The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) will not join Wednesday’s general strike because employers need to be given 10 days’ advance notice. The union’s 280Â 000 members would instead hold demonstrations and pickets when not on duty in support of public servants’ wage demands.
A KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) domestic worker who called an emergency number in a bid to save her pregnant daughter’s life was told ”there were no workers and there was nobody at the hospitals”. The 12-hour struggle to get an ambulance has left Busi Dlamini’s daughter on a ventilator battling for life with her dead, unborn baby inside her.
With only two weeks to go before the ruling party’s crunch national policy conference, most of the party’s provincial structures have not taken an official position regarding President Thabo Mbeki standing as African National Congress president for a third term.
The government’s firing of striking nurses will anger workers and their unions, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said on Saturday. ”All the trade unions will be extremely angry at this provocative and quite unnecessary move by the government,” said Cosatu spokesperson Patrick Craven.
This month’s ANC policy conference, and its national conference in December, inspire both concern and confidence. The concern arises because the stakes are enormous: the outcome of these meetings will affect the course of South African history for many years to come.
African, especially Southern African, nations must link tuberculosis (TB) testing and treatment with HIV-prevention programmes if they are to win the Aids battle, a top World Health Organisation (WHO) official said on Thursday. Dr Kevin de Cock, head of WHO’s HIV/Aids department said that traditional treatments for Africa’s rampant TB problem could worsen the Aids pandemic.
Aids experts have called for a mass circumcision programme in South Africa, condemning a ”deafening silence” from policy makers since studies revealed it sharply cut infection rates. Delegates at South Africa’s national Aids conference this week called for the roll-out of such a programme.
Four years ago the National Association of Conservancies of South Africa (Nacsa) did not exist. Now it operates in seven provinces, with 750 conservancies, protecting about 30-million hectares of land. "That is five times more than SANParks and the provinces control, and we do it on no budget at all," says Nacsa chairperson Anthony Duigan.
What happens when ordinary people go that extra mile? Well, grade 11 learners at Weston Agricultural College in KwaZulu-Natal can tell you: they win awards, repeatedly. But, more importantly, they bring about real change for people living in their community.
The government stuck to its guns on Tuesday in the current pay dispute with public servants, saying the current salary demands of the public servants were not realistic. Public-service unions rejected a revised offer of a 6,5% pay rise by the government on Monday and are demanding a 12% rise.
Residents of Gauteng earn more, are better educated and are likely to live longer than people in other provinces, a South African Institute of Race Relations study has found. In a report released on Tuesday, it identified ”glaring inequalities” in service delivery and living conditions across the provinces.
As the Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) began three days of public hearings on health services, based on a nine-province review, one of its most shocking findings is that poor patients are effectively being excluded from healthcare if they can’t afford to pay for transport.
Public-service unions rejected a revised offer of a 6,5% pay rise by the government on Monday, saying it was nothing new. Union leaders said at the end of pay talks in Centurion on Monday night they would come up with a counter proposal. It was not immediately clear when negotiations would resume.
Union negotiators boycotted talks to end South Africa’s nationwide public-sector strike on Monday after police used stun grenades to crack down on nurses demanding a living wage. The Congress of South African Trade Unions said in a statement that police fired rubber bullets that injured striking nurses at a hospital in Durban, calling it a ”brutal” attack.
Aids researchers from around the world gather in South Africa on Tuesday amid tentative signs the nation is finally embracing mainstream approaches to fighting the epidemic. Hopes of a shift in South Africa’s attitude to a disease affecting nearly 12% of its 47-million people have been building since the government in March unveiled a revamped Aids strategy.
Aids may be killing elected officials in some Southern African countries faster than they can be replaced, creating a new threat to democracy and governance in the region, a new study said. The Institute for Democracy in South Africa said a study of mortality patterns in Southern Africa indicated Africa’s HIV/Aids crisis was reaching deep into elected governments.
Striking public-sector workers in South Africa warned on Monday that government threats to sack health workers would derail efforts to resolve an increasingly bitter pay dispute. Fikile Majola, secretary general of the National Education Health and Allied Workers’ Union said negotiations would resume on Monday.
The government warned striking health workers to return to work on Monday or face being fired while soldiers staffed hospitals and private ambulance services moved seriously-ill babies to private facilities. ”If they are not at their workplace [by Monday], then we will be instituting a process of terminating their services,” said national director general of health Thamsanqa Dennis Mseleku.
Soldiers, volunteers and private hospitals have stepped in to help public-health facilities crippled by the public-service pay strike which started on Friday. Army medics were on duty from 8am on Sunday in wards of the hard-hit King Edward VIII hospital, in Durban.
The intensive care unit at Durban’s King Edward VIII Hospital, South Africa’s second largest, was shut down on Saturday. This was after striking workers reportedly threatened nurses at the unit with knobkerries and whips. Doctors were awaiting ambulances to transfer critically ill patients to other hospitals.
Union leaders sought to draw other sectors into their wage dispute with the government on Friday as thousands of public servants countrywide downed tools. The first day of what the unions said would be an indefinite strike passed without major incident and had a patchy effect on service delivery.
The national public-service strike was largely peaceful on Friday, but got off to a violent start in Cape Town, police said. Police used stun grenades to disperse protesters outside Tygerberg Hospital after about 500 people had blocked both the entrance and the road outside the facility, said Inspector Bernadine Steyn.
The Education Department must do something about school security, a school principal pleaded on Thursday after the ”horrific” stabbing of one of his pupils with a pair of scissors. Another three school pupils have died in violence throughout the country this week, including an eight-year-old hacked to death by two classmates.
A 38-year-old businessman was arrested in Durban on Thursday for allegedly failing to pay R43-million in value-added tax (VAT) to the South African Revenue Service (Sars). Properties, cash in bank accounts and vehicles in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng — valued at R90 million — were seized in dawn raids.
Maybe race is still too big an obsession for South Africans to have a reasonable discussion about it. Real, old-style racism has been driven underground — into private discussions around the braai fire and nasty little corners on the internet. Honest public discussion about race is rare.
The National Treasury has gazetted the details of municipalities whose 2006/07 municipal infrastructure grant allocations have been stopped — because of non-compliance with the 2006 Division of Revenue Act. It amounts to R503-million. The main reason for the funds being stopped is "significant under-expenditure".
The ”Green Scorpions” begin an inspection of Mittal Steel’s Vereeniging plant on Tuesday, the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism said. The inspection, to last several days, marks the launch of a national environmental compliance campaign in the iron, steel and ferro-alloy industry.
The University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) has informed two of its mechanical engineering professors that they are under investigation. In a statement on Monday, the university said the two men were informed that ”investigations are under way and charges relating to misconduct are being prepared”.
Two pastors were among the five people killed when their vehicles collided head-on on the Mafikeng-Lichtenburg road on Sunday, the North West transport department said. Also, seven people were killed when three vehicles burst into flames after colliding on the R34 route between Vryheid and Melmoth on Monday.
The naked, decomposed body of a 22-year-old woman was found in Mdantsane near East London, Eastern Cape police said on Saturday. Earlier in the day, a naked, battered and badly bruised woman was found dumped in a field in Umlazi, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal police said. She died soon after being found.
The two academics who helped with Chippy Shaik’s thesis will face charges of serious misconduct within the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s internal judicial system, the <i>Sunday Times</i> reported. This follows reports that "more than two-thirds" of Chippy Shaik’s 2003 PhD had been plagiarised.
Schoolgirls who fall pregnant could face having to spend two years out of the classroom before being allowed back if a proposal in circulation within the Department of Education is approved, the <i>Sunday Times</i> reported.