"Flying toilets" are a new phenomenon in Kibera, Kenya’s largest slum, where women and girls are forced to use desperate measures to overcome inadequate sanitation. "We keep our business [faeces] for the evenings. In the dark we wrap it in plastic bags and throw it as far away as possible. These are our flying toilets and our neighbours do the same." How much progress has the world made since all the fanfare of the World Summit in 2002?
Should there be a sunset schedule for affirmative action in industry? Two key black intellectuals — Billiton SA’s Vincent Maphai and the University of Cape Town’s Loyiso Mbabane — have locked horns on this issue. Black economic empowerment (BEE) is now mainstream policy and big business. With much BEE now framed by the Broad-Based BEE Act, there is hot debate about how earlier provisions and policies need to be adapted to fit in with it.
The African Parliament is the glittering prize South Africa is expected to be handed at the African Union summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, this week. AU officials already gathered in the Ethiopian capital say there is only a slim chance that Egypt will grab it when the 53 member states finally vote on who will be awarded the right to host the Parliament.
To date, Zimbabwe’s leading political parties, Zanu-PF and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), have failed to find enough common ground for official talks. For more than a year South African President Thabo Mbeki’s office has told critics that there are talks, or talks about talks, going on. In reality that has turned out to be empty talk. Mugabe is skilfully dancing around Zimbabwe’s issues
while Africa obligingly turns a blind eye.
Tax practitioners draw a sharp distinction between tax avoidance and evasion — the latter is cheating, amounting to fraud, while the former boils down to a taxpayer arranging his or her affairs openly to minimise tax. Much of the tax practitioner’s work consists of drawing contracts to minimise the tax burden.
The 79-member grouping of African, Caribbean and Pacific countries (48 sub-Saharan countries including Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe) known as the ACP bloc wrapped up its latest summit in the Mozambican capital, Maputo, last week, with delegates expressing a willingness to kick-start stalled global trade talks.
Some people are never happy, as Brian Cohen once remarked about an ex-leper. The Springboks have won all three of their home Tests against northern-hemisphere opposition, scoring 13 tries in the process, and yet everyone is queuing up to remind them that the All Blacks and the Wallabies are waiting around the corner.
It is easy to forget that most top cyclists have the physiques of jockeys or bantam-weight boxers. In a long stage race such as the Tour de France, which starts on Saturday, the game is ultimately decided by who can prevail in the high mountains. Tyler Hamilton is fit and ready to challenge Lance Armstrong this year.
Ralf Schumacher marked his 29th birthday on Wednesday knowing that his career with the Williams team may be over. Doctors in Germany said that he sustained two cracked vertebrae when he crashed at the United States Grand Prix on June 20. Doctors have forecast that Schumacher may be unable to race for up to 12 weeks.
Bafana Bafana find themselves having to win the game against Burkina Faso on Saturday in order to keep their destiny in their own hands for the qualifiers of both the African Cup of Nations and World Cup in 2006. All the teams in group two have three points and this weekend’s game against the Burkinabe presents Bafana Bafana with a good chance to pull away from the five other countries.