Sechaba ka’Nkosi National electricity supplier Eskom and local authorities are fighting an uphill battle against the booming illegal business of “alternative” electricity supply. It’s alternative, say its practitioners, because most residents whose power has been cut by town councils for non-payment prefer to use their services rather than paying the R650 reconnection fee. The practice […]
Lizeka Mda The challenge to South Africa’s abortion legislation being heard next week in the Pretoria High Court pays little attention to the needs and desires of South Africa’s women. On Monday, three groupings – the Christian Lawyers Association of Southern Africa, Christians for Truth in South Africa and United Christian Action – challenge the […]
Neil Manthorp Cricket The first Texaco Trophy one-day international was played on Thursday. The squad now travels in their luxury coach (with microwave, kettle, fridge and toilet) to Old Trafford, Manchester, and Headingley, Leeds, for the second and third matches on Saturday and Sunday. Although the smart money is on South Africa to win, it […]
Duncan Mackay Hassiba Boulmerka When Hassiba Boulmerka arrived home in Algiers after her 1E500m victory at the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, she expected a heroine’s welcome. Instead she was booed and jeered by Islamic Fundamentalists who objected to her running in shorts and vest. “For Muslim women I symbolise freedom but, believe me, many people […]
The South African pharmaceutical industry has been greatly expounded in the media in the past few months. The reason is not, however, as a result of the sector’s amazing rise in share prices, but as a consequence of frequent government intervention. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange pharmaceutical index has risen from a December 1997 low of […]
The response this week from state health officials to our story that some of their former psychiatric patients have been killing people is instructive. Valkenberg hospital, which treated and released the patients, says such tragedies in other countries prompt, at the very least, a full-blown commission of inquiry. Not so here. The Western Cape provincial […]
David Newnham Runny nose, annoying cough and a sore throat that won’t go away? Time was when your doctor would recommend a good holiday. But today, the question “When were you last on an aeroplane?” is more likely to pinpoint the source of an infection than suggest a cure. The practice of recirculating cabin air […]
Ferial Haffajee ‘We are not going to eradicate poverty in a decade,” says Minister of Welfare Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi. It’s a very new song she is singing. Fraser-Moleketi is the young minister responsible for breathing life into what used to be a “by-the-way” ministry run by the National Party’s Abie Williams. “This is a powerful ministry. […]
Ferial Haffajee In KwaZulu-Natal a community of women risk getting eaten by crocodiles and bitten by snakes. It’s the peril they face on their daily trek to collect water. Other women told the poverty hearings in other provinces that they are raped or harassed as they make their way to watering holes. Water provision is […]
Noam Chomsky The current call for international debt cancellation is welcome, but debt does not just go away. Someone pays, and history confirms that risks tend to be socialised in the system mislabelled “free enterprise capitalism”. The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon the borrowers and lenders. Money was not borrowed by assembly plant […]