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/ 18 December 2005
While traffic volumes along major routes to holiday destinations declined by Saturday night, Arrive Alive said they were experiencing alcohol related problems on the roads. ”People are indulging in alcohol and many of them are travelling drunk long distances,” said Arrive Alive spokesperson Ntau Letebele.
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/ 17 December 2005
Twenty people were confirmed dead by 9am on Saturday after the bus they were travelling in overturned and plunged into a river near Wepener, Free State police said. Captain Elsa Gerber said 77 other passengers were removed from the wreckage and transported to several hospitals in the province.
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/ 15 December 2005
Gauteng police put a halt to a meeting on Thursday at Khutsong Stadium by residents protesting their municipality’s incorporation into the North West from Gauteng. Although the situation in Khutsong remained calm on Thursday, police maintained a strong presence in the area.
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/ 15 December 2005
Word from Cape Town that Parliament had rubber-stamped a Bill that put an end to cross-border municipalities triggered violent protests in Khutsong on Wednesday. By evening, a police officer had been badly burnt during a petrol-bomb attack and five houses had been torched.
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/ 14 December 2005
The National Council of Provinces gave the final green light to controversial legislation doing away with cross-boundary municipalities on Wednesday. The changes have sparked vehement protests, particularly in Khutsong — a part of Merafong municipality — where residents have been staging violent protests.
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/ 14 December 2005
A night vigil led by the South African Communist Party in Khutsong, outside Carletonville, went ahead on Tuesday night, despite police declaring it illegal. The government decides on Wednesday whether the municipality, currently in Gauteng, will be incorporated into North West province.
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/ 13 December 2005
Anthony Egan reviews two new books, which go a considerable way to helping us see the new South African Police Service (SAPS) more fairly.
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/ 13 December 2005
The National Assembly on Tuesday approved legislation giving effect to the Constitution’s Twelfth Amendment that abolishes cross-boundary municipalities. This affects 17 municipalities, including the contentious ones of Merafong (Gauteng to North West) and Matatiele (KwaZulu-Natal to Eastern Cape).
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/ 13 December 2005
A call for members of the public not to panic over fuel shortages was made by Minister of Minerals and Energy Lindiwe Hendricks in the National Assembly on Tuesday morning. In Gauteng, the problem has been exacerbated by panic buying among motorists who do not even need to fill up with fuel, she said.
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/ 13 December 2005
Parliament will have an attentive audience on Wednesday when residents of Merafong municipality gather to hear the result of their demand to remain part of Gauteng province. On Monday, a protest march ended in the handing over of a memorandum calling for the proposal that Merafong be incorporated into North West to be withdrawn.
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/ 12 December 2005
As motorists struggled to find petrol on Monday, the government denied any fuel shortages inland. The situation inland constituted ”an inconvenience rather than a crisis”, and motorists should not wait for their tanks to empty before filling up, Minerals and Energy Minister Lindiwe Hendricks told reporters in Pretoria.
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/ 9 December 2005
What a difference three quarters of a year can make. In April this year, the South African gold industry was characterised by the cacophonous strains of a sector strangled by a strong rand and rising input costs and about to breathe its last. It had just announced that production output from last year had fallen to 308 tonnes — its worst level since 1930.
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/ 7 December 2005
Senior health officers from South Africa and Mozambique will sign an agreement formalising the treatment of Mozambicans in health facilities along South Africa’s borders, it was announced on Wednesday. The initiative was part of the health department’s efforts to address Mozambican’s use of South African resources in those rural and underdeveloped areas.
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/ 1 December 2005
Three Mpumalanga teachers and a principal have appeared in the White River Magistrate’s Court in connection with alleged examination irregularities, an official said on Wednesday. The four from the William English Medium School, a private school in Hazyview, were released on bail of R5 000 each.
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/ 30 November 2005
South African athletes won four gold medals on the second day of the 2005 Pacific School Games in Melbourne, