The Wild Coast SDI is setting local communities against each other, report Thembela Kepe, Lungisile Ntsebeza and Ben Cousins Simmering beneath the surface of the Wild Coast Spatial Development Initiative (SDI), announced with great fanfare last month, are conflicts and tensions that could blow the much- vaunted investment initiative sky high. In some areas a […]
Stefaans Brmmer Gauteng Premier Mathole Motshekga shares a business empire with an apartheid-era military intelligence agent who was also a key backer in Motshekga’s bitterly contested campaign last year for the provincial throne. Abel Rudman’s military intelligence cover was blown in 1991 when the then Weekly Mail revealed that an anti-African National Congress newspaper he […]
Mungo Soggot and Andy Duffy A number of policemen charged with torturing suspects in custody – in some cases with electric shocks – have not been suspended while awaiting trial. The Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) – the police watchdog which has received 63 complaints of police torture over the past year – has confirmed to […]
Is it true that the only feasible agenda in politics today is a right-wing agenda? Twenty years ago, the question would have been ridiculous. Every liberal democracy courted a left agenda, in the government or in the mainstream opposition. To be on the left meant, at a minimum, embracing three commitments which those on the […]
David Beresford The master planner in the African National Congress’s liberation war came out from the shadows this week to defend his role in the most deadly phase of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. Aboobaker Ismail, the ANC’s head of “special operations”, appeared before Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to ask for amnesty for a […]
As the Internet spreads like wildfire across the African continent, Mike Jensen assesses our relative connectivity levels The Internet has spread rapidly through Africa over the last 18 months. In May 1996 only 16 countries had full Internet access. Now more than three- quarters of the capital cities in Africa are online – 44 of […]
house World-renowned palaeo-anthropologist Professor Phillip Tobias discusses why it would be disastrous to build a casino near Sterkfontein Valley Since the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (Unesco) general conference adopted a convention on the protection of the world’s cultural and natural heritage on November 16 1972, 506 properties worldwide have been inscribed on […]
Special Mail &Guardian supplement on Internet connectivity in Africa Developing Africa’s information economy is of paramount importance, writes David Shapshak The Internet will finally take off in Africa in 1998. But taking the information age into the continent, which dramatically lacks the infrastructure needed for conveying the Internet and normal telecommunications, may prove to be […]
If the international community wants to help Rwanda and its people in their recently declared process of reconciliation, the massive psychological impact of the genocide on the population of the country will have to taken into account. I cannot help but remember the speed with which the families of those who died in the crash […]
The food sector of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange is overcrowded, with too few companies offering shareholders significant returns on their investments. In January 1996 the food index stood at 9 300. Within a year, it had fallen 100 points, recovered its losses and remained at this level until the October 1997 market correction. Between that […]