We all rewrite our personal histories. Putting positive spins on past defeats, deliberately forgetting embarrassing relationships and adapting our views are quintessentially human activities. But it is a far more serious matter when the political history of a head of state is revised and fictionalised, writes Nicoli Nattrass
”Skorokoro”, ”Tata ma chance”, ”Going nowhere slowly” and ”Laduma!” — these are the four environmental scenarios facing South Africa, says the consultancy at the forefront of the government-commissioned report, South Africa Environment Outlook. The report found that the country’s land, atmosphere, marine areas, inland water and biodiversity are already in extremely poor shape.
As an Iranian, it is painful to recall that the Shah’s regime maintained close relations with the apartheid state, despite United Nations sanctions. The Shah supplied 90% of South Africa’s oil and held substantial shares in the Secunda refinery. In turn, the apartheid regime sold yellow cake to Iran and was closely involved in Iran’s nuclear programme, which unlike today was not a targeted programme.
The business management philosophy that one person’s crisis is another’s opportunity may perhaps never have been taken to such bizarre extremes. A plague of two billion mice in central China was described just days ago as being so bad that it resembled a scene from a horror movie, with hillsides turned black with rodents.
Togara Sanyatwe was buried in the West Park cemetery on the edge of Bulawayo at 83 years of age. The headstone reveals nothing more about his life, but he would already have been considered an elder of his community at the time those who now lie around him were being born. They include Zah Zah Ngwenya, who was just 28 at the time of her death on the same day as Sanyatwe.
Tokyo Sexwale’s star is on the rise. He has secured a foothold in at least four major provinces where senior party leaders have been lobbying for his election as ANC president. A “national coordinating committee”, led by Gauteng finance minister Paul Mashatile and national executive committee member Enoch Godongwana, has been meeting once a month since Sexwale announced in May that he would be available for nomination.
Five years is not such a long time for the armies that eyeball each other along the demilitarised zone cutting the Korean peninsula in half. Their guns have been on a hair trigger for more than five decades. In fact, the frozen battlelines are such a feature of the landscape that part of them is now a Cold War theme park.
It’s not just Bin Laden’s deputy turning up on channel as-Sahab last week promising to pulverise the United Kingdom’s honours committee for knighting Salman Rushdie, nor the self-same Ayman al-Zawahiri vowing revenge over the Red Mosque a couple of days later.
Dissident General Laurent Nkunda likes to think of himself as a saviour. This might explain why, as we drive to church on Saturday morning, his security detail includes not only standard issue Kalashnikovs and RPGs, but also a keyboard and eight hymn-singing soldiers.
”If you remove the South African context, BEE is really about a company being a responsible citizen in the environment in which it operates,” says Andile Tlhoaele. ”In South Africa, we incentivise you for doing that.” Tlhoaele, the chief executive of verification agency Inforcomm, a director of the Association of BEE Verification Agencies and a member of the ICT Charter steering committee, is unsurprisingly bullish on BEE.