Professional hunters are capitalising on the Kruger National Park’s growing elephant population by selling "canned" elephant hunts to wealthy American clients. Police and conservation officials are investigating the "hunting" of a Kruger bull within hours of its delivery to a safari outfit in North West province.
February 26 2004. Johannesburg. The date and place where the seeds of the ongoing match-fixing scandal in South African football were sown. The event was a meeting of the Premier Soccer League (PSL) executive committee — made up of club chairmen and other club officials — at the PSL headquarters in Doornfontein. The meeting was called to discuss a spate of bad refereeing decisions.
Second-hand book dealers, old-age homes and a whole assortment of so-called ”secondary merchants” are all eagerly awaiting the forthcoming Government Publications Warehouse Sales. As each fulfilling decade of the South African rainbow democracy comes to an end, government storage houses will be kicking off the next 10 years with a major clean-out. I managed to get a look at some.
"A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday " — Alexander Pope (1688 to 1744). By happy synchronicity, the above quotation popped up on the Wordsmith website the very morning I was starting on this column. It couldn’t have been better suited to my subject.
South Africa’s best prospects for growing employment lies in sectors that export primary products to rapidly industrialising countries such as China and India, suggests a new labour market analysis by the Reserve Bank. These include food and coal, according to Labour Market Frontiers, published last week.
The arrival of a new premium beer and spirits distributor in South Africa may give SABMiller some grey hairs on the yuppie beer front. This week saw the launch of Brandhouse, a three-way joint venture between Diageo, Heineken and Namibian Breweries. The company will distribute premium beer brands including Heineken, Windhoek and Guinness, and whiskies Johnnie Walker, J&B and Bells.
At this week’s annual gathering of leaders of the most troubled continent on the globe, a little change — better still, reduction — in conflict would have been welcome. But there they were again in Addis Ababa. The usual suspects. Sudan and DRC emerged at the top of the African Union’s list of hot spots.
Political office has never been for the faint-of-heart. Getting into office is often a dirty business, and staying there a trying one. There’s no denying, however, that legislators from developing countries — in the case of this article, Zimbabwe — face a particularly challenging set of circumstances.
Many of us would feel a lot better if President Thabo Mbeki, the most credible and influential leader in the region, would phone Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and give him a firm and irrevocable deadline to move out of office. It would enable us to feel that the fundamental human rights values,for which we fought in the struggle against apartheid, are alive and well. The problem is that South African foreign policy does not work like that.
The last time The Open Championship visited Royal Troon Colin Montgomerie was the hottest golfer in Europe. Over the past three years two South African golfers — Ernie Els and Retief Goosen — have usurped Montgomerie’s hegemony of the European Order of Merit. Last week Goosen leapfrogged Els to lead the standings.