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/ 16 September 2005
Any crusader for small business in South Africa needs to possess missionary zeal, personal experience in running a small enterprise and a belief that the businesses need not stay small for good. Wawa Damane, CEO of the Small Enterprise Development Agency, brings to her job more than 23 years experience in running small businesses, developing support programmes with academic institutions.
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/ 16 September 2005
Precious* was 12 years old when she first sold sex, to a man nearly four times her age. Now 18, the Liberian schoolgirl says she sleeps with between five and six men on an average day in order to pay her school fees, which are the cheapest available at $1 500 Liberian dollars per year. She receives between $25 and $50 for each man.
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/ 16 September 2005
Transnet this week cancelled the sale of R4-billion’s worth of MTN shares, to a consortium led by former Denel boss Sandile Zungu, over concerns about the governance climate in which the deal was reached and the steeply discounted price.
Zungu told the <i>Mail & Guardian</i> he was about to launch legal action.
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/ 16 September 2005
A Durban denim-clothing manufacturer is among the first to have a writ of execution issued against it as a result of rulings made in favour of the industry bargaining council by the South African Labour Court. Hein van der Walt, the director of the Confederation of Employers of Southern Africa (Cofesa), says there are another 877 manufacturers who are to have writs issued against them.
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/ 16 September 2005
Mangosuthu Buthelezi, president of the Inkatha Freedom Party, reminds me of the main character in a perspicacious Zulu myth. This myth is a message about death, which originated from the failure of human beings, or their messengers, to relay a message of mortality punctually.
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/ 16 September 2005
A lion calls to others in booming, short moans during a night’s downpour. Just after dawn, a group of rhinos forages for the day’s first meal. Meru National Park, has only recently begun seeing such scenes again after decades of poaching obliterated its rhino population and scared away most other animals.
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/ 16 September 2005
Darfur risks sliding into a perpetual state of lawlessness even as the Sudanese government and the main rebel groups in the region — the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and Justice and Equality Movement — resume peace talks, observers have warned. Attacks on aid workers and villages in Darfur have increased greatly and threaten to destabilise the fragile ceasefire in the volatile western Sudanese region.
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/ 16 September 2005
A potentially crippling campaign of fuel protests failed to materialise across the United Kingdom this week as tiny groups of beleaguered demonstrators failed to stop tankers filling up with petrol and diesel at oil refineries and depots across the country. With few demonstrators in sight, it was also business as usual at two refineries in west Wales that, five years ago, witnessed dramatic blockades.
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/ 16 September 2005
There are as many figures pointing to a country’s progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) as there are grains of sand on a beach. What is known about a country’s progress towards the MDGs also depends on whose figures you look at.
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/ 16 September 2005
It’s election season in Poland. Confused by the bewildering political menu on offer, Poles might also be forgiven for thinking that they are seeing double. The ubiquitous posters of the plump, grey-haired chap demanding to be made prime minister later this month are (almost) indistinguishable from those of the plump, grey-haired bloke urging that he be made president.