The African National Congress’s (ANC) policy conference, which will play a key role in deciding whether President Thabo Mbeki leads the party for a third term, gets under way in Midrand on Wednesday. About 1 500 delegates are expected at the four-day meeting at Gallagher Estate.
Severe cold and more snow is to hit large parts of the country later on Tuesday and Wednesday, the South African Weather Service has warned. It said temperatures will drop as low as minus nine degrees Celsius in places such as Sutherland in the Northern Cape. The town was blanketed in snow on Monday.
A national antenatal survey for 2006 has shown a decrease in the prevalence of HIV among pregnant women visiting public health facilities, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Monday.
Four people died and 41 others were seriously injured when two trucks and a bakkie collided in Blinkpan outside Witbank, Mpumalanga police said on Saturday. Spokesperson Captain Leonard Hlathi said three of the people died on impact, while a fourth died on arrival at the Cosmos Hospital in Witbank on Friday morning.
South Africa lacks women in high positions, the Public Service Commission (PSC) has found. A lot still needed to be done to empower women, the PSC said in a report released on Friday. ”Critical in this endeavour is the creation of an enabling environment to ensure that women’s talents and potential are harnessed …,” it said.
Women should benefit from the settlement of land claims, Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana said on Tuesday. Handing over commercial land valued at R1-billion to four communities in Mpumalanga, she said it was crucial that women were not marginalised. ”Women must benefit significantly from the economic benefits that follow with this claim,” she said.
South Africa’s civil-service strike broadened on Wednesday as other union workers walked out, piling more pressure on the government in a dispute stoking political tensions in Africa’s largest economy. Union leaders have vowed to shut the country down in sympathy with civil servants, whose two-week-old strike has already caused chaos in hospitals, schools and public offices.
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.
If you weren’t one of the lucky visitors to experience throngs of product owners and travel journalists, fantastic tourism exhibitions (and some mediocre ones), aching feet, too many cocktail parties and wall-to-wall networking sessions, then you missed out on this year’s Travel Indaba at the ICC in Durban.
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.
Environmental rights are critical for South Africa to develop sustainably in the 21st century. But how well are we doing in terms of implementation? Increasingly we see that this appears to be just so much public relations. Last month the Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Marthinus van Schalkyk, issued the authorisation for a new 4 800MW coal-fired power station in Limpopo.
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.
South Africa’s first water reclamation plant, the Emalahleni Water Reclamation Project, is expected to be up and running by July. The project is a brainchild of Anglo Coal South Africa and is this year’s winning project in Greening the Future’s category of companies with innovative environmental strategies that improve business performance.
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.
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.
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.
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".
A lack of capacity to spend their allocations from the integrated housing and human-settlement development grant has resulted in the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga being stripped of R145-million by the national Housing Department, the Cape Town-based South African Local Government Research Centre has reported.
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 increase in electricity demand must be reduced, Eskom said on Thursday. "We have only so much generating capacity; therefore the only solution is to reduce the demand," it said in a statement. Rolling power failures affected parts of Gauteng and Mpumalanga on Wednesday evening.
Mdantsane fighter Ali Funeka was finally stripped of his title by Boxing South Africa (BSA) on Wednesday for refusing to defend it against top contender Godfrey Nzimande. BSA said Funeka was relieved of the title due to his failure to respond to numerous letters ordering him to honour the defence of his title.
Much of South Africa can expect another freezing night on Wednesday, the South African Weather Service said as the costs of this week’s cold spell mounted. At least 22 people have died of cold in different parts of the country this week, 15 of them in the Eastern Cape.
The South African Weather Service recorded 54 weather records in the icy wet and snowy weather this week. On Monday, there were 34 new temperature records and on Tuesday another 20. At least 17 people were reported dead from exposure or in fires trying to keep warm in the icy wet weather gripping the country.
More than 800 people were forced to evacuate their homes by the stormy weather that hit Cape Town on the weekend, the city’s disaster risk management centre said on Monday. And the South African Weather Service said more bad weather is on the way. Forecaster Stella Nake said Cape Town should expect another cold front on Thursday.
Eastern Platinum (Eastplats) listed on the JSE on Monday morning under the "Resources, Mining-Platinum" sector. "The JSE listing will enable us to access South Africa’s capital market and increase our investor base in an environment in which the PGM sector is well understood," said Eastplats president and CEO Ian Rozier.
An enormous gulf exists between the levels of service provided by different provinces, a Democratic Alliance (DA) study has found. ”If you are poor and reliant on the state for health, education and housing, the best provinces to live in are the Western Cape, Gauteng and the North West,” DA spokesperson Willem Doman said on Monday.
Widespread frost is expected over the central interior and Highveld of Gauteng from Tuesday until Thursday morning, the South African Weather Service said on Sunday. Very cold conditions were expected to persist over the central interior until Wednesday.
Tunisian doctors are coming to South Africa to alleviate a local staff shortage, the Ministry of Health said on Friday. KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and Northern Cape and Mpumalanga are expected to benefit, said spokesperson Sibani Mngadi. H said it was a short-term measure that would give the department time to train more staff and improve its ability to retain them.
The communities of Khutsong and Moutse will contest the demarcation issue in the Constitutional Court, their attorneys said on Thursday. ”We are now in a process of compiling papers,” said Rudolph Jansen of Lawyers for Human Rights. Jansen said papers for Khutsong would be filed soon.
One of the Boeremag treason accused, Herman Scheepers, has died after a long battle against a brain virus he contracted in jail. Scheepers (52) has been absent from the trial since last year because of his ill health. He was granted bail in July 2006 after four years in custody, following an urgent application by his attorney, Paul Kruger.