Howard Barrell: OVER A BARREL If we do begin to make dramatic inroads into unemployment in South Africa in the near future, we can probably be sure of one thing: the presidential Jobs Summit this week will have had very little to do with it. For, as one postponement of the get- together followed another […]

Wally Mbhele Winnie Madikizela-Mandela stands accused of being central to the formation and activities of the Mandela United Football Club, whose members were involved in at least 18 cold-blooded murders. In a harsh judgment on her association with the football club, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) final report said most Mandela United operations were […]

David Shapshak Debt relief topped the agenda at the Second Tokyo International Conference on African Development between October 19 and 21, when Japan announced a grant bail-out for some African countries. This was perhaps the most significant and concrete achievement of the conference, which adopted an ambitious “agenda for action” to halve the present levels […]

Wonder Hlongwa It was handing over my autobank card and pin number that convinced me my visit to a loan shark was not going to be pleasant. A friend had told me that loan sharks were the quickest moneylenders in the city. The sign at the one in Braamfontein certainly seemed to back this up: […]

Paul Farrely: SHARE WORLD The irony is delicious. The despair in markets the world over has just made Wall Street’s biggest optimist very, very rich indeed. Last week, Abby Joseph Cohen, cool- headed chief investment strategist at Goldman Sachs and the United States’s most influential market guru, finally claimed one of the biggest prizes on […]

Alex Duval Smith in Lagos Never mind the military regime’s promises of free elections. Never mind the international community’s endorsement. What 100-million Nigerians want to know is: what would Fela Kuti have said? The hard-living, outspoken inventor of afrobeat, who died last year and would have been 60 this Thursday, left behind both a musical […]

Gail Smith With everyone clamouring for the attention and income of the youth market (the black is silent), The Kwaito Storm is an event-in-waiting. Set to take place on Saturday night, October 31, at Johannesburg’s Electric Workshop, it promises to bring together some of the hippest, most happening of the blackoisie, kwaito’s latest and greatest, […]

South Africa supports the aims of Jubilee 2000, but it seems we don’t qualify for debt relief. Ann Eveleth reports Each year the South African government spends as much money paying interest on its R338-billion debt as it does on education, but the Department of Finance insists there is no easy way out. Jubilee 2000 […]

Maureen Barnes Down the tube Of all the irritating things about SABC TV, I think the one which bothers me the most is its inflexibility – a hangover, like so many aspects of the present service, from the previous policy-makers. SABC3 decided – and please don’t think I’m knocking this decision – that on Saturday […]