I drive through Braamfontein with a photographer looking for someone dragging a supermarket trolley loaded with scrap cardboard or plastic. I want to chat to one of these lonely figures — who really account for South Africa’s record as one of the top waste recyclers. We see a man of medium build relentlessly pulling a heavy flatbed piled high with grey bags along the pedestrian strip of the Nelson Mandela Bridge.
In the early 1990s the African National Congress played a modernising role. South Africa had been held back by the consequences of apartheid, international isolation and a siege economy. From its enthusiastic adoption of information technology to the international exposure of many future leaders, the ANC helped to drive modernisation in areas that went well beyond an expected pre-occupation with racial redress.
Police crowd control methods have again come under the spotlight during the public service strike, with a senior Western Cape trade unionist alleging that police personnel ”have used more violence against strikers than during apartheid”. However, Nehawu provincial secretary Suraya Jawoodeen also conceded that union leaders were battling with increasing worker violence during strike action.
Stubborn, contradictory, a lame duck and surly. These are just some of the words used to describe Thabo Mbeki. But writer Ronald Suresh Roberts takes a different view. Roberts has mounted the first systematic defence of Mbeki’s controversial presidency in a persuasive analysis of the historical and global traditions behind many of Mbeki’s decisions.
It’s 2pm and 16 degrees Celsius. Council workers in green overalls are side by side, unravelling rolls of kikuyu grass on to recently flattened earth. They are involved with what Johannesburg City Parks (JCP) — reality-show style — terms an ”X-treme park makeover” in Wilgeheuwel, near Roodepoort on Johannesburg’s West Rand. The 24-hour makeover is aimed at creating fanfare about the environment.
In 2001/02 state employees received below-inflation pay hikes. But, in the past four years, hikes have been above inflation, though the nominal increase fell from 8,5% in 2003 to 5,3% last year. In addition, working in the public sector is much less lucrative than in the private sector. The median wage for workers with tertiary degrees in the private sector is R8 000. In the public sector it is R6 000.
The private Nelspruit Medi-Clinic has admitted more than 100 public patients for treatment since the strike began — and the government will pay at least some of the heavy costs of private treatment. ”We recognise that there will be emergency admissions from public to private hospitals,” said Nelspruit Medi-Clinic operations director Koert Pretorius.
Despite being publicly lambasted by President Thabo Mbeki, a professor at Groote Schuur hospital is standing by his claims that racial quotas have had a damaging effect on specialist staffing at Western Cape hospitals. And another doctor, who says he is emigrating to Australia because he has hit a career ceiling, has also come forward to point out the omissions in Mbeki’s facts.
South African Communist Party treasurer general Phillip Dexter has warned that a culture of ”revisionism, opportunism, ideological incoherence and factionalism” is consuming the party at the expense of its historical role as a leader of South Africa’s working class. In a hard-hitting paper Dexter writes: ”The party cannot claim to be the vanguard in the revolution when some in it are seen to compromise with and pander to tribalism.”
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