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/ 19 December 2007
Skills shortages, touted as the critical issue hampering the effectiveness of government, are nowhere more obvious than at local government level, role players in the sector told the <i>Mail & Guardian</i>. Although local government has upped its game in the past few years and significant gains have been made by municipalities local government is still not operating at the expected level.
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/ 19 December 2007
Corruption in local government, poor levels of service delivery and declining standards of working conditions for its members are the main concerns of the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu), traditionally a powerhouse in municipalities around South Africa.
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/ 19 December 2007
As the DA-led coalition moves towards March 2008 and the end of its second year of governing Cape Town, it continues to fight attempts to usurp the alliance in a turbulent political atmosphere that often overshadows the pressing delivery needs of the city. Since taking power from the ANC after last year’s local government elections, the coalition government has fought off numerous attempts by the ANC to unseat it.
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/ 19 December 2007
The Swartland, made famous throughout the country by WeetBix’s old advertising campaign, is characterised by undulating fields of wheat planted and harvested in orderly rows and a few industrious rural towns cleansed by the wind and the sun shining from a clear blue sky.
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/ 18 December 2007
Pity the president of the ANC Women’s League … for the sister truly reigns in troubled times. As if presiding over a government department crippled by scandal, ineptitude and general chaos wasn’t trying enough, along comes the added humiliation of being stabbed in the back by one’s own, writes Khadija Bradlow.
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/ 18 December 2007
This morning, facing too many deadlines, I found my brain blocked. I have been reading all three fat Mandela books, trying to find something to say for a commissioned article. In the midst of my writer’s block I have been searching for a high by following the Obama campaign on the internet and ignoring our own political frenzy here in Kenya, for this time it has no grace.
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/ 18 December 2007
The Tolkien community was in hysterics on Tuesday. At least that was the verdict on one of the leading Hobbit websites following the announcement in Los Angeles that Peter Jackson, director of the -billion-plus trilogy The Lord of the Rings, had signed up to produce two films based on The Hobbit, expected to go into production in 2009.
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/ 18 December 2007
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Sanele ”Shanee” Moroka was a girl trapped in a boy’s body with feet trapped in too tight pumps in the voting queue in Polokwane. She doesn’t believe the ANC should remain a multi-class organisation and is wondering what will happen to her poor calloused palms after having tugged the comrades ”forward towards enlightenment”.
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/ 18 December 2007
Microcredit, tiny loans to the world’s poorest, is booming and now benefits more than half a billion people but Africa and Latin America lag behind Asia and unscrupulous lenders are cashing in. The Microcredit Summit Campaign surveyed more than 3 000 microcredit bodies around the world and found they reported reaching 133-million people by the end of 2006.