This week’s revelation that senior African National Congress members may have bagged the lucrative foreign-owned stake in Telkom could uncork a debate on empowerment which is simmering in the ruling party. The consortium is led by Andile Ngcaba, the former director general of communications and a powerful ANC personality; Smuts Ngonyama, the party spokesperson and national executive committee member; and businesswoman Gloria Serobe.

”Stellenbosch stands for an idea.” This was the popular intellectual war cry the old Afrikaner Nationalists used to influence and mobilise (rather, immobilise) Afrikanerdom of yore. But the Stellenbosch University of the 21st century stands for a new idea: of being an agent of change, a transformer in co-creating the country all South Africans deserve to live in. It was almost a case of ”too little, too late”.

Students and staff at the University of Stellenbosch have united against a group of alumni, widely described as ”conservative old-timers”, who are opposed to a posthumous honorary doctorate for communist leader and advocate Bram Fischer.
The award has triggered a battle between the university’s council and senate, and the body of graduate students and academic staff, highlighting how deeply divided die volk still is.

Assets belonging to Donovan Moodley, who is accused of murdering Johannesburg student Leigh Matthews, were seized on Thursday, his lawyer said. Jonathan Minnie said Moodley was notified on Thursday morning and the Asset Forfeiture Unit served a court order on him at the Johannesburg prison.

Thousands of child soldiers have been forcibly recruited by Tamil Tiger rebels in Sri Lanka despite a ceasefire called in 2002 between the government and the separatists, Human Rights Watch said on Thursday. The New York-based organisation accused the Tigers of continuing to enlist boys and girls at a rate of more than 100 a month.

To the end, Yasser Arafat kept his subordinates wrangling among themselves for influence and power. The Palestinian leader refused to anoint a successor even as his health declined over recent months. By the time he slipped into a coma, all the Palestinian leadership had to fall back on in deciding how to disperse the many powers that lay in the grip of the one man for 40 years was the law.

Opposition is consolidating within government circles to the bid by a politically influential empowerment consortium for a 15,1%, R7-billion stake in Telkom. The leading figure in the consortium, former director general of communications and Didata chairperson Andile Ngcaba, is described by critics as the architect of a series of sweetheart policies, which protected Telkom’s monopoly and placed Ngcaba himself in pole position to benefit from the deal.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?cg=Insight-National&ao=125423">’New charterists’ face challenge from old</a>