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/ 6 February 2004
A wireless internet portal will soon be available in South Africa — a step towards bridging the "digital divide". According to a Unicef report released late last year, only 35% of the population had phones and a mere 6% had internet access in 2001.
MyWireless by Sentech, to be introduced over the next few months, will end the need for phone lines to connect to the internet.
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/ 6 February 2004
The UN’s top nuclear official called for a new international regime to destroy the flourishing black market in nuclear technology on Thursday, describing current controls as ”kaput”. Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, said the trade in the technology was now a dangerous ”supermarket”.
The <i>Mail & Guardian</i> reveals how the African National Congress, through its close association with an empowerment oil trader, joined a dangerous courtship dance with the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. The story raises important questions about party funding and the extent to which our ruling party may be prepared to use its access to state power to get more of it.
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/ 6 February 2004
"I’d never been skiing. I’d tried ice-skating once, but spent the whole horrible half-hour clinging to the bar at the side of the rink, my ankles shaking either through feebleness, fear or both. So when I was told that even I could learn to cross-country ski in three days, I was sceptical." There’s more to skiing than plunging down snow-covered slopes, as Dea Birkett found out.
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/ 6 February 2004
”We are marching because we are concerned about the serious threat to health care in this country. It is the inability to pay doctors better — we are losing our experienced doctors.” Angry doctors will march on Parliament on Friday, the day of the State of the Nation address. Dr Kgosi Letlape, chairperson of the South African Medical Association, speaks out.
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/ 6 February 2004
The late black consciousness leader Steve Biko once said "no average black man can ever at any moment be absolutely sure that he is not breaking a law." This year we celebrate 10 years since South Africa officially became a non-racial country, so I would like to believe that Biko’s observations have spread to people of other hues, writes Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya.
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/ 6 February 2004
Opposition parties in Africa are always complaining that governments, secure in overwhelming majorities in their legislatures, ride roughshod over them. But many Southern African politicians point out that it is also crucial that opposition parties present themselves as credible — and better — alternatives to the existing governments.
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/ 6 February 2004
New legislation aimed at bringing financial services within the reach of South Africa’s estimated 17-million "unbanked" adult citizens is in the pipeline. The Dedicated Banks Bill is currently being fast-tracked by the government and could be on the statute books as early as next year.
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/ 6 February 2004
About 40% of the South African adult population — or about 11-million people — have at least one basic bank account, a South African Reserve Bank publication has estimated. This compares poorly with the number of "banked" Americans — about 90% of the total population.
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/ 6 February 2004
Privatisation in South Africa lost momentum last year as the ruling African National Congress deferred to its trade union ally, suggests a new report by the BusinessMap Foundation. The government frequently cites the poor market conditions and state of the global economy as reasons for not pressing ahead with privatisation.