In his National Arts Festival Winter School lecture this year, 30 Years On: The Legacy of Steve Biko, Barney Pityana — a friend and intellectual confrère of Biko — dexterously balanced the personal and the political, and eloquently demonstrated why the former so often constitutes the latter.
Metsimaholo municipality in the Free State, where an angry mob of citizens killed an ANC councillor on Monday, ranks as the best performing municipality in the province according to service delivery indicators, yet 44% of the population still live below the poverty line.
Mail & Guardian cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro – better known as Zapiro – is this year’s winner of the Cartoonist’s Rights Network International’s (CRNI) Courage in Editorial Cartooning Award. The gong is handed out to a cartoonist who chooses to ”express truth to power”, despite being ”threatened by terrorists, government officials or affiliated goon squads”.
”Give me 10 more vehicles and 85 extra cops on the beat and I will take Nyanga off the number one murder spot in the country.” Assistant commissioner Manyano Noqayi of Nyanga police station was speaking this week after the area was, for the second consecutive year, named the neighbourhood with the highest number of murders in the country.
Hillbrow. The word conjures up images of high-rise slums and streets rife with crime. But in this week’s crime statistics, the Hillbrow police station was singled out as one of the country’s better stations. How has it raised its crime detection rate by 12% and notched up a 10% increase in the number of cases it brings to court?
Mbulelo Goniwe will probably be reinstated as a member of the African National Congress (ANC), but he will not return to Parliament if ruling party MPs have anything to do with it. Goniwe lost his job as chief whip in December last year after a disciplinary committee found him guilty of sexual harassment, abuse of power and bringing the party into disrepute.
The SACP in Gauteng has nominated its provincial secretary, Zico Tamela, to challenge Blade Nzimande for the general secretary’s post in a move calculated to embarrass Nzimande. The SACP will elect new leaders at its national conference that takes place at the Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth from next Wednesday to Saturday.
At about 4pm on Tuesday afternoon a casual observer might have thought things were back to normal in Refenkgotso, a small township in Deneysville, just south of the Vaal river. The previous morning’s rioting by a mob numbering a few hundred people had left a local ANC councillor dead and a municipal building partially burnt and vandalised. But by the next day, children were playing pick-up soccer games or huddling around braziers as usual.
The ANC government’s sound economic policies have put South Africa on a good footing to address the backlogs of the past. For the past decade the government has implemented tight monetary and fiscal policies. It has been very painful but, in the long term, all South Africans will realise that it was the right thing to do.
Women are slowly beginning to make their mark in wage bargaining on the mines, territory that has long been dominated by men. Dr Elize Strydom, the chief negotiator at the Chamber of Mines, is one of the few female negotiators who is making her presence felt inside the bargaining rooms.