The Budget must set the stage for investment growth if Thabo Mbeki’s ambitious employment plan is to succeed, writes Madeleine Wackernagel Thabo Mbeki’s ambitious blueprint for economic growth and job creation brings into sharp focus the need for the “right” Budget on March 13. Without the building blocks to encourage foreign and local investment, the […]

Bafana Khumalo ‘JESUS! These people sure did give us grief.” I am at Museum Africa in Newtown, viewing an exhibition on the 1956 Treason Trial. “These people” are whites. The man who is invading this particularly private moment of mine is one of the workers at the museum. “Probably on a tea break” — I […]

Madeleine Wackernagel The appointment of Graca Machel to the Thebe Investment Corporation’s (TIC) board should ensure it a first bite at Mozambique’s privatisation cherry. Litha Nyhonyha, executive director of TIC and chief executive officer of its financial arm, Msele Financial Holdings, said the new appointments underline TIC’s intention to be a major player in the […]

CLASSICAL MUSIC: Coenraad Visser ANOTHER stunning French pianist, another enterprising programme, another accomplished conductor, another triumph. Cecile Ousset first visited South Africa long before she became a household name in countries like Britain. Here for the first time in many years, with the National Symphony Orchestra, she gave a performance of Saint- Saens’s second piano […]

Ricardo Dunn and Nicole Fritz report on the state of crime today Almost 90 percent of the 132 people who were murdered in one weekend in February were poor, young, black men. Many headlines in South Africa give the impression that whites are the primary target of violent crime in this country. That is not […]

Justin Pearce ANYONE who had lost hope for international socialist solidarity in the 1990s would have been heartwarmed by the scenes at Johannesburg International Airport on Tuesday, when the first 96 Cuban doctors arrived in South Africa. The placards held by the crowd of people who came to greet the doctors ranged from the mundane […]

Have the ANC’s young lions turned into pussycats? Rehana Rossouw looks at the dilemmas facing the ANC Youth League THERE was a time when the African National Congress Youth League’s leaders roared and the security establishment’s grip automatically tightened on its rifle butts. This was the 1980s — when the ANCYL was one of the […]

Jacquie Golding-Duffy talks to Jill Chisholm, the woman at the helm of SABC television, about the successes and failures of the new- look channels The new-look SABC has some distance to travel before its revamped schedules are up to scratch. While television head Jill Chisholm is by-and-large pleased with the relaunch, she concedes that schedule […]

A substantial damages claim against the Thor company in South African will be heard in a British court, writes Eddie Koch ENGLISH lawyer Richard Meeran arrived in South Africa this week to prepare a multi-million-rand lawsuit in the British courts against Thor Chemicals for damages suffered by 20 workers, exposed to high levels of mercury […]

Next week sees the beginning of the end of one of the most sordid chaptersin South Africa’s history. Ann Eveleth previews the Malan trial History will also be in the dock when the multiple murder trial of former defence minister Magnus Malan and 19 other security force officers gets under way next week. As it […]