Minister of Housing Lindiwe Sisulu said on Friday that 1,6-million houses have been built since 1994, but admitted the housing backlog is still enormous and her department can only do so much. She said poor communication with the public is the likely cause of protests about the pace of housing delivery.
The US military has stopped battalion commanders from dismissing new recruits for drug abuse, alcohol, poor fitness and pregnancy in an attempt to halt the rising attrition rate in an army under growing strain as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lobby group Jubilee SA has accused Johannesburg police of harassing its demonstrators outside the Barclays head office in Sandton on Friday. ”Constables, brandishing automatic weapons, jumped out the van and threatened to arrest every demonstrator,” said Tristen Taylor, spokesperson for the organisation.
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The Asset Forfeiture Unit was on Friday granted an order to seize assets worth R30-million belonging to convicted Durban businessman Shabir Shaik, spokesperson Makhosini Nkosi said.
On the crescent-shaped, 14-island archipelago that makes up the Atlantic Ocean’s volcanic-oriented Cape Verde Islands, Bafana Bafana coach Stuart Baxter will be hoping no unforeseen eruptions take place in Saturday’s crucial World Cup qualifying game against the unfashionable but patently dangerous Islanders.
Only eight of the group of 61 of suspected mercenaries will be prosecuted in South Africa after they appeared in the Pretoria Regional Court on Friday. Their case was postponed to July 8 for further investigation. The men, who are out on warning, are facing charges of contravening the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act.
Steel workers have rejected a 4,3% wage increase offered by employers, their trade union said on Friday. Dumisa Ntuli, a spokesperson for the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), said the union and the Steel Engineering Industry Federation of South Africa failed to reach an agreement on Thursday.
Two cave-ins at a gold mine killed at least 22 miners late last month at Lunga in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) Katanga province, local officials said on Friday. Those who died in the successive accidents on May 28 and 30 were local gold-diggers working at the mine near the town of Kalemie.
Niger’s government on Friday squashed any notion that food would be distributed free of charge to the country’s citizens teetering on the edge of a food crisis that could affect about three million people. The reaction followed Thursday’s rally by several thousand people demanding free food stocks.
Scattered violence forced the early closure of more than 250 polling stations in Burundi on Friday, threatening to mar local elections critical to the country’s peace process after more than a decade of civil war. Burundian and United Nations officials stressed the violence was limited to areas in and around the capital.