The ‘spy’ alleged to have known about Chris Hani’s assassination spoke to the M&G this week, reports Stefaans Brmmer MOHAMMED AMIN LAHER, whom the Mail & Guardian identified as the mystery “double agent” who had advance knowledge of Chris Hani’s assassination, this week claimed the death plot had been “a conspiracy on both sides of […]

Cutting wages is not an effective means to increasing employment, write Eddie Webster and Ian Macun CONTRARY to conventional wisdom the South African labour market is reasonably flexible. This is the conclusion reached by the South African Labour Flexibility Survey, conducted by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Sociology of Work Unit of Wits […]

Gwen Ansell EVEN now, at 40, Andy Sheppard looks like the art student he never became. = His hair is spiky, his eyes focused on some distant, as-yet-unpainted, landsca= pe. What changed his 16-year-old life was the recordings of John Coltrane. Sud= den ly, he found his music – jazz – and his instrument, the […]

Glynis O’Hara INYOUREAR EVER sensitive to trends, especially constitutional ones, a few days of hor= izo ntality were spent listening to SAfm (104 to 107 FM), employing verticality= on ly under duress. And one was faced with some serious questions. Such as: Does Vuyo Mbuli really, really like the music he plays? Where did = […]

Mungo Soggot THE Central Energy Fund (CEF), which holds the state’s fuel assets, has quietl y limped into the new South Africa with the appointment of a new, far more rep resentative board. The new players on a board that until recently was synonymous with the CEF’s s anctions-busting past, include what chairman Roy Pithey […]

Alan Finlay WITS: A UNIVERSITY IN THE APARTHEID ERA by Mervyn Shear (Wits University, R69) INhis history of the University of the Witwatersrand -Wits – from 1919 to t= he=20 1990s, Mervyn Shear tries to uphold the idea of a place of learning that is= ab le to negotiate an even-handed response to a torn […]

For South African fans enjoying a feast of cricket, the arrival of the Aust= ral ians is the cherry on top CRICKET:Jon Swift IT hardly seems credible that, in the midst of what seems a plethora of cri= cke t, we have yet more coming our way – the Australians open their account wit= h […]

Tangeni Amupadhi ESCAPED gangster Joshua Rabotapi was reunited with his thumb and parts of his fingers this week after he was arrested at his luxury home in one of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. Police say Rabotapi lost his digits in a shoot-out with police during a robbery in 1994 in which three people were killed. The […]

Eddie Koch The confession by a group of policemen=20 about their role in the killing of Steve=20 Biko and the grisly assassination of at=20 least nine other anti-apartheid activists=20 from the Eastern Cape has focussed renewed=20 local and international attention on the=20 main themes and controversies shaping the=20 work of the truth commission. The revelations […]