Charlene Smith On March 16 1984, former president PW Botha met his Mozambican counterpart, Samora Machel, at the Nkomati River to sign an accord that effectively blackmailed Mozambique. Next month, on June 6, President Nelson Mandela and Machel’s succesor, President Jaoquim Chissano, will open the Maputo development corridor, strengthening relations between the two countries and […]
Alex Duval Smith in Zambezi, western Zambia In the darkness of the mud-brick hut, the glint in the man’s eye was as piercing as the flashes of light from the half-dozen diamonds in his palm. “They will cost you 1,6-million kwatcha [R4 800]. At the moment, I can also sell you emeralds, gold dust and […]
Nick Cumming-Bruce President Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie’s enthusiasm is infectious, but his head- spinning monologues have the power to wear anyone down – as Margaret Thatcher discovered while drumming up business in Indonesia. Purposeful as ever on a mid-1980s visit, she strode around the Bandung aviation plant with Habibie trotting beside her, talking furiously. Visibly flagging, […]
Mukoni T Ratshitanga Vista University was plunged into crisis this week as students continued a boycott of their mid-year examinations while management reacted by shutting several of the campuses. Two weeks ago students demanded that the examinations scheduled to have begun last Monday be delayed by a week, saying they were unprepared and the timetable […]
into profit Andy Duffy A cabal of students is running the University of the North (Turfloop)as a private business, spending millions of the cash-strapped institution’s funds and extorting protection money from outside firms working on the campus. Documents leaked from the university this week, and confirmed by senior sources as accurate, claim the Student Representative […]
Neil Manthorp Cricket It has been a silly week on tour. For four years people have complained about the inability of various hosts around the world to organise a sensible itinerary. India, Pakistan, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and even Australia, who isolated the third and final test by sticking the World Series into the middle […]
Uneven standards of community care mean the state’s new policy of releasing mental patients could be a bad plan, writes Andy Duffy The deaths of seven people at the hands of former state psychiatric patients in the Western Cape have exposed a raw nerve in state health circles. The Department of Health this week slammed […]
Charl Blignaut investigates the fives rules for how to become a South African pop icon. (Don’t be scared to perform from the back of a truck) In 1985, six months after Lucky Dube’s fourth mbaqanga album had turned to gold – sales in excess of 25 000 units – the recording studio was again booked […]
Tim Radford United States space scientists believe they will be able to conjure up refrigerator and furnace insulation tiles out of thin air. They are experimenting with a composite material called aerogel, the lightest solid known. A lump of this “frozen smoke” the size of a man would weigh less than 0,45kg, but could bear […]
Simon Caulkin Stock options have become the Nineties way of rewarding top managers. But as the number of options being granted has exploded, so the boom in share prices has inflated the value of those options. The sheer volume of stock options has achieved such scale that it threatens to undermine the validity of company […]