The war between the Sunday Times and Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang continued in this weekend’s edition of the newspaper. It alleged that she had required her liver transplant this year because she was an alcoholic, and that she had been convicted of theft while working in Botswana in 1976.
The facts remain confused, the allegations wild and numerous, but one can’t help feeling that Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is being grossly misrepresented in the media. Firstly there is the issue of her alleged threat to "fix" fired deputy Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge and, in this case, no thinking South African can harbour any doubts about Tshabalala-Msimang’s innocence.
A sense of frustration is creeping into various groupings within the tripartite alliance and the business community, which want businessman Cyril Ramaphosa to enter the succession race for the leadership of the ANC and the country. Sections of the business community worry that the former general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers might be running out of time because he has not yet indicated an interest in running for the ANC’s top job.
Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Saturday she does not know who her new deputy will be. She was touring Durban’s Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Hospital to see what improvements had taken place at the hospital’s maternity and neonatal wards where a klebsiella outbreak claimed the lives of 22 babies in 2005.
Heavy rains continued to wreak havoc in East and Central Africa on Saturday as floods that have already displaced hundreds of thousands heightened fears of food shortages and disease outbreaks across the region. In Uganda, high waters submerged entire villages and destroyed many farms in the east of the country.
A Turkish plane heading for Istanbul from northern Cyprus was hijacked on Saturday, but the hijackers gave themselves up and released all hostages five hours after forcing the plane to land in Turkey. CEO of Atlas Jet airline Tuncay Doganer confirmed that the hijack of the passenger plane had come to an end.
The Bush administration is preparing a case to designate the Horn of Africa nation of Eritrea a ”state sponsor of terrorism” for its alleged support of al-Qaeda-linked Islamist militants in Somalia, the top United States diplomat for Africa said on Friday. Officials are compiling evidence of Eritrean backing for the extremists to support the designation.
An enraged man in a western Ugandan district took a machete and hacked to death his wife and six children before hanging himself, the government press reported on Saturday. Abdallah Byekwaso cut his children aged two to 13 beyond recognition and beheaded one of his sons.
Twelve-year-old Mohammed Abdelaziz’s brother said he screamed in pain as he was tortured in Egyptian police custody, but his screams are now silent. Pictures recently published on a popular Egyptian blog showed Mohammed dead with signs of torture all over his skinny little body.
When On the Road came out in 1957, Jack Kerouac became the voice of the beat generation almost overnight. Now, 50 years on, the tale of disaffected youth struggling to find a place in post-war America is to be re-released in its original form, unedited, cruder and more erotic.