South African Football Association president Molefi Oliphant is facing the sternest test to his leadership yet. A group of national executive committee (NEC) members that ascended into the soccer body’s hierarchy in October last year openly challenged national office appointments and decision-making processes this week.
Recently, elderly Katrina Mtsweni, of Delmas’s Botleng township, received a surprise visit from President Thabo Mbeki. Mtsweni, who lives in a dilapidated shack in the Mandela B section waited for a lull in Mbeki’s sweet talk before asking him to help repair her leaking, collapsing shack. The very next day, brand-new corrugated iron sheets arrived at her door.
The Democratic Alliance failed to regain most of the hinterland municipalities in the Western Cape it lost to the African National Congress through floor-crossing, despite its aggressive ”Take back your city” campaign. Instead, Patricia de Lille’s Independent Democrats emerged as potential queenmakers in several finely balanced rural municipalities.
Security at Cape Town’s Koeberg nuclear power station is in need of a complete rethink, critics have argued following the government’s announcement that one of the nuclear facility’s generators had been sabotaged. ”Three years ago Greenpeace managed to get people into Koeberg undetected,” Institute of Security Studies military analyst Henry Boshoff said.
No clear winner has emerged in Cape Town’s municipal poll, opening up the prospect of negotiations for a unity government, with smaller parties such as the Independent Democrats and the African Christian Democratic Party in the pound seats. At 1pm on Thursday, the count of 40% of the overall vote showed the Democratic Alliance in the lead at 51% and the African National Congress with 24,6%.
The rape trial of former deputy president Jacob Zuma will finally go ahead on Monday after his lawyers indicated that they would not oppose the appointment of Judge Willem van der Merwe to hear the case. Transvaal division Judge President Bernard Ngoepe announced that Judge van der Merwe, a white Afrikaner best known for sentencing former apartheid hitman Eugene de Kock to life imprisonment in 1996, would preside over the case.
The next five years will be make-or-break for local government. National ministries are being re-examined, the future of provinces hang in the balance, and the structure of municipalities are to be revamped as President Thabo Mbeki seeks a stronger hand over the huge delivery backlogs threatening his legacy.
The Inkatha Freedom Party’s decline was set to continue in KwaZulu-Natal as the African National Congress had gained considerable ground in IFP strongholds by the end of Thursday. At the time of going to press the ANC had 43% of the vote and the IFP was at 45%.
The Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, said on Thursday that he believes al-Qaeda has infiltrated the occupied territories and could further destabilise the region. ”We have indications about a presence of al-Qaeda in Gaza and the West Bank. This is intelligence information. We have not yet reached the point of arrests,” he said.
Africa’s rivers face dramatic disruption that will leave a quarter of the continent severely short of water by the end of the century, according to a global warming study published on Friday. In the first detailed assessment of climate change on the continent’s waterways researchers found that watercourses on the continent are highly sensitive to shifts in rainfall patterns.