Now the sun has set, my first memories are of the dawn. I was at London’s Royal Festival Hall that bright May morning in 1997 when the news came through of the Labour landslide. When Tony Blair appeared on an outdoor platform, he was greeted like a dragon-slayer. "A new dawn has broken, has it not?" he asked.
The biggest public service strike in a decade now seems unavoidable. All unions have rejected the government’s paltry offer of a 6% wage increase, with no improvement to other critical conditions of service. Government presented its last offer on May 3. Unions representing more than one million workers refuse to accept salary increases limited to inflation targeting, writes Shireen Pardesi.
Last week the World Bank published a major book on a crucial aspect of development. The problem was its title. The scandal surrounding its president, Paul Wolfowitz, and the pay package he secured for his bank-employee partner means <i>The Many Faces of Corruption</i> has become less a resource for development economists and more a goldmine for satirists.
I heard with a sickening sense of foreboding the news that an airliner had come down somewhere in Central Africa shortly after take-off from Cameroon’s main airport at Douala. Any airliner coming down anywhere in the world fills me with this kind of dread. The feeling is fuelled by hundreds of take-offs and landings across four continents in a long travelling life.
Retailers and agro-processing companies are under investigation by the National Agriculture Marketing Council, which is concerned that these groups may use their "excessive" market power to the detriment of consumers and farmers. These concerns are described in the council’s report on food price trends released last week.
Burundi’s limping peace process could be slowed down further by promises that have allegedly not been kept and growing divisions between the South African mediation team, specialists involved in the negotiations and the main rebel group, Palipehutu-FNL.
For all the talk about a lack of skills in South Africa’s advertising industry, its man of the moment, Groovin Nchabeleng, may just have the answers. Nchabeleng, this year’s AdReview advertising person of the year, also comes in handy when another South African ill, the lack of entrepreneurship, is discussed.
It amuses me that we commentators, analysts and consultants pore over the Broad-Based BEE Codes like technicians studying the manual of a motor vehicle to see how best to make it go. Then along comes a saga like the Holcim empowerment deal to remind us how profoundly political BEE is. Whatever codes and charters say, BEE is not a mere technical matter
As the retail boom continues in South Africa, fears are mounting that the concentration of power in the hands of large retailers and shopping centre landlords is growing unchecked in tandem with excessive mall development, which is wreaking havoc among independent retailers in the country’s CBDs and high streets.
Travelling into Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza Strip, which I visited recently, is like a surreal trip back into an apartheid state of emergency. It is chilling to pass through the myriad checkpoints — more than 500 in the West Bank. They are controlled by heavily armed soldiers, youthful but grim, tensely watching every movement, fingers on the trigger.