Stefaans Brmmer SOUTH AFRICA has joined the body of nations agitating for a complete ban on the production, stockpiling, transfer and use of anti-personnel landmines – but campaigners say South Africa should prove its bona fides by legislating a complete ban locally. Jackie Selebi, South Africa’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, last week […]

consultants Lynda Loxton THE government is finding that trying to get to grips with the booming consultancy industry is as difficult as wrestling with an octopus. This emerged in the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee when it considered the special report by Auditor General Henri Kluever on consultancy services. The committee heard this week that although […]

Eddie Koch EUGENE DE KOCK’S autobiography, hand-written in his cell, is being kept under wraps by the colonel and his lawyers because it contains deeply personal details about the man who became apartheid’s most ruthless killer. It describes his upbringing in a right-wing family on a plot near Springs. He attended the Baanbreker Primary School […]

Travel and leisure company Aventura looks set to be the first model for restructuring, writes Eddie Koch AVENTURA, the state-owned travel and leisure company, is being primed for privatisation, the culmination of three years of transformation from a loss-maker to a streamlined commercial enterprise. The Department of State Enterprises is planning to complete a draft […]

Lesley Cowling talks to a UCT professor who is introducing the world to new galaxies TONY FAIRALL greets questions on his subject with a wry smile and the deceptive simplicity of a Zen master. When your daily work combines the task of mapping the unimaginable – our universe – and a job as director of […]

For some companies aid is big business, as Robert Lacville discovers on a visit to World-Aid 96 in Geneva ACCORDING to Norway’s Trygvie Nordbye, chairman of the International Council for Voluntary Agencies (ICVA), 300-million people are hurt by war, earthquake or famine each year. The 1996 world budget for emergency relief and rehabilitation is $8- […]

An operation code-named Skrik vir Niks was a lost opportunity which could have saved the country four years of bloodshed, political unrest and economic damage, reports Marion Edmunds A SECRET document which throws new light on the origins of the reform process and undermines the reputations of key reformists in the National Party has been […]

Protests are already being planned against a proposed World Bank loan to South Africa, writes Gaye Davis FINANCE Minister Trevor Manuel will face tough questions when he returns on Saturday from the joint International Monetary Fund (IMF)/World Bank annual meeting in Washington. MPs from his own party want information about a loan South Africa – […]

FILM: Andrew Worsdale THE Japanese Film Festival, now in it’s third year, opened last night at the Rosebank Mall in Johannesburg, the place where third secretary of political affairs Yasushi Nato says, “the cinema gourmet stays”. The programme is a little dour, featuring classics from the past. They may be masterpieces of cinema, but there […]

FORMER prime minister PW Botha “went through the roof” when he heard the radical proposals of a hand-picked team of senior civil servants whom he had mandated to find solutions to break the deadlock with the ANC in 1987. In their final proposal, the civil servants who participated in Operation Skrik Vir Niks criticised the […]