Three million children will die in the poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa as a result of the failure of the global community to meet its promise of slashing the death rates of the under-fives by 2015, the United Nations will reveal on Thursday.
Schabir Shaik’s case links back to the Hefer commission, and goes forward to Deputy President Jacob Zuma. The saga also goes further, to what President Thabo Mbeki should be doing, and this is the story the media should be chasing. All the way. It’s time to get beyond the last-gasp cliché’s like "shaken, rattled and rolled over".
How does a society rehabilitate a 14-year-old rapist? In South Africa, we don’t. We lock children like this up. Put them away, run them through the criminal justice system and turn them into hardened criminals. But is this an effective and humane way to deal with children?
If you asked someone to list 10 words they associate with South Africa, "crime" would almost certainly be among them. With 35 000 young people under the age of 21 currently awaiting trial or sentenced and imprisoned, it would seem that lawlessness is going to be a defining feature of South Africa for a long time to come.
In my two previous columns, I looked at the basics of education. What is basic about education, and what is basic to accomplishing it? The answers, I said, revolve around the tight connection among three familiar terms: learning, change and leadership. Education is most fundamentally about learning.
Clinics in rural areas often have hundreds of pamphlets on health issues, but very few of these well-intended leaflets reach their target audience. About 30% of South African adults are functionally illiterate and this figure is often higher in rural communities where many pamphlets end up as fuel for the household fire.
It’s hard to imagine, from our modern vantage point of mass censorship, "Homeland Security" Gestapo-like control, Pentagon-funded war films and propaganda disguised as Hollywood product — but, for a brief moment in the 1970s, film in general was allowed to reflect accurately the distaste and revulsion for the government and the military that seems almost impossible to imagine today.
Maria Mogotsi* works as a domestic worker in Johannesburg and is responsible for the education of seven children — her own five plus two of her deceased brother’s children. While Mogotsi is determined that all seven should get a decent education, the total monthly school-fees bill takes a huge chunk of her salary.
For 48 years Boys Town has worked to stamp out a reputation for itself as one of the country’s landmark institutions for the residential care for boys. In February, the Alpha Family Home for Girls opened its doors in Claremont, Cape Town, to its first intake of five girls. The home can now accommodate 10 girls.
”We are opposed to the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. We are equally opposed to the, at best, misguided, at worst, immoral attempts by the Association of University Teachers to boycott the Israeli academic community,” writes Professor David Newman and Benjamin Pogrund, former deputy editor of the Rand Daily Mail .