South Africa exports goods and services to about 53 African countries. Last year this amounted to R53,1billion. Steven Matthews, CEO of FNB International Banking, says the 2006 exports represent a 16% increase on the value of exports in 2005 (R45billion). “Zambia was the top African destination for our exports last year, up from third place the previous year," says Matthews.
South African companies have been accessing markets throughout the African continent since the country regained admission into the world trading community. While there have been some less than stellar ventures into Africa, most companies have developed successful African business models that allow them to expand into these new markets and deliver profits to their shareholders.
Less than a month after its policy conference, the ANC is battling the “two centres of power” as the party fights with its government structures about who is in charge. In the past two weeks the party has overruled two municipalities and the North West provincial government over deployments. In the Eastern Cape, the party told the Nelson Mandela Bay metro mayor Nondumiso Maphazi to put her reshuffling on ice.
Isabelle Wirimana was nine years old the last time she saw her family. All she remembers of fleeing their house in Kigali, Rwanda, during the 1994 genocide is the crowd of passers-by carrying her from the crumbling city, away from her parents and four siblings lost somewhere on the road.
A Middle Eastern businessman spent over 000 in a five-hour, champagne- and vodka-fuelled spending spree in a London nightclub on the weekend. Fraser Donaldson, a representative of Crystal, a club favoured by Prince Harry, said in 20 years working in the industry it was the biggest bill he’d seen from one customer.
The tents of thousands of pilgrims dot the hillside, the air is heavy with the scent of incense and the sounds of the church bell toll across the valley. This is the Armenian Christian pilgrimage marking the feast of the first-century missionary, St Thaddeus, deep in the north-western mountains of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The South African world of letters and scholarship is in desperate need of colour. Black women and men are in short supply when it comes to imaginative writing and knowledge creation. Yet the publishing industry, we are told, is experiencing a revolution — a fiction boom to be specific. What exactly is the nature of this boom?
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Soshanguve serial rapist Simon Malatji was on Monday sentenced in the Pretoria High Court to life imprisonment and a further 307 years on various other counts. Judge Ronnie Bosielo sentenced Malatji (32) to life imprisonment for twice raping one of his victims and to a further 307 years’ imprisonment on 30 further counts. All sentences will run concurrently with the life sentence.
State utility Transnet unveiled its new brand positioning and corporate-identity strategy in Johannesburg on Monday. Company group chief executive Maria Ramos told reporters that the company had come up with a new one-brand image with its different operations falling under it.