“Another storm is brewing,” says Marcus Balintulo, the new vice-chancellor of Walter Sisulu University, with a stoic forbearance that three months at the crisis-ridden institution appear to have already tested. He is referring to the staff demand of a 10% salary hike this year, but the comment is an equally apt description of the turbulence he faces in trying to ensure the university’s overall survival.
The N2 Gateway housing project in Cape Town is literally cracking up and in some places falling apart because of substandard workmanship. The Rental Tribunal Office in Cape Town has confirmed that it is “inundated by complaints” from residents who moved into the housing complex less than six months ago.
The African National Congress (ANC) task team investigating the ”hoax” email saga has found the email messages to be genuine, the Mail & Guardian can exclusively reveal. The investigators identified those they considered responsible — but could not release their names after the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) rejected the report at its weekend meeting.
Insult has been added to injury for the 24-year-old woman who survived a horrific gang rape in a cell at the Volksrust police station last month. First the prosecution of the police on duty that night was bungled by poor investigation, now she is being forced to pay a R50 fine for public drunkenness.
Arbitrators have dismissed a claim by the SA Post Office for the return of R31-million it believes it overpaid on a project to revamp branches, saying the parastatal had only itself to blame. The arbitration ruling accentuates the breakdown of corporate governance at the post office — an issue also tackled by Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri.
Senior members of the Italian Mafia have obtained an interest in Namibia’s nascent diamond-cutting industry, using front companies to buy an existing but unused diamond-cutting and polishing licence, an 18-month-long investigation has revealed. Company documents show that the Italian criminal syndicate appears to have been aided and abetted in obtaining their licences by Sam Nujoma’s youngest son.
Almost half a century of communist rule has saved Havana’s eclectic architecture from the urban developer’s bulldozer, but a lack of repair has taken a ruinous toll on its neo-Baroque and Art Deco gems. Dozens of colonial buildings and beautiful squares in Old Havana have been restored since the United Nations cultural agency, Unesco, designated it a world heritage site in 1982.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said recently that the global tuberculosis epidemic may be leveling off, but this optimism is undermined by the reality of incomplete detection of the disease, high levels of mortality and poor information about the extent of drug resistant forms of the disease.
There is an ANC branch in Randburg named after the late Bram Fischer. Recently it held a gala dinner to celebrate being named the best performing ANC branch of the year. The branch takes its work seriously. It has an impressive recruitment programme in an area of Johannesburg not generally regarded as an ANC stronghold.
I nuzzled her downy cheek, sniffed her hair and held her close. I felt choked with anger. I wanted to howl. But instead, I smiled; I wanted my 22-month-old daughter to remember me that way. Then I stoically handed her over to my steely-eyed mother-in-law who delivered her to the adoption agency, writes Pat Devereaux.