As the massive irregularities in the Nigerian presidential poll come into focus, it has emerged that South African companies were asked at the eleventh hour to print ballot papers that often did not reach polling stations in time. A local printer says it declined a request four days ahead of the poll to print the bulk of the presidential ballots.
A crucial official inquiry into the activities of Palto, the controversial reservist unit that allegedly had direct access to police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi, could be stymied by the disappearance of important court records. Palto was set up in late 1999 by Paul Stemmet, a bodyguard, karate expert and captain in the police reserve.
The ANC Youth League has warned some of its leaders against manipulating the 50/50 gender quota for their personal leadership interests. The league appeared to be taking a swipe at President Thabo Mbeki’s call for the next president of the country to be a woman. The current gender quota in the ANC calls for 30% of leaders to be women.
The woes of government’s massive housing flagship, Cape Town’s N2 Gateway, refuse to go away. The United Nations’s special rapporteur on adequate housing, Miloon Kothari, wrapped up a two-week visit to South Africa, saying he found it “distressing” that the R3,1-billion scheme was so “chaotic”.
The first sound you hear is a bright, solitary trumpet. Then comes a rumbling tuba, rattling drums and the familiar refrain of John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever. A behemoth of a guitar riff lumbers in with a flurry of banjo, a skirl of bagpipes, a battery of percussion and squeals of brass overlaid until they sound like a stampede of panicking elephants. And on it goes, like the devil’s own mix tape.
A hard-hitting document by former Mpumalanga premier Matthews Phosa criticising the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) for being compromised by party politics was held back “for sterilisation” by the ANC’s top brass, an ANC leader has told the Mail & Guardian.
Former National Intelligence Agency boss Billy Masetlha has subpoenaed African National Congress (ANC) secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe to hand over the ruling party’s ”hoax” email report. The report, sealed and classified as confidential, will form part of Masetlha’s defence in his fraud trial in July.
“To be very simplistic I am a South African because black people like me survived police brutality and I am South African because I am a child of Mandela,” laughs writer and artist Zweli Twalo, a self-professed Rastafarian and co-founder of Sounds of Edutainment. Twalo is one of the professionals we asked to describe their national identities.
The Barracuda nightclub in Port Harcourt, the main city in the oil-rich Niger Delta region, was empty last weekend. The oilmen who usually pack the place on Friday and Saturday nights had been evacuated from the city or been placed under ”lockdown” in their compounds for what was expected to be a volatile election period.
Up to 400 000 people may have fled fighting in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, the United Nations’s humanitarian chief said on Thursday, warning that aid had reached less than a fifth of the refugees. The UN refugee agency said last Friday that an estimated 321 000 Somalis had fled Mogadishu since the beginning of February.