The prospect of state schools closing their doors to the nation’s children next week is undoubtedly the biggest crisis this country has faced in four years of democratic government. The signs are everywhere that education has come off the rails; should there be a strike now, this schooling year might just as well be written […]

Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon Say what you like, the African National Congress is proving itself a paragon of what many modern democratic governments should strive to become. No more so is this ranking emphasised than in the ANC’s great resilience and, with that, fortitude, vision, determination, tenacity, sheer nerve and, when all else fails, that […]

row Cotton is the only cash income for peasants in Maringu. A farmer who grew the average of 300kg per hectare earned about R450 last year. With this, families need to buy whatever they do not grow or make themselves. As the cotton is being harvested, expectation hangs in the air. Families picking the crop […]

FRIDAY 4.30PM: THE African National Congress has welcomed the conviction of former Civil Co-operation Bureau assassin Ferdi Barnard, but has called his comments likening his cause to that of President Mandela “presumptious”. After being sentenced to two life terms and 63 years for murder, attempted murder and fraud, Barnard said: “When President Mandela got sentenced […]

theNet Mukoni T Ratshitanga A Singapore-based agency which sells customers “camouflaged” bank accounts, driver’s licences and college degrees is also selling “Southern African passports and identity documents” on the Internet. The agency, Expat World Special Services, offers in the June edition of its monthly newsletter “an official Southern African Government Immigration Program” which gives permanent […]

Ann Eveleth The highest bidder for resort parastatal Aventura instructed attorneys this week to force Minister of Public Enterprises Stella Sigcau to back down from her decision to choose the buyer before a parliamentary debate on the sale. Parliament’s public enterprises portfolio committee this week also accused Sigcau of “pre-empting the activities of Parliament” and […]

Smoking cigarettes can prevent breast cancer in women carrying rare genes that predispose them to the disease, suggests a highly controversial new study. An international team, co-ordinated by Steven Narod of the Women’s College hospital in Toronto, looked at the relationship between lifestyle and breast cancer in more than 300 women with inherited mutations in […]

David Beresford It was one of those definitive moments in South African history, a moment that Eugene de Kock had long been waiting for. His five heavily armed bodyguards had taken up nervous positions around the courtroom. PW Botha was sitting in a well-padded chair, placed next to the dock in vague acknowledgement that he […]

ruins Amid Renamo ruins At sunrise, Chief Nchiri invokes the ancestors. Sitting with the chief around a sacred pakassa tree are seven men, barefoot and bare-chested. Nchiri has a white cloth draped around his waist. Nchiri explains to the ancestors that builders from Beira want to demolish the ruined houses of Maringu. Many people died […]

Krisjan Lemmer With less than a year to go before the centenary of the Anglo-Boer War, there has been muttering in the Dorsbult Bar about the belated discovery by the Brits that Lord Herbert Kitchener, the war hero, was a bit of a cad. The BBC’s Reputations series appears to have stumbled upon the fact […]