The Department of Arts and Culture has received ”hundreds” of submissions on the proposed renaming of Johannesburg International airport to OR Tambo International airport, the department reported on Monday. The deadline for submissions is at midnight on Monday. Ministry spokesperson Sandile Memela said that submissions were streaming in ”every moment of every hour”.
Getting through a month of enforced abstinence from one’s favourite addiction, alcoholic or otherwise, is not easy. In my case, I’ve just spent four weeks in Addis Ababa, mainly teaching a course at the university, during which time I was forced to do without my daily dose of South African media, and specifically without my weekly Mail & Guardian.
Business is helping tackle crime, with several initiatives by Business Against Crime bearing fruit. Vehicle theft and hijackings are down about 16% over the past five years from about 115 000 in 2001 to 96 000 last year. Even more impressive is the 30% reduction in Gauteng hijackings last year.
Mining company Kumba hopes to avert a massive strike planned for Sunday by several trade unions, the company said on Thursday. The unions, however, were adamant that the strike will have a severe impact, with more than 6 000 of Kumba’s 9 000 workers taking part.
Residents of Lydenburg in Mpumalanga are to march this week against changing the name of their town, contending that correct procedures had not been followed. ”Proper procedures were not followed. We have all the proof of all the minutes of the name-change committee and the attendance registers,” said Democratic Alliance councillor Isabel Dickson.
They belch hundreds of millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year, but South Africa’s coal-fired power stations will remain the major suppliers of the country’s energy needs for years to come, Eskom said on Wednesday. ”We need to be very clear: coal will remain a major, major part of our [energy] supply,” Eskom said.
A meeting between Sasol and two unions that may join Solidarity’s strike was underway on Wednesday at the chemical industry’s national bargaining council. Bosole Chidi, the acting general secretary of the South African Chemical Workers’ Union, and Welile Nolingo, the general secretary of the Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers’ Union, were at the meeting.
Officials of the trade union Solidarity and Sasol managers were holding talks on Tuesday intended to end a strike that began earlier in the day, the union said. The meeting was to take place in Secunda, Mpumalanga, after the union’s general secretary, Flip Buys, had spoken to striking members, said Dirk Hermann, Buys’s deputy.
The government’s plan to establish a seventh regional electricity distributor (RED) to take care of the power-supply distribution for all non-metro municipalities may end up "fixing" non-existent problems, says the official opposition Democratic Alliance.
When the world’s soccer fans descend on South Africa for the 2010 World Cup, most of them will disembark at OR Tambo International airport, as Johannesburg International airport will soon be known. Minister of Arts and Culture Pallo Jordan announced on June 30 that more than 50 place names will be changed, including that of the airport.
The National House of Traditional Leaders is to appoint a four-member task team to get ”first-hand information” on ongoing problems with traditional circumcision ceremonies. The resolution follows the deaths of 16 youths and the hospitalising of dozens more in the Eastern Cape over the past few weeks.
An estimated three million children in South Africa are involved in exploitative labour, a conference on the matter heard on Thursday. ”The government of South Africa estimated that 32,5% of children aged five to 14 years were working in 1999. Between 248Â 000 and three-million children are engaged in exploitative child labour in South Africa,” Dr Helene Aiello of Khulisa Management Services told the Reducing Exploitative Child Labour in South Africa conference in Boksburg.
An awaiting trial prisoner shot during an attempted escape in Lenasia, Johannesburg, has died, police said on Tuesday. He was wounded during a shoot-out with two policemen who were transporting him and two other men to Potchefstroom in the North West province. Sergeant Modukeng Riba (44) was shot and killed and Inspector Piet Maleka (49) was critically injured.
A ”frightening” number of police officers have died in Gauteng so far this year, with almost as many slain in the first six months of 2006 as in the whole of last year, said the office of National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi. The deaths of four police officers in a bloody siege in Jeppestown last Sunday brought the tally to 19 since the start of the year.
Most recent robberies in Gauteng were carried out by foreigners, South African police union president Mpho Kwinika said on Thursday. He was speaking at a memorial service for four slain police offices held at the Littlefalls Christian centre in Roodepoort. ”The first invasions in Gauteng took place in 2003 on a highway in Germiston. A gang of 14 men tried to rob a cash van … eight of them were foreigners.”
According to information obtained from a DA parliamentary question, only 52% of South Africans infected with TB are treated successfully, compared with the World Health Organisation’s target of 85%, the DA’s spokesperson on health, Dianne Kohler-Barnard, said in a statement on Monday.
