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 […]

Angella Johnson THE government is to lift its two-year ban on recruiting new police officers following a public outcry over escalating violent crime and the continued haemorrhaging of manpower from the South African Police Service (SAPS). The first batch of candidates is expected to start training early next year, ending a moratorium police claim has […]

FILM: Hazel Friedman THE ground-breaking local television series, Ghetto Diaries, won the award for best documentary at the 1996 Southern Africa Film Festival, held recently in Harare. The brainchild of filmmaker Teboho Mahlatsi and M&G Television Productions, the series provided a refreshingly gritty visual diary of township life and the aspirations of its residents. What […]

THEATRE: Andrew Wilson ACTORS Greg Melville-Smith and Karin van der Laag deserve medals, not only for excellent performances, but for coping every night for an hour and a half with visionless direction and a clich-infested script. As the first tangible production from the Civic Theatre’s 1996 New Stages project, Please Hold I’m Coming, written by […]