A new computer system will allow the revenue service to harvest more taxes, writes Belinda Beresford The tax collector is quietly setting traps to catch those modest South Africans too shy to reveal their full income. The phone call interrupting supper could be a polite revenue service reminder that your tax return is overdue, or […]

“We protested here for almost seven weeks without a single window being broken and now look at our city – it has been destroyed.” – Lesotho opposition representative Mamelo Morrison, quoted in Business Day The quotation says it all. The Lesotho invasion would be laughable if it did not involve the loss of lives and […]

Simon Caulkin It’s as regular as the changing of the seasons. Every few months, a new survey triggers the familiar debate about soaring executive pay. But managers take no notice of the haranguings of unions and ministers, and the frustrated disapproval of everyone else; they just keep pocketing the cash. It is disingenuous to blame […]

Andy Capostagno Rugby Everybody said it wouldn’t work and they were right, but it is still sad to see Dawie Snyman being shown the door for not taking the Golden Lions to the semi-finals of the Currie Cup. When Snyman was appointed last June it was widely believed that he had been brought up from […]

Nic Paul On show in Durban What becomes of the sons of great men? Greatness seldom strikes the same family twice, and almost never one generation after the next (some South African examples, like the Tutus and the Ruperts come easily to mind here) and it’s an interesting question which Mahatma vs Gandhi doesn’t try […]

Mungo Soggot The Office of the Auditor General has appointed an oil trading expert from London to probe the government’s sale of about R2- billion worth of oil earlier this year. The government quietly sold off 25-million barrels – the bulk of South Africa’s strategic oil stock – in March and transferred R800-million of the […]

Cameron Duodu: FIRST PERSON Just before President Bill Clinton set off on his March/April tour of Africa that brought him to South Africa, Ghanaian writer Cameron Duodu sent Clinton an open letter, urging Clinton to avail himself of the opportunity offered by the tour to put the Monica Lewinsky affair in its correct perspective. Duodu […]

Wonder Hlongwa The Yeoville Community Development Forum has a dream: it wants to see the streets of greater Yeoville cleared of crime and grime. It wants to create an environment that encourages economic, social and cultural development in the cosmopolitan community in eastern Johannesburg. The forum unveiled its dream at a brain- storming workshop this […]

As mutinous Lesotho troops take to the hills in preparation for a drawn-out struggle, we re-examine the report that caused all the trouble William Boot The Southern African Development Community’s mishandling of the Langa commission of inquiry and its inability to publicly admit that the Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD)had fraudulently stolen the May 23 […]

Is Camille Paglia duffing up the right-on `feminazis’ on behalf of bad girls everywhere? Or is she peddling outdated, simplistic views completely out of touch with the Nineties? Angela Phillips on the working-class motormouth who enrages as much as she engages This should have been Camille Paglia’s week. The woman who put the sex back […]