If you’re worried about rocketing petrol prices — which hit R8,25 a litre in Gauteng last week and are set to increase further — you can take some comfort from the fact that reform of the fuel sector is finally under way, with the promise of a freer, more efficient fuel market kicking in early next year.
For millions of people in Southern Africa, each day is shaped by the extreme conditions of hunger, disease and despair. This pandemic of poverty represents one of the world’s most deadly scourges, yet for the privileged, these horrors appear to be a natural, inevitable part of the geopolitical landscape.
While it is no secret that South Africa’s poor are the hardest hit by inflation, it seems that people in rural areas are suffering the most. Looking at a rural shopping basket, a study has found that basic food items have increased between January last year and January this year by 23% in the case of maize meal.
Last Monday, the Indian government announced a scheme to pay poor families to give birth to and bring up girl children. The government has also moved to end the practice of suicides in bankrupted rural communities. Randeep Ramesh looks at the ways in which the Indian government is providing relief and incentives for the poor.
When the crew of the Greenpeace ship <i>Esperanza</i> pulled in its one-metre net from the surface of the Atlantic about 300km south-east of the Azores last year, it was surprised only by the quantity of what it found. Washing around in the net were nearly 700 minuscule and unidentifiable fragments of plastic, among other litter.
Local television producers wait with bated breath for the expected multibillion-rand boost to the sector that is expected to be driven by the entry of three new broadcasters in the second half of this year. Analysts and stakeholders are predicting an investment between R2-billion and R5-billion.
It was a game of pass the buck in the government last week over who exactly was responsible for the decline of state-owned telco Sentech. Early last week, Sentech released a position paper in which it accused the government of failing to allocate it the funding it required to roll out its wireless broadband network.
Last week, the Presidential Working Group for Women and Old Mutual launched the Women’s Activism Balanced Fund, a women’s empowerment investment fund that follows last year’s launch of a domestic workers’ retirement plan. An injection of R70-million in seed capital will be made by Old Mutual into the fund.
Let us venture into a political no-go zone and say that, at some point in the not too distant future, there is a bitter pill that we will need to swallow — and we are getting just a foretaste with the current energy crisis. In a nutshell, our global growth-based economic model is fundamentally unsustainable.
If the economy is giving you a headache, relief, at least in the form of Disprin, is not at hand. The country has been gripped by a Disprin shortage over the past five months. There has been speculation on the possible cause, including suggestions that the product had been contaminated.