If anyone has ever had a raw deal from the print media it is this wretched man, Lawrence Mushwana. Just like many other victims of the poisoned word processors of today’s journalists, our Public Protector has recently been all but hanged, drawn and quartered in a series of viciously unbalanced newspaper articles.
Johannesburg authorities responsible for the power supply have clashed over who is to blame for the frequent outages in the city. City Power says that insufficient funding provided by the City of Johannesburg before the 2003/04 financial year had tied its hands in the upgrading of the aging network.
Old Mutual’s short-term growth prospects will not be severely harmed if its planned acquisition of Swedish insurer Skandia fails to materialise. This is according to Julian Roberts, the group’s financial director. Roberts spoke to the <i>Mail & Guardian </i>after the group unveiled its interim results for the six months to June.
Barclays recently secured 56,1% control of Absa at a cost of about R31-billion, leaving black economic empowerment consortium Batho Bonke as the second largest shareholder, with 10%. Batho Bonke’s impeccable timing has gifted it a more than R3-billion theoretical profit on its Absa share options.
An empowerment consortium led by former justice minister Penuell Maduna is poised to take a R2,5-billion stake in Uhambo, the fuel refining and retail giant that will be created if Sasol’s fuel business is permitted to merge with Engen. Maduna is expected shortly to announce the structure of his Tshwarino consortium.
Am I the only one squirming with discomfort at the recent trend for black men and women to declare "well of course, I’m not an affirmative action appointment"? When did affirmative action (AA) become a dirty word? The affirmative action policies enshrined in our law were never intended as an insult, yet black people are eschewing the title with a ferocity that is astounding.
The Cape High Court has found the Cape Town municipality guilty of unfair discrimination after it refused to employ a diabetic as a fireman. The court, in the precedent-setting case, in July ruled that the council was wrong not to give John Murdoch (31), an insulin-dependent diabetic, a job if the only reason for the decision was that he suffered from the "type one" variety of the chronic illness.
When Stephen Lussier, head of marketing at De Beers, visited China in 1989 to see if this could be the new market for diamond jewellery, he found it a depressing experience. ”There were no shops selling diamond jewellery. When I talked to people they had some vague knowledge of American film stars wearing diamonds. I left thinking it was going to be a long haul,” he says.
When the bustle went out of fashion, the average woman must have felt joyously liberated, permitted as she was to stand and sit without a huge lump of horsehair wedged above her bottom. And when corsets were released, so that underwear no longer meant asphyxiation, she would doubtless have embraced the liberty bodice as a symbol of emancipation.
The most heroic figures of last week were the astronauts crawling around the edge of the space shuttle to repair the craft in which they must return to the Earth 400km below. It’s an extraordinary testament to the defeated and sunless mood that we seem to be in that this was treated everywhere as a defeat.