Bongani Nxumalo ”stole” a firearm from a relative to carry out the robbery that put him in jail for five years. Another firearm, from a friend, was only a call away. ”Guns are easy to get,” he said in an interview recently. Soft-spoken Nxumalo was recently paroled from the Emthonjeni juvenile section of Pretoria’s Baviaanspoort Correctional Centre.
You would expect the driver of a cash-transporting truck to be a big, robust guy, but Elijah Gumbi is thin and old for his 42 years. He limps, dragging his heavy security guard’s boots across the tiles at Coin Security’s offices in Centurion. Softly spoken and everybody’s pal, Gumbi looks as if he wouldn’t hurt a fly. At Coin Security’s Pretoria branch, however, he is the longest-serving and most trusted driver.
The misty West Coast town of Port Nolloth is in an uproar over the eight-year jail term handed out to a popular resident for racketeering. But the case does not seem to have dented business in South Africa’s gem smuggling capital. Antonio Cesar Alves dos Santos was convicted and sentenced in the Cape High Court last month after an 18-month Scorpions probe.
With share prices of listed property collapsing by 20% on the back of the rate hike in June and fears of future rate hikes, retail investors bailed out of the sector, according to the latest figures from the Association of Collective Investments. For the quarter ending June, investors were net sellers of unit trust real estate funds to the tune of R500-million.
The disappearance of dozens of firearms issued to the Durban metro police department has blown wide open the haphazard management of arms and ammunition by municipal police services. State-issued firearms have been used in robberies and hijackings in Durban and surrounds, fuelling fears that criminals are buying guns from corrupt police officers.
Some may wonder how, as a man of the left and Israel’s peace camp, I can at the same time be a member of a government now fighting a war in Lebanon. The answer is the same one Clement Attlee or Harold Wilson would have given: when your very existence is under threat, you have the right to defend yourself, writes Isaac Herzog.
When the De Beers black economic empowerment deal was announced last year, Cheryl Carolus could be described as not being "one of the usual suspects". Not now. In a short time Carolus, former ambassador to London and darling of those nostalgic for the optimistic non-racialism of the United Democratic Front, has become a firm BEE favourite.
"There’s a lot of excitement and anticipation here; there’s a buzz," electoral observer Ilona Tip tells me on her cellphone from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) capital, Kinshasa. "It reminds me of South Africa in 1994. The stakes are also fairly high and in the conflict since 1998, 3,5-million people have died."
Five years ago, in an article titled "Scent of the plague", published in the <i>Mail & Guardian</i> (June 29 2001), I summarised my experiences as a doctor working in a health service faced with the plague of HIV infection among children in South Africa. I wrote about how difficult it was to break the news of a deadly infection to the parents, whose likely HIV status was revealed by the illness of their baby.
To avert a chaotic collapse of four years of global trade talks, the Director General of the World Trade Organisation Pascal Lamy, announced recently a slightly more dignified "suspension”. A postmortem may be premature — in the words of the Indian Trade Minister, Kamal Nath, the round is not dead, merely "between intensive care and the crematorium”.