Frans Rautenbach argues that the new Labour Relations Bill should be scrapped THE problem with the Labour Relations Bill is that, in the best possible scenario, such a system would be a disaster for the South African economy, growth, jobs, the Reconstruction and Development Programme and everything that goes with it. The Bill is largely […]
Stefaans Brummer UNIVERSITY of Pretoria student leaders this week accused the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) of bias against the ANC-aligned South African Students’ Congress (Sasco) during an invesigation into campus NIA agents visited a number of university campuses last month to gather information for a report to Cabinet’s intelligence and security committee on the wave […]
Pat Sidley Last week’s march on Parliament by thousands of angry Christians highlights the rapid growth of fundamentalist Christian groups in South Africa, and mirrors the advance of the religious right wing in the United States. The marchers had come to protest the exclusion of the words “Almighty God” from the Constitution. But their agenda […]
Ivor Powell IT was, of course, a set-up for censorship in the first place. Approached by the Vita Art Now selection panel to participate in their annual showpiece exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, artist Kendell Geers put forward three works. One was uncontentious, a red overall to be positioned where the hanging committee saw […]
Thomas Equinus was for many years the readers’ favourite anachronism, a horse-racing column for people who knew nothing about horse racing.
CINEMA: Stanley Peskin IN Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance (1893), Mrs Arbuthnot turns out to be of considerable importance to Lord Illingworth: she is the mother of his illegitimate son. In A Man of No Importance, a country house near London is replaced by Dublin and instead of the gentry, all the characters […]
IT took three days of court argument, three-and-a-half months of deliberation and 244 pages of opinion for the Constitutional Court to re-establish the sanctity of life in South Africa by declaring invalid the death penalty. This week’s decision is a major break from the past. It brings to an end South Africa’s long-standing dominance of […]
Philippa Garson describes a typical working day in Alexandra’s ‘Beruit’ in April 1992.
‘IT is not for the President to determine whether or not the ANC was justified in its action on the day in question, whatever his personal feelings on the issue might be.” — Tony Leon (DP) ”We are dealing here with a President who, having made his statement in the Senate, has demonstrated to us […]
Jean-Pierre Rossouw MOVEABLE FEAST SOME cities are weatherless. You can safely guess that the sun will set on a clear sky and rise again on the same spotless horizon. Not so in Cape Town. Here seasons have their own personalities, each of them distinct. So when a restaurant sets out a menu that tries to […]