Khadija Magardie Educationists from across South Africa attended a three-day conference organised by the Council on Higher Education (CHE), which has told the government that there is no common vision on the future of higher education. There are severe problems related to availability of financial and human resources, inadequate higher education policy expertise and a […]

Peter Dickson Special courts are planned for the hearing next year of a backlog of more than 400 government-related fraud and corruption cases in the Eastern Cape. The decision was taken at the province’s first anti-corruption summit held in East London last week after Premier Makhenkesi Stofile asked for broader input on Bisho’s proposals. It […]

countries Aaron Nicodemus The United States has done an about-face this week on the issue of intellectual property rights for Aids drugs, a development welcomed by Aids activists and researchers. On World Aids Day, President Bill Clinton announced that the US will develop a co- operative approach on health-related intellectual property matters in order for […]

Paul Kirk Camouflage is illegal. The only people who may be in possession of the trendy material are the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) and the elite special task force of the South African Police Service (SAPS). Terry Lyons, the owner of a Durban company called Cammo Joe, has been prosecuted and convicted for […]

Howard Barrell and Barry Streek The decision by top government leaders at an all-day meeting in Pretoria on November 29 to accelerate privatisation of state- owned enterprises is of great political and economic importance, according to officials who were present. The meeting represented a commitment by the government to economic restructuring – whatever the potential […]

Shaun de Waal Movie of the week The Blair Witch Project may have already outdone Star Wars Episode IV: The Phantom Menace and Eyes Wide Shut as the most hyped movie of 1999, except that the hype around it was relatively organic. That is to say, this low-low-budget movie (a mere $30 000 to put […]

Zolile Machi and his family, in Durban’s Kwa Mashu township, had been caring for a cousin believed to have Aids. He describes how life changed when he arrived, and when he left A cousin from the South Coast arrived on our doorstep the other evening. He was carrying a huge but almost empty black Nike […]

Stefaans Brmmer and Mungo Soggot A Johannesburg-based German businessman recently named in the British press and in local intelligence reports as an arms dealer with pariah states says he is the victim of a plot by old-guard intelligence operatives. Rudolph Heinrich Wollenhaupt says that for several years he has been the target of an orchestrated […]

Several paragraphs went missing from Lionel Abrahams’s review of Guy Butler’s Collected Poems last week. After “A major source of pressure and fire in his art is his deep experience of a world afflicted by division,” the review should have read: Articulating his own dilemmas, doubts and challenging insights, Butler foreshadows aspects of the new […]

Jerry Richardson was this week back before the TRC’s amnesty committee, but no more coherent than during his last testimony, reports Piers Pigou Between November 1988 and February 1989, Jerry Vusimuzi Richardson and other members of the Mandela United Football Club went on a killing spree that resulted in his arrest, prosecution, conviction and 20-year […]