How cool would it be to own and drive a car in Johannesburg which is emission free? One of the reasons South Africa is a disproportionately large contributor on a per capita basis to the build-up of greenhouse gases is the fact that the country has an under-developed public transport system.
Everything we have been told about the Olympic legacy turns out to be bunkum. The games are supposed to encourage us to play sport; they are meant to produce resounding economic benefits and help the poor. It’s all untrue. As the evictions in London begin, a new report shows that the only certain Olympic legacy is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
The CIA, faced with the impossibility of infiltrating white Americans into radical groups in the Middle East, is recruiting Arab-speaking Sudanese citizens, in spite of sanctions against the country over the killings in Darfur, it emerged this week. Sudanese recruits have been providing information about individuals passing through Sudan to Somalia and elsewhere in the the Horn of Africa and Iraq.
Described as "one of the biggest economic phenomena of the last decade", the astonishing speed at which South Africa has become the largest investor in the rest of Africa has eclipsed even the recent surge in interest from non-African investors such as China. Following a gradual increase on the continent after 1994, investment opportunities have taken off in the past five years.
Some mining companies dispute that billions have been lost in mining investment in South Africa, as reported this week. They argue that while there may have been delays because of the new Mineral Petroleum and Resources Development Act, there has not been a loss in investment and the Act has brought about an increase in exploration in South Africa.
UNAids is careful in its assessment: "Without question, we absolutely have to ensure that men and women are aware that male circumcision is not a ‘magic bullet’ — it does not provide total protection and it does not mean people can stop taking the safe sex precautions they were already using."
When George W Bush appeared at the White House correspondents’ dinner last year beside an impersonator, everyone other than those at the front tables had trouble telling who was who. A new cartoon that debuted on Wednesday night on the American cable channel Comedy Central could pose the same dilemma.
South Africa’s peaceful democratic transition confounds Afro-pessimistic views that the continent is doomed. Yet the "Rainbow Nation" is still struggling to come to terms with the HIV/Aids epidemic — a crisis with long-term consequences for its political economy and the sustainability of Africa’s states and societies.
Africa’s ever-recurring armed conflicts and civil wars and the new waves of globalisation in the post-Cold War era have accentuated the marginalisation of a continent so severely that it is now at the periphery of the periphery of the world. The failure to deconstruct and reconstruct Africa’s inherited colonial economy has exacerbated centuries-old dependence and dispossession.
In 1986 Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui called for a metaphorical bridge across the Red Sea that would reintegrate Africa with Arabia several million years after a natural cataclysm had torn the Arabian Peninsula from the rest of Africa. He noted that, just as in the view of continental pan-Africanists, the Sahara desert is a sea of communication linking states below the Sahara with their neighbours above the desert, so the Red Sea could become a similar bridge.