The African National Congress Youth League spent a massive R17-million on its national conference in Mangaung in the Free State. After the conference was aborted inconclusively, this money is now wasted. Two league leaders have said the money came from donors including the ANC, Tokyo Sexwale and Patrice Motsepe.

Durban businessman Sifiso Zulu has, over the past two weeks, become the city’s Scarlet Pimpernel. But, unlike the Pimpernel, rumours circulating in the city suggest that Zulu may need the intervention of friendly political aristocrats, rather than the other way around.

The Scorpions unit is under immense stress, acting National Prosecuting Authority head advocate Mokotedi Mpshe has conceded. In an interview with the Mail & Guardian, he warned that uncertainty about the unit’s future was having a damaging effect.

Law-and-order fears, mingled with blatant xenophobia, are providing the anti-immigrant league with lush electoral pastures in the flatlands west of Venice. And its showing here could have a decisive impact on the character of the government that emerges from Italy’s general election on Sunday and Monday.

Fourteen years into democracy, South Africans are over the rainbow nation and growing up fast. And nowhere is our transition from ”colour-blind” children to sharp-tongued teenagers more evident than in the jingle of fruity, rooty names we’re using to describe ourselves and one another.

The state’s case against police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi could be a major casualty of the African National Congress’s drive to shut down the Scorpions. The Mail & Guardian has established that seven of the eight investigators working on the Selebi case have already resigned or are in the process of leaving the unit.