POLICE are holding a cuckolded fifty-year-old Swazi who apparently hacked his wife and her lover to death with an axe over the weekend. The man, of Ka-Langa, a rural village in the rural Lubombo region, killed the couple after catching them having sex in his rival’s house on Saturday night. Finding the adulterous couple having […]

AFP and OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday AIDS-related deaths in South Africa’s prisons increased by about 300% from 1995 to 1999, and are expected to continue to soar, an official with a prisons monitoring group said this week. Natural deaths in prisons had increased from 186 in 1995 to 737 in 1999, with about 90% […]

ALGERIA’S state-run conglomerate Sonatrach expects oil and gas export revenues for this year to reach $20bn, its chairman Abdelhak Bouhafs said this week. Sonatrach’s revenues at the end of the first half of this year stood at $10.2bn, based on a Sahara Blend crude price of $27 a barrel, he added. The figure is well […]

DARREN SCHUETTLER, Johannesburg | Tuesday HARMONY Gold, South Africa’s third biggest gold producer, is considering closing a money-losing shaft after reporting weaker results for the quarter to September. Harmony kicked off South Africa’s gold reporting season with a 30% drop in net earnings, prompting investors to lop nearly nine percent off the company’s share price. […]

BLOODY ethnic clashes which erupted this week in Nigeria’s commercial capital Lagos have spread to other parts of the city, doubling the death toll to 16 people, witnesses said. The latest fighting in the slum district of Orile and earlier clashes in the Ijora district have added another eight deaths to a bloody feud between […]

NIGER’S seasonal meningitis epidemic, which has killed over 1000 people so far this year, slowed in September, official figures showed. Some 35 new cases of meningitis were reported in September, down from 56 new cases in August, although the death toll rose to seven in September from five the previous month. At least 1016 people […]

THE Nigerian Central Bank said it would introduce new currency of 200 naira denomination into the financial system from November 2000. The central bank representative Tony Ede said the samples of the new currency notes, printed by a UK firm, De La Rue, would be presented to President Olusegun Obasanjo and members of his cabinet […]

THE National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) has voted to end a 29-day wage strike at world number one platinum producer Anglo American Platinum (Angloplat). ”The NUM branches met today and the decision was taken to end the strike,” NUM Executive President Zenzeni Zokwana said. Thousands of Angloplat workers have been on strike since September 18 […]

SOUTH Africa’s state-owned power company Eskom has pulled out of a $75m partnership with Gambia’s state power company NAWEC, signed in June, say sources close to the deal. The deal, which had been expected to become operational from September 1, would have seen Eskom bring in equipment and provide senior management, with the World Bank […]

ELLIS MNYANDU, Johannesburg | Tuesday A MASSIVE R1bn investment in South Africa motor manufacturer BMW SA by its parent company two years ago is paying off handsomely, with exports from its Pretoria plant expected to approach R6.5bn this year. Thanks to the investment by parent group BMW AG, the BMW plant in Rosslyn now produces […]