Charlene Smith A retrenchment package will often be the largest lump sum a person ever receives and the temptation is to spend all the money, hoping tomorrow will take care of itself. Each year employees contribute R27-billion to retirement funds – and those who lose their jobs rarely make sensible re-investment decisions. Hermie Rossouw, regional […]
Dror Eyal The dust is blowing in from the east. Sand clouds that whip the air, flay my skin, sting in my eyes. Dust in each breath I swallow, grit grating between teeth, sticking in my throat. Dust in my food, dust in my beer. Winds blowing up a storm in front of the main […]
For the time being, war-torn Sierra Leone has no standing army of its own. But Chief Sam Hinka Norman, reappointed as deputy minister of defence, says he has other forces to call on. “If you point your rifle at me, you may believe it, it will not strike me,” he says. “When all this is […]
Mail & Guardian reporter Chief land claims commissioner Joe Seremane is threatening to take the government and the African National Congress to the International Court of Justice in a desperate attempt to solve the murder of his younger brother, Timothy Seremane, at the infamous ANC Quatro camp in 1982. Seremane’s latest salvo against the ANC […]
Andy Duffy The African National Congress is engaged in frantic lobbying among its Western Cape branches to ensure that Ebrahim Rasool is the only contender to succeed Dullah Omar as the party’s provincial leader. Nominations for the post are open until April 13, but insiders are already spinning the line that Rasool, the provincial caucus […]
Mungo Soggot The downfall of state oil chief Don Mkhwanazi this week came after the Cabinet blocked an earlier attempt by the Minister of Minerals and Energy, Penuell Maduna, to keep him at the helm of the Central Energy Fund (CEF). Maduna tried to persuade the Cabinet that Mkhwanazi, the fund’s chair, and his board […]
Doctors at Johannesburg General hospital allegedly refused to examine a dying paraplegic patient, writes Angella Johnson A wheelchair-bound teenager died after he was found sitting in his excrement in the emergency waiting room at Johannesburg General hospital. He had spent four days there waiting to be examined for abdominal and chest pains. Petrus Ndlovu (19) […]
Robert Kirby : Loose Cannon Squinting down from my ivory tower of white privilege, I am wont to say just how encouraged I am to be called a snobbish elitist, hardly distinguishable from a khaki-clad Neanderthal. What’s more, called all these names by someone who knows exactly what he’s talking about. And no, this column […]
Janet Smith speaks to the first South African writer/director to have a short film accepted for screening by Ster-Kinekor Gavin Hood was an accidental hero when he took on his first (and only) pin-up role in The Game, the South African rugby soap which was slightly ahead of its time when it was screened in […]
Toni Morrison is America’s most famous black writer. Her latest novel, Paradise, is being hailed as her best yet. Katharine Viner spoke to her There are 3 000 people in the Midland Theatre, Kansas City, and the place is packed to the gods. They are here for Toni Morrison, black America’s most famous novelist, and […]