There will have to come a point when South Africans stop being black, white, Indian and Coloured and are merely South Africans, Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota said on Tuesday. ”When will we cease to be Africans, coloureds, Indians and whites and merely South Africans? This is the question we must ask ourselves,” said Lekota while briefing the parliament’s portfolio committee on defence.
The stench of the place is evident for kilometres around. Nonetheless, people of all ages, mostly men, can be seen scurrying around the Mbeubeuss dump site near Senegal’s capital, Dakar, salvaging anything that can be sold. Belatedly, authorities have recognised the 24-year-old dump site as an environmental hazard.
Former South African president Nelson Mandela announced his retirement from public life on Tuesday.
The state may be able to speed up a 19-year-old’s High Court trial for the murder of a baby girl, the rape and murder of her mother, the murder of her grandmother and the rape of a teenager, a state advocate said on Tuesday. On Monday, a belligerent William Kekana swore at cameramen and media before the trial began.
The JSE Securities Exchange South Africa (JSE) was in negative territory in noon trade on Tuesday, led by heavyweight dual-listed stocks which were dragged down by the stronger rand. Trade was thin — just more than half-a-billion-rand-worth of shares had changed hands — and lack of buying interest contributed to the weakness.
A two-hour boat ride across windswept Algoa Bay from Port Elizabeth lies Bird Island, the site of the largest breeding colony of gannets in the world. Bird Island is managed by SA National Parks, which also looks after three smaller adjacent islands — Stag, Seal and Black Rocks. They estimate there are 169 000 gannets on the island.
A former Libyan intelligence agent jailed for 27 years over the 1988 bombing of a United States airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, has won the right to appeal, legal authorities said on Monday. Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was sentenced last November to a minimum 27-year prison term, which the public prosecution is set to appeal for being unduly lenient.
The Health Department would not be suspending anti-retroviral programmes for children as had been reported in the media, a spokesperson said on Tuesday. However, it had warned participating hospitals to make sure they had enough supplies of the medication before enrolling new patients, spokesperson Sibani Mngadi said.
Strategic plans quantifying the size of the South African labour force in the next decade are expected to be in place by 2005, says the deputy director general for public finance in the national treasury, Andrew Donaldson. Donaldson said the modeling work on how to reduce unemployment over the next decade "has not been worked out in detail yet".
A man charged with the kidnapping, attempted murder, indecent assault and rape of a six-year-old girl pleaded not guilty in the Johannesburg High Court on Monday. The girl was raped and disembowelled in the veld near Alexandra in September 2002. She underwent emergency surgery after the incident.