Michael Nurok It is 3am on Sunday and “Dr Davis”, an intern at a Western Cape hospital, has not stopped working since 8am the previous day. He is trying to resuscitate a child who has lost so much blood from an open fracture he is unconscious. Save the overburdened nursing staff, there is no one […]

shot Andrew Muchineripi : Soccer What a difference two years makes. When South Africa hosted the 1996 African Nations Cup they had partisan support, familiar conditions, a settled team, a successful coach, and duly triumphed. While Jomo Sono, the former national star who succeeded Barker last month on a caretaker basis, speaks confidently of retaining […]

Ferial Haffajee ‘It’s difficult getting the message through by committee,” says Dominic Ntsele, managing director of ad agency Young & Rubicam. Last year, Ntsele headed a creative team working to highlight the endemic levels of child abuse, rape and battery in the country, ahead of the Men’s March in November, through a high-profile media campaign. […]

hospitals Ann Eveleth Horror stories of South African public hospitals abound, but perhaps none more poignantly than recent claims by paediatric staff at Durban’s King Edward Hospital that “children have died because of insufficient staff being available”. The hospital’s paediatric department has battled “for years” to convince provincial health authorities to give it more nurses, […]

The state-owned synthetic fuel producer is demanding another R1,8-billion, reports Mungo Soggot Mossgas, the state-owned synthetic fuel producer which is one of South Africa’s most expensive white elephants, has asked the government for another R1,8-billion. The latest call for cash by the plant — which is controlled by the embattled Central Energy Fund (CEF) — […]

Andrew Muchineripi : Soccer No footballer will be more closely followed, on and off the pitch, during the African Nations Cup in Burkina Faso this month than Abedi Ayew, the veteran Ghana midfielder popularly known as Pele. To be named after the Brazilian who played in a World Cup final at 17 and is arguably […]

Nicky Barker Induna Jonathan Buthelezi lives with a small community in the tribal lands of the Buthelezi next to the Ngome Forest in KwaZulu-Natal. The clan occupies a piece of land on two timber farms adjacent to the Sapekoe Tea Plantation, where they all work. The farms run steeply down a mountain, with 80ha of […]

Neil Manthorpe : Cricket He was desperately keen to tour England again, to finish his remarkable career in the land where the game of cricket began and where he would have time to ease an understudy into the job. But now Dave Richardson has gone, just like that. No fuss, no fanfare, no tears. None […]

Mungo Soggot and Wonder Hlongwa The man who is likely to become deputy president of South Africa has been taken to court for not repaying his R120 000 overdraft and for failing to honour payments on a R400 000 home loan. Standard Bank confirmed this week that it successfully obtained judgment against Jacob Zuma — […]

Andy Duffy More than 530 people died at the hands of the police in the last nine months of 1997. Early investigations pinpoint police negligence as a main cause of the deaths, though the police watchdog, the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD), has also found evidence of murder and culpable homicide. The ICD’s figures show that […]