The problem with pricing healthcare in a market economy is that it doesn’t behave like a commodity whose "value" is arrived at through the process of supply and demand. A scarce resource faced with unlimited demand, the dynamics are further complicated by inequalities in society and acknowledgement of healthcare as a human right.
The end of apartheid brought about a new order and a new lexicon, in which some commonplace words have become swear words. People no longer say things, they "indicate" or "allude to" them. They do not talk about things or concepts; rather they discuss "the whole question of …" I personally mourn the death of words such as "intellectual", "ambitious" and "elite". Alas, such passing is a sign of the times.
As children, we soon learned, it was different for boys. While they had Superman, Desperate Dan, a legion of Bash Street Kids and the Hardy Boys, for girls, sturdy female heroes were thin on the ground. The pages of Bunty were riddled with ladies who swooned, and simpering boarding-school girls who dreamed of ponies, while on television women were always assistants, love interests or girls who got the collywobbles at the sight of a ghost or a spider.
Those involved in peace and in anti-conscription movements during apartheid, are mourning the loss of peace activist Nan Cross, who died last weekend aged 79. Her religion and her pacifist sentiments meant that her contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle centred on conscientious objection.
Sajida Khan (55) died in her home on Sunday night, during a second bout of cancer caused — she was convinced — by Durban’s largest dump. The Bisasar Road site, which handles most of the city’s rubbish, was placed directly across the street from her home in Clare Estate in 1980.
Africa’s east coast could go from having no undersea broadband cables to four. The planned East Africa Submarine System, touted as the solution for the bandwidth-starved continent, has been plagued by political squabbles that have resulted in it splintering into four mooted cable projects.
Last week France and Germany abandoned the dual-nationality management structure at Eads, the owner of Airbus, in an attempt to turn the struggling aerospace and defence group into a "normal" global company. The move will bring an end to the strife that has crippled the group for the past two years.
Philomena Appiah’s factory is the surprising source of thousands of American uniforms and workwear items, tailored by Ghanaian seamstresses and shipped across the Atlantic to stores in the United States as part of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa).
Two toddlers sit on a rusting grille platform built on bamboo stilts at the entrance to one of Bangladesh’s fastest-growing housing developments. Three feet below them lies a festering mound of rubbish, into which a gushing waste pipe from a nearby factory discharges. Beyond them are rows and rows of windowless, airless, corrugated iron rooms, stacked on top of each other like chicken coops.
Motorists can be expected to pay more for fuel soon as crude prices soared again to nearly $77 a barrel. Turmoil in the international oil markets — due to strong demand, geopolitical instability and a shortage of refining capacity — will put further upward pressure on forecourt prices.