment in two, […]
Tracy Murinik On show in Cape Town Just in case you overlooked him, I can report that Caliban is, indeed, alive and well, and effectively leaving many a little speechless and thunderstruck in his eloquent wake. Mustafa Maluka’s latest solo exhibition in the Artsstrip at the AVA, entitled (the (UNSTOPPABLE) rapist), engages, through an elaborate […]
Larry Elliott and Alex Brummers A Second Look From the offices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in downtown Washington, DC, the ambush of the Thai baht by currency speculators a year ago this week looked like a brief but violent tropical storm. That great edifice, globalisation, had sprung a leak, but the problem was […]