Nelson Mandela’s group of ”elders” warned of signs of deep and growing division in Sudan as they ended their first official mission to the country, a visit marred by violence and confrontations with security forces. ”We heard the tale of two countries,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu told reporters at a press conference at the close of the trip.
Image is everything. This is the message that the Germans would like to convey with the visit of Chancellor Angela Merkel. In her first visit to South Africa since taking on the top job, Merkel will want to share the successes of the football World Cup hosted by her country last year with South Africans preparing for 2010.
When Cape Judge President John Hlophe ordered a nine-week postponement to the state’s attempt to evict about 25 000 Joe Slovo residents from their shacks in Langa, the 2 000 people outside court broke into wild celebratory song. The 6 000 households of Joe Slovo have been opposing government’s attempts to remove them from this piece of land bordering the N2 highway for close to three years now.
Hillary Clinton, United States presidential candidate, was raised in a middle-class family in the middle of America — a classic suburban childhood, she says on her page on Facebook, the social networking website that has taken the world by storm. She was warmly welcomed in Oakland this week, where a crowd of 14 000 heard her speak. That’s about one-third of the number of supporters linked to her Facebook profile.
The battle between embattled former National Intelligence Agency (NIA) director general Billy Masetlha and President Thabo Mbeki is not over yet, despite the Constitutional Court’s ruling this week that upheld Mbeki’s decision to sack him. Masetlha has vowed to take the fight to another level by demanding that the state pay him a higher financial settlement than the one offered to him last year.
More than half of South Africa’s maths and science teachers are underqualified, but imminent changes in the education system are set to create an even bigger deficit in qualified instructors, making it more difficult to improve maths and science results for learners.
The announcement last week that the Department of Arts and Culture has received a qualified audit report from Auditor General Terence Nombembe has been met with alarm from the parliamentary opposition and silence from within the department itself. In the first qualified audit finding in five years, the Auditor General has written: ”An unexplained difference of R13 415 189 exists between the asset register and the amount disclosed in the financial statements.”
He came to tell ”of arms and a man”, and on Tuesday prosecutor Billy Downer and his team resembled warriors. Standing proud in the Constitutional Court after they won their last battle (for now), Downer, his fellow prosecutors and investigators from the Scorpions were all smiles as they shook hands and sent SMSs to spread the news.
South Africa will not be able to distribute 30% of its land to black people by 2014, the director general in the Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs has warned. Glen Thomas says the high land prices will make it impossible to reach the 2014 target — set by President Thabo Mbeki — if ”drastic interventions” are not made.
South Africa’s health system is hurtling from crisis to crisis. The country has a minister of health who deftly sidesteps accusations of incompetence, flatly denies drinking at hospitals and fires her competent deputy, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge. But the problems are not just concentrated at the top. They are more basic and affect the lives of children.