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/ 13 November 2006
I’m late. Very late. The taxi drivers are on strike and blockading the M1. I’ve been granted a coveted interview with Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni. He is stickler for time and I’m getting ready for a tongue-lashing. But the gods are smiling on me and Mboweni is sympathetic with me and mad at the taxis instead. The authorities, he says, should not allow taxi drivers to hold the country to ransom.
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/ 13 November 2006
Of course the word going around when the death of former president PW Botha was announced was: “How could they tell anyway?” The invincible old crocodile had been lounging around at his place in the Wilderness virtually unseen by human eyes, except for his youngish new wife, who popped up from time to time to say that he was not only fit and well but had healthy sexual appetites to boot. She was around to prove it.
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/ 13 November 2006
The United Nations says that international aid work is one of the world’s most hazardous professions, in which humanitarian workers are constantly threatened with — or victims of — kidnappings, harassment, detention and deadly violence. A UN study points out that hundreds of aid workers and UN humanitarian personnel continue to face risks in some of the world’s major trouble spots
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/ 13 November 2006
South Africa seems to be so fixated on black economic empowerment (BEE) that the unprecedented white economic empowerment taking place is either not noticed, simply assumed to be natural, or denied. The fact that it makes for an uncomfortable acronym probably doesn’t help either. When FNB recently released a breakdown of the country’s most wealthy individuals, one headline read: "Many of SA’s super-rich are black."
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/ 13 November 2006
Rumour has it that Tony Leon is leaving the DA to start a new party called the Neo-Malthusians. Its founding credo aims to make all South Africans rich because poor people take up too much space, eat too much food and drink too much water. The new party is inspired by the ideas of political economist Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 postulated that high fertility among the poor was responsible for stripping the Earth’s resources.
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/ 13 November 2006
Australia’s blistering summer has only just begun, but reservoir levels are dropping fast, crop forecasts have been slashed, and great swathes of the continent are entering what scientists this week called a "one-in-1 000-years drought”. With many regions now in their fifth year of drought, the government called an emergency water summit in Canberra.
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/ 13 November 2006
Workers’ skeletons litter the mines of this land. Many of those killed underground were never retrieved; their families never had the opportunity to bury them decently, according to African rituals and tradition. In the worst disasters the recovered mineworkers are often unidentifiable and those families that insist on remains for ritual burials risk interring the wrong body.
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/ 13 November 2006
The poets are unhappy. First I read that Rian Malan saw only sad decay for our future. Then André Brink was being quoted around the globe spreading similar doom and gloom. Malan worried me no end. The last I heard, he was living in Fish Hoek or thereabouts with a person called the Princess, or something like this.
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/ 13 November 2006
The road to Dowa could be any road in rural Malawi. Subsistence farmers scratch out a living from desiccated, exhausted soil and pray for the rains to arrive soon. The blackened stubs of trees are mournful witnesses that this area was verdant indigenous woodland not so long ago. Now their function as recyclers of moisture is lost and the water that evaporates simply disappears. Rainfall has diminished and the rivers have shrunk to muddy trickles.
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/ 13 November 2006
Palestinian student Huda Abu El-Roos enrolled at Bethlehem University in the occupied West Bank in 2003. But Abu El-Roos, who lives in the Gaza Strip, has never set foot inside the campus. Citing security reasons, Israel has prohibited the 21-year-old and nine colleagues from attending classes on occupational therapy in the biblical town.