The forestry sector could lose almost R900-million because of invasive alien wasps, says Water Affairs and Forestry Minister Lindiwe Hendricks. In written reply to a question by Democratic Alliance MP Janet Semple in the National Assembly, Hendricks said a control programme to limit damage had been introduced.
The Council of Education Ministers has approved measures to beef up security at public schools, and the department will identify ”problem schools” needing immediate attention, Minister of Education Naledi Pandor announced on Monday. These are aimed at schools around the country.
Gases and welding products group African Oxygen (Afrox) is to invest approximately R350-millionin several major new gas production facilities around South Africa during the year. Craig Falconer, Afrox’s general manager process gas solutions, says this expenditure results from increased demand from the company’s existing customer base as well as by new business wins.
The media might have fabricated fears reportedly expressed by judges about pending constitutional amendments affecting the court system, Deputy Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Johnny de Lange intimated on Tuesday. ”I don’t trust the media,” he told Parliament’s security and constitutional affairs select committee.
Police opened fire with rubber bullets on protesters against municipal boundary changes who had broken away from a dispersing crowd at the Union Buildings in Pretoria on Friday. Earlier, about five or six small groups, from a few hundred protesters, set patches of the Union Buildings’ lawns alight.
Protesters were shot at with rubber bullets and arrested at South Africa’s Matsamo border with Swaziland on Wednesday in demonstrations against the kingdom’s leadership, Mpumalanga police said. Initially the marchers were peaceful but then they started to blockade the roads, said Superintendent Mtsholi Bhembe. Police told them their march certificate only entitled them to picket and they cleared the road.
Three of South Africa’s five border posts with Swaziland were completely blocked to traffic in organised protests against the kingdom’s leadership, the Swaziland Solidarity Network (SSN) said on Wednesday. Members of the SSN, the Congress of SA Trade Unions the South African Communist Party and the Young Communist League were gathering at South Africa’s border posts with the kingdom to protest the curtailing of political freedoms.
South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal border with Swaziland was completely blocked on Wednesday in a protest against the kingdom’s leadership, said the Swaziland Solidarity Network. ”The Golela border post, which is the border between South Africa and Swaziland in KwaZulu-Natal, has been blocked to traffic by our protesters since 5am,” said spokesperson Lucky Lukhele.
A hundred and thirteen people were injured in a four-bus pile-up on the Moloto Road, north of Pretoria, on Monday. The accident happened at a depot where three of the buses were stopped when a fourth bus hit one bus from behind, causing each to ram the vehicle in front of it.
Lodge owners in a prime coastal resort are pitting the Danish and Mozambican governments against each other in a bitter legal row over who owns a piece of paradise. Jørgen Nielsen, a Danish businessman, ran into trouble in paradise shortly after he bought rights to a piece of land in the Vilanculos Coastal Wildlife Sanctuary in 2001.
Life insurers saved R347-million in 2005 by preventing dishonest policy holders and financial advisers, as well as crime syndicates, from making fraudulent claims. This was an increase of nearly 40% on the previous year, Gerhard Joubert, chief executive of the Life Offices’ Association said on Thursday.
A rural security company established to create jobs in the San community in the Northern Cape has already secured contracts in three provinces. Gert Schoombie, managing director of Sanda Security, said the first group of security guards consisting of members of the !Xun and Khwe community had received their certificates.
The Scorpions have been given permission to confiscate a farm in Mpumalanga where the drug tik-tik, or ice, was manufactured, the National Prosecution Authority said on Friday. Spokesperson Makhosini Nkosi said the Pretoria High Court gave the order on Thursday.
Phil Naledi has changed the lives of residents along a leafy street in the north-eastern Johannesburg suburb of Sydenham. He earns R900 a month for guarding the houses in the relatively affluent suburb, working 12-hour shifts. ”No one can make a life if they spend so much time working for this little money,” he explains.
Police were keeping an eye on striking private security guards in the Johannesburg city centre on Friday. About 100 guards had gathered at Beyers Naude Square by 9am, police said. In other centres, striking security workers were also expected to march in support of their demands for better wages and working conditions.
Protesting security guards in Pretoria began to disperse on Thursday afternoon after their strike turned violent earlier, with a security vehicle set alight and rubbish strewn in the inner city. At one stage police fired rubber bullets at the protesting guards in an effort to calm the situation.