The South African pharmaceutical industry has been greatly expounded in the media in the past few months. The reason is not, however, as a result of the sector’s amazing rise in share prices, but as a consequence of frequent government intervention. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange pharmaceutical index has risen from a December 1997 low of […]

The response this week from state health officials to our story that some of their former psychiatric patients have been killing people is instructive. Valkenberg hospital, which treated and released the patients, says such tragedies in other countries prompt, at the very least, a full-blown commission of inquiry. Not so here. The Western Cape provincial […]

David Newnham Runny nose, annoying cough and a sore throat that won’t go away? Time was when your doctor would recommend a good holiday. But today, the question “When were you last on an aeroplane?” is more likely to pinpoint the source of an infection than suggest a cure. The practice of recirculating cabin air […]

Ferial Haffajee ‘We are not going to eradicate poverty in a decade,” says Minister of Welfare Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi. It’s a very new song she is singing. Fraser-Moleketi is the young minister responsible for breathing life into what used to be a “by-the-way” ministry run by the National Party’s Abie Williams. “This is a powerful ministry. […]

Ferial Haffajee In KwaZulu-Natal a community of women risk getting eaten by crocodiles and bitten by snakes. It’s the peril they face on their daily trek to collect water. Other women told the poverty hearings in other provinces that they are raped or harassed as they make their way to watering holes. Water provision is […]

Noam Chomsky The current call for international debt cancellation is welcome, but debt does not just go away. Someone pays, and history confirms that risks tend to be socialised in the system mislabelled “free enterprise capitalism”. The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon the borrowers and lenders. Money was not borrowed by assembly plant […]

Alex Brummer In an eloquent gesture, designed to underpin development in Uganda – the first of the poorest countries to receive some debt forgiveness – the World Bank advanced the government of President Yoweri Museveni a grant of $75-million this month to support universal primary education across the country. The move demonstrates just how far […]

The conflict between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda is often characterised as mindless ethnic bloodletting. Mahmood Mamdani provides a far more complex background to the conflict No two conflicting groups in the Great Lakes region have a longer and more comprehensive history of intermarriage than do the Hutu and the Tutsi. Intermarriage between the Hutu […]

With a clogged-up justice system, prisons are bursting at the seams with remand inmates. Angella Johnson braves ‘Sun City’ The first thing that hits you is the smell. It is the same in every prison: a rancid aroma of cleansing fluid, stale sweat, urine and more than a whiff of despair which clings to your […]

I never thought I was the type who’d join a cult. But I did. It’s not a cult of personality, but of technology. It’s the cult of the PalmPilot – a simple hand-held computer and operating system that now accounts for over 60% of the global personal digital assistant (PDA) market. Most religious cults attract […]