From Africa, black economic empowerment, commodities and China to Jacob Zuma, exchange controls and volatility, Investec Asset Management director Jeremy Gardiner looks at 26 issues affecting the economic future of South Africa and its residents.
South Africa’s euphoria after their victory in what has been hailed as the greatest one-day game of all time was officially declared over by coach Mickey Arthur ahead of the first Test against Australia starting at Newlands on Thursday. ”We spent the morning talking about it,” said Arthur on Tuesday.
The Pebble Bed Modular Reactor’s (PBMR) fuel division announced on Wednesday that it had awarded a design contract worth R10,5-million to a South African design house, Thermtron Projects, in a crucial second step in the PBMR fuel manufacturing technology, to prove sustainability on an industrial scale.
It is important that people are well informed about just what to do in an accident. When an accident happens, people often make mistakes and forget to do the basics because they’re so traumatised, says Caroline da Silva, head of commercial underwriting at Santam.
Swine fever has been detected at Uitenhage in the Nelson Mandela Metro and about a thousand pigs will be culled this week, the South African Broadcasting Corporation reported on Wednesday. Road blocks have been set up around KwaNobuhle in Uitenhage in an effort to contain it, but this measure does not seem to work as the disease has continued to spread throughout the province.
Property in the vicinity of Rosebank, Park and Sandton railway stations will be the first to be expropriated to make way for the Gautrain line, the Gauteng government said on Tuesday. Land in Midrand will also be expropriated for the construction of the maintenance depot and land in Marlboro for the tunnel portal.
Sony will delay the launch of the PlayStation 3 by half a year until November, a report said on Wednesday, boosting Microsoft’s efforts to win a bigger share of the multibillion-dollar video game industry. The next-generation home video game console is one of Sony’s core products and its success against Microsoft’s already-launched Xbox 360 is considered vital to its revival after a profit slump.
In his office in Peshawar’s historic Mohabat Khan mosque, prayer leader Maulana Yousaf Qureshi smoothes his beard from the white roots to the henna-orange tips. "There’s no time limit. If someone kills the cartoonist in 50 years he will still get the million dollars," he says.
Black ownership of companies trading on the JSE remained at only 7%, Business Report said on Wednesday. It quoted the BusinessMap Foundation as saying this figure was about 18% points off the government’s 2014 ownership target of 25%.
Ambitious plans to reform the United Nations in the wake of the oil-for-food scandal and the Iraq schism have yet to amount to much. But one issue on which world leaders attending last September’s summit in New York did agree was the need to strengthen UN monitoring, protection and enforcement of universal standards of human rights.