”It is a dream come true,” is the way Louis de Jager (19) summed up his feelings after returning a final round of 73, one over par, giving him a 36-hole total of 145, one under par, one stroke clear, and the Sanlam South African Amateur Championship Stroke-Play trophy.
Former South African Reserve Bank deputy governor Gill Marcus is to take over as independent chairperson of banking group Absa, it was announced on Wednesday. She will succeed Dr Danie Cronje, who will step down as chairperson on July 1 but remain as a director of Absa Group as well as Absa Bank until the end of July.
The correctional services committee in Parliament on Tuesday rejected a report on the escape of Annanias Mathe from Pretoria’s C-Max prison. The report found that Mathe had probably escaped by squeezing himself through a tiny window and then walked over the roof of the maximum-security prison.
Zambia broke the regional silence on Tuesday over the deteriorating political conditions in Zimbabwe, telling its counterparts in the Southern African Development Community to stop pretending ”all is well in Zimbabwe”. Zimbabweans, who are already jumping the border into South Africa in droves, are now also flooding into Zambia seeking food.
United States President George Bush suffered a fresh setback on Tuesday when a top White House aide, Lewis ”Scooter” Libby, was found guilty of perjury in relation to events leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Bush, whose polling rates are already the worst of his six years in office as a result of Iraq, watched the verdict on television in the Oval office.
Russia is to replace its military doctrine with a more hawkish version that boldly identifies Nato and the West as its greatest danger. In a statement posted on its website, Russia’s powerful security council said it no longer considered global terrorism as its biggest danger.
Africa’s biggest bank by assets, Standard Bank, increased normalised headline earnings per share by 20%, driven by strong growth in corporate and retail lending, the group said on Wednesday. The bank said normalised headline EPS for the year to end-December increased to 796,4 cents per share.
For Merline Momo Azeufac, a teacher at Balefock village in western Cameroon, the days of fearing nightfall while correcting pupils’ work are over. She’s no longer hostage to the poor light provided by kerosene lamps. At the end of last year, Balefock received four solar panels to produce power, under a grant from the Rural Entrepreneurship Foundation.
On February 12, a young South African man was accidentally shot outside the Bafana Bafana spaza shop in Motherwell township in Port Elizabeth’s Nelson Mandela Municipality. Police claim he was shot by Somali shopkeeper Hassan Alow. Alow said thieves who had robbed his shop shot the boy.
The ”dismal” state of housing delivery in the Eastern Cape needs national intervention, a public watchdog organisation said on Tuesday. Public Service Accountability Monitor researcher Chantelle de Nobrega said the province would not meet a nationally set target to eradicate informal settlements by 2014 without help.