The Heath special investigative unit turned its microscope on Mpumalanga this week, reports Justin Arenstein THE tribulations of Mpuma-langa’s disgraced former MEC for safety and security, Steve Mabona, may just be starting after South Africa’s most powerful investigative unit this week started probing his financial management of state funds over the past seven years. Mabona […]
David Ludman RAYMOND CHANDLER: A BIOGRAPHY by Tom Hiney (Chatto & Windus, R150) WERE it not for Raymond Chandler’s drunkenness we might never have had The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The Long Goodbye and the other novels and short stories he gave us. The books Chandler produced in the Thirties and Forties are with […]
South Africa is taking the credit for the decision to relax the ban on the international ivory trade, but animal rights groups are outraged, reports Eddie Koch THIS week’s landmark decision by the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) to relax its ban on the international ivory trade is a diplomatic coup for Deputy […]
The 1997 World Bank Development Report argues that states need strong institutions to meet people’s needs effectively, reports Madeleine Wackernagel THE World Bank is not known for advocating intervention – thus, its World Development Report 1997, released this week, which takes the role of the state as its theme, could be seen as something of […]
elephants When the rejoicing dies down, it will be time for the Cites signatories who supported the ivory downlisting to prevent a new wave of elephant slaughter, writes Eddie Koch THE South African government, along with those of Cites’s 138 member nations who voted to allow Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia to renew limited trade in […]
Gustav Thiel In the face of strong opposition from old Transvaalers, Afrikaner leaders met behind closed doors this month to reconsider a plan to launch an organisation to protect their language. The who’s who of Afrikaner intellect and business had thrown their considerable weight behind the initiative, and agreed at their first public meeting in […]
Gustav Thiel ARMS manufacturer Armscor sold bulletproof vests to the police, army and the prisons service – ignoring concerns that they were sub-standard. The vests were produced for Armscor by a now-defunct firm. Johannesburg-based Ballistic Body Armour, which supplies body armour, said this week that the vests “could endanger the lives of people who wear […]
Lesotho’s leaders play at politics, civil servants sit disconsolate in bars and a blanket of despondency AT Sparrows and at the Lancers Inn, two popular downtown bars where civil servants and the sundry elite of Maseru gather every evening to down beer and gossip, they talk of Lesotho as a land of “political wonders”. They […]
Efforts to reform rugby, apartheid’s sporting religion, have foundered on old attitudes in high places. Donald McRae analyses the shaky progress so far AS white South Africa slipped into its usual breathless fervour for the first Test between the Springboks and the Lions, Brian van Rooyen sighed wearily. “I’m just an ordinary guy,” he said. […]
FRIDAY, 2.00PM HIGH Court Judge Edwin Cameron has ruled that Mineral and Energy Affairs Minister Penuell Maduna flouted basic legal rights when he fired the CEO of the Diamond Board. In overturning Maduna’s dismissal of Gerhard Bindeman, who had been CEO of the board since 1989, Cameron found the minister to have acted in breach […]