The Industrial Development Corporation is backing an ambitious project that will cost between R7,5-billion and R11-billion to produce 1,1-billion litres of ethanol a year. The project will fund between seven and 10 ethanol plants over the next decade, with the hope that the low-cost, greener fuel will help off-set rising oil prices and reduce emissions.
South African Airways’s cost structure, twice that of budget airlines, prevents it from competing against low-cost carriers, meaning that its stated intent of entering this market will ultimately be at the taxpayer’s expense. SAA will enter the budget market, which has grown 44% in four years, by year-end.
The 1960s saw the advent of skin-lightening creams. The damage done by these creams cannot be emphasised enough, for they left untold emotional and physical scars in the black community. In the South Africa of that time, social hierarchies were clearly structured along the lines of skin colour.
”When my son was in grade zero, he had a friend called Brendan. Typical of a South African parent born before 1990, I asked Ntsika if Brendan was a lekgoa [white person]. ‘What is a lekgoa?’ he asked. I did not answer, not because I believe children should be seen and not heard, but because I did not know how to respond to the question,” writes the Mail & Guardian‘s Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya.
Like a variegated leaf, the old Movement for Democratic Change didn’t respond to sunlight and other atmospheric conditions in a uniform way. There was party president Morgan Tsvangirai, a former trade unionist and the working man’s hero, who wanted to tread the populist route and then there was his secretary general, Welshman Ncube, a professor of family law with a tendency to seek consensus through scholarly persuasion and debate.
All the African representatives on the 15-member United Nations Security Council, Congo (Brazzaville), Ghana and Tanzania recently agreed that travel and financial sanctions should be slapped on four individuals suspected of involvement in atrocities in the Darfur province of Sudan.
It is a guilt trip inflicted on most children who leave sprouts or cabbage on their plates. ”Eat up,” their mothers chide. ”Think of those starving children in Africa who don’t have such luxuries.” A few grimacing mouthfuls later, the plate is empty. Adults will be reminded of their youth when they step into a Nigerian restaurant in east London.
”Over the past 34 years, I have been arrested 126 times while carrying out my profession as a journalist. Physical and mental torture, death threats, the ransacking of my newsroom and so forth have often been my daily lot in a situation where repression and corruption, even within the press, have become the norm,” writes Cameroonian journalist Pius Njawe.
The World Bank, a leader in the global effort to control malaria, has been accused of deception and medical malpractice by a group of public health doctors for failing to carry out its funding promises and wrongly claiming its programmes have been successful in cutting the death toll from the disease.
Something refreshingly old-fashioned has taken place in the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal: a genuine revolution. From April 6 (until Monday, when King Gyanendra finally gave in to the people’s demands), Nepal was paralysed by a general strike called by the political parties and backed by Maoist guerrillas.