TWO months before his arrest for allegedly taking part in a huge vehicle fraud syndicate, the branch commander of Rustenberg’s police car-theft unit bought himself a house. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just an old family dwelling down the road from the police station for him, his wife and four children. How much of it […]
and chair of Comtask, in The Mark Gevisser Profile Author in need of healing ‘However far apart our bodies may be / Our souls are locked together in perpetual embrace.” So concludes a poem by Ben J Langa, written to his younger brothers Mandla and Bheki after they went into exile, and published in Staffrider. […]
THE crime of hijacking has been fiercely denounced over the years by many governments. One should not, it is said, give in to hijackers’ demands or offer concessions which might encourage others to try the same path. Granting asylum to the Iraqi hijackers who hijacked a Sudan Air Airbus to Britain this week would reward […]
Andrew Castle explains why Pete Sampras puts more extrovert champions in the shade IT WAS the day before Wimbledon 1989. Jeremy Bates and I had been asked by John Barrett to come along to the Hurlingham garden party to play an exhibition doubles match against a couple of young Americans. We duly arrived, warmed up […]
laundering Tebello Radebe Justice Minister Dullah Omar is confident that several key laws to curb the easy pickings made by embezzlers, thieves, insider traders, and fraudsters will be in place before year-end. “This will be the culmination of a process we started two years ago to review our legal system because we inherited many laws […]
closet Ann Eveleth Joseph Mdluli’s death in detention in Durban 20 years ago made international headlines. His son, who was in detention at the time, later told a judge during the trial of the late Harry Gwala he had heard the name “Joseph” being shouted round the prison one night. It was only later he […]
time At Stellenbosch, blacks are running for office. And that’s not the only thing that’s different about this year’s student elections, report Joshua Amupadhi and Thandi Lewin In a first for the new South Africa, political parties — the African National Congress, the National Party and the Freedom Front —are taking part in student elections […]
Pronounced guilty, Eugene de Kock will now have his turn to incriminate members of the old security forces, writes Eddie Koch The day of judgment had come. Yet there was no air of anticipation in the courtroom. No murmurs of approval in the gallery as the judge delivered his verdict. Not a single family member […]
Mungo Soggot Reserve Bank Governor Chris Stals’s key annual address this week drew consensus among economists that South Africa’s top banker is caught between a rock and a hard place. But while there was agreement that the economy’s vital statistics — huge imports, a shaky balance of payments, and crippling debt levels — were far […]
The most vulnerable groups in South Africa — the poor, the elderly, the disabled and the abandoned — are being hit hard by burgeoning problems in social security offices across the country, as they struggle to claim their state grants from demoralised, ill-informed and sometimes deceitful civil servants. This year, the implementation of the new […]