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/ 17 September 2007
Even if most employed South Africans paid up to 15% of their salaries towards the new national social security system (NSSS), netting a whopping R54-billion, it would fall short of current flows into the pension fund industry by R18-billion. The problem with pension funds is not so much coverage of employed people, but rather that people are drawing on these savings before retirement.
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/ 17 September 2007
South Africa’s decision to invest in a nuclear power future has raised concerns about what will happen to the nuke waste generated. Last week it emerged that nuclear power would account for about half of Eskom’s planned new generating capacity. At present South Africa’s nuclear waste policy is vague and does not list a clear end-plan of what will happen to high-level nuclear waste.
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/ 17 September 2007
When Ahmed Mursal was held up by a drug-desperate gunman in the tuckshop where he was working in the Cape Flats township of Delft, he offered to buy the gun for R250. He told the gunman he could pay only R30 then, but would speak to his Somali brothers, one of whom was sure to want to buy the gun. If the gunman brought the gun the next day, Mursal would pay the balance of R220. The gunman accepted.
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/ 17 September 2007
The Mail & Guardian‘s Ferial Haffajee speaks to Godfrey Oliphant, the head of parliament’s committee charged with electing a new SABC board. Oliphant has the inside track on the men and women who will guide the broadcaster.
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/ 17 September 2007
The only thing certain about the Competition Tribunal’s precedent-setting ruling against South Africa’s steel monolith, Arcelor Mittal SA, is that it’s going to have far-reaching consequences. But whether it is for Mittal or the tribunal itself, remains to be seen.
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/ 17 September 2007
What strange creatures we are, we yawners, a category that extends across species to include, I am told, mammals of many shapes, colours and stripes. How incomprehensible it is to us that we are sometimes taken, possessed even, by a fit of our physiologies, to extend our jaws and exhale with an intensity that animates only the orgasm and laughter.
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/ 17 September 2007
A tropical sun rises over Havana and in the neighbourhood of Vedado, a maze of worn, bleached apartment blocks, a unique healthcare system limbers up for another day. In Parque Aguirre, a small plaza shaded by palms, two dozen pensioners form a semi-circle and perform a series of stretches and gentle exercises, responding to the commands of a spry septuagenarian.
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/ 17 September 2007
The government is refusing to tackle increasing water shortages and instances of waterborne diseases in Bulawayo because of a struggle over control of the city’s water supply. Unless local officials hand over control of the water supply to a government agency, the central authorities have said they will not help the residents of the second-largest city.
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/ 17 September 2007
Before the protest march, leaflets were scattered around town claiming Libyan troops had entered Niger to annex the country’s oil and land while French business people were busy looting the country of its meagre wealth. And when hundreds of Nigeriens took to the streets of their capital recently, they did more than accuse neighbouring Libya of backing rebels and call for Areva, a French nuclear firm mining uranium in the north of the country, to leave.
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/ 17 September 2007
Professor Ruben Sher, the man who predicted 20 years ago that HIV/Aids would become a “biological holocaust” in South Africa, has died at the age of 78. Under apartheid, and at a time when the disease was seen as a problem of white homosexuals, he was the stubborn, forthright and vocal prophet warning of the looming tragedy.