FRIDAY, 1.00PM LATEST figures from the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers show that new car sales last month rose 4,3% to 20 190 units against last June, offering some encouragement after May’s poor performance. New car sales in the first half of this year climbed 3,1% from the same period last year to 122 477 […]
halt Ferial Haffajee THE government’s determination to keep the lid on the public sector wage bill took a drubbing this week when four trade unions announced a month of mass action. Ironically, the fight is not with old-guard civil servants, but with the Congress of South African Trade Unions’ affiliates, whose members are the police, […]
FRIDAY, 1.00PM Telecoms parastatal Telkom on Thursday posted a 61,3% rise in attributable profit to R1,95-billion for the year to end March, which translated to earnings a share of 50c. Chairman Dikgang Moseneke said the rose in profits was the first tangible result of the company’s transformation programme, which led to tighter cost controls and […]
The ANC is struggling with the fact that the elimination of poverty will not be achieved unless metropolitan areas can be governed at a local level, argues Mark Swilling THEY used to say in the 1970s and 1980s that “when Soweto sneezes, the country catches a cold”. Extended into the democratic non-racial 1990s, we should […]
PRESIDENT Nelson Mandela brought joy and excitement to the lives of 1 200 children with life-threatening diseases on Friday when they joined him at a party in Cape Town to celebrate his forthcoming 79th birthday.
WITH striking candour, Penuell Maduna admitted to the parliamentary committee on mineral and energy affairs last October that, four months into his new job, he was struggling. “I don’t know where to begin,” the Minister of Mineral and Energy Affairs confessed. It was easy to understand why. He inherited from Pik Botha a weak, thoroughly […]
An international organisation to stir `bystanders’ to act against genocidal violence was established at a conference in Sweden last month. Benjamin Pogrund was there FIFTY-THREE years ago Ervin Staub was saved from a Nazi death camp by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Staub is now an eminent professor of psychology at an American university — and […]
South Africa’s policy-makers should look beyond the propaganda of business – that improved labour standards prevent job creation. Society as a whole will benefit from new employment laws, argues Vishwas Satgar SOUTH African economic history has been afflicted with amnesia. The symbiotic relationship enjoyed by monopoly business with the apartheid state has become opaque in […]
JCI’s deal with Anglo is just the first step to realising its Lonrho ambitions, reports Madeleine Wackernagel MZI KHUMALO is not one to give up easily. Just three days after merger talks were called off by Lonrho, he was back on the phone to Nicholas Morrell, Lonrho’s chief executive, requesting another meeting, this time armed […]
Martin Walker in Washington THE United States Supreme Court has authorised free speech on the Internet, striking down a new law that sought to bar cyberporn to children. Internet activists hailed the court’s landmark judgment, handed down late last month, as a major victory for free speech which would keep the fast-growing global network of […]