Andrew Muchineripi Soccer When a team is hanging on to the slenderest of leads in a two-leg cup tie and has conceded an away goal, the last place in South Africa they want to go is the Independence Stadium in Umtata. The Eastern Cape ground is not going to be a contender when – hopefully […]

The Basic Conditions of Employment Act applies to domestic workers too, writes Belinda Beresford Labour relations, like charity, begin at home. But unlike charitable acts, proper labour relations towards your maid, gardener, chauffeur or childminder are not voluntary. Before crime and emigration became the main topics of conversation among the chattering classes, complaining about domestic […]

Mathews Phosa believes he is doing what he promised the people who voted for the ANC, writes Wally Mbhele He sees himself as a crusader against officials who have given his province the reputation as the most corrupt in the country; a victim of an unfair and persecuting media, even a fall guy for the […]

Bart Luirink A bronze bust depicting Dutch Nazi collaborator Jacob van Tilburg has been consigned to oblivion in the basement of the University of Pretoria (UP), but controversy is still raging about his art collection on display on the campus. The collection was in all likelihood stolen from Dutch Jews deported from Holland during World […]

Ferial Haffajee This week’s rate cut is a drop in the ocean. Wednesday’s decrease in the repo rate will have little significance for wider South Africa because commercial lenders are unlikely to follow suit immediately. But the small cut – one-quarter of a percentage point – in the interest rate at which the Reserve Bank […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Friday 11.00am. TWO local golfers, looking for their first wins as professionals, set new course records of nine-under 62s at the Royal Johanesburg West on Thursday, when they shot their way to the top of the second-round leaderboard in the Gauteng leg of the Vodacom series. Ryan Dryer (26) and John […]

battleground On October 23 1942, the battle of El Alamein began. James Ambrose Brown, a young soldier, carried into battle a diary in which he recorded the horror of all he saw This year there will be no old soldiers at the graves of comrades who died at the battle of El Alamein. Like those […]

indifference Mark Atkinson in Washington When Asian currencies collapsed last year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank came to the rescue with multi-billion-dollar bail- outs. Since 1985, when Tanzania began implementing its IMF structural adjustment programme, the local currency, the shilling, has devalued by 1 500%, yet the country will not qualify […]

Steve Gordon South African musicians at home and abroad will be saddened to learn of the death last week of guitarist Russell Herman, who died in London, where he had been living since the early 1980s. Born in Cape Town in 1953, Herman grew up in District Six, and was an integral part of the […]

Tangeni Amupadhi Randburg’s public prosecutor struggled this week to determine whether he could prosecute the managing director of Legacy Merchant Bank, Douglass Fliess, on the bizarre charge of stealing a garden. Charges relating to the theft of plants and malicious damage to property were laid against Fliess by property agents Gary Bruyns Properties on behalf […]