JUSTIN ARENSTEIN, Nelspruit | Thursday MPUMALANGA’S cash-strapped provincial administration has grounded all government vehicles, except emergency or other essential services, until March 2001 as part of a package of extraordinary cost curtailment measures. Provincial government official spokeswoman Joy Letlonkane also confirmed that government landline and cellular telephone expenses would be cut dramatically and the use […]

HUNGRY firemen and emergency officers in Swaziland are threatening to go on strike to force the government to feed them at work. A representative said that since September 30 emergency personnel were expected to cook their own food after the caterers were dismissed. Emergency officers had already agreed not to respond to emergencies while they […]

SIZWE SAMAYENDE and JUSTIN ARENSTEIN, Middelburg | Thursday AFRICAN National Congress (ANC) councillors in Middelburg, Mpumalanga, have ousted the city’s proposed executive mayor in a clear show of defiance against the party’s national leadership. The revolt is the most extreme protest yet by disgruntled provincial ANC members who are campaigning against the party’s national executive […]

BRIAN LIGOMEKA, Grahamstown | Wednesday AFRICA’S growing debt burden is largely due to poor or corrupt political leadership and reckless economic management, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said this week. IMF programme co-ordinator for southern Africa, El Tigani Ibrahim, said increasing numbers of African countries were struggling to service debt repayments because their political leaders […]

RENEWED heavy fighting between government troops and insurgents has driven at least 94 000 desperate people to flee the Kissidougou region of southern Guinea in two days, the UN refugee agency said. The desperate plight of hundreds of thousands of local people and refugees caught up in the conflict in Guinea’s border area was a […]

THREE people have drowned and four others are missing after heavy rains and floods in the eastern and northern parts of South Africa at the weekend, police said. In KwaZulu-Natal a policeman was washed away while trying to wade through the swollen Qwasha river, witnesses said, while rescue workers found the bodies of three taxi […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Arusha, Tanzania | Thursday THE United Nations’ chief war crimes prosecutor says two African countries – suspected to be Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo – are sheltering some of the most wanted suspects of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. Carla Del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and […]

OWN CORRESPONDENTS, Harare | Thursday ZIMBABWEAN president Robert Mugabe has lashed out at his country’s courts, the British government and South Africa opposition leader Tony Leon in a belligerent display preceding his ruling ZANU-PF party’s convention. Mugabe vowed to press ahead with his controversial land seizure plan, attacking the judiciary for trying to protect ”white […]

LONDON based property and financial services firm Liberty International has secured a 730m pound 15 year non-recourse term and revolving loan facility. The facility will allow it to retire some short-term debt and invest more in the shopping centre portfolio of its subsidiary Capital Shopping Centres Plc. – Reuters

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Windhoek | Thursday NAMIBIAN President Sam Nujoma has announced plans to repossess under-utilised commercial land to resettle thousands of landless blacks, but his government has ruled out Zimbabwe-style land grabs. ”Land that is not being effectively utilised must be repossessed by the state in accordance with the law,” Nujoma said in an address […]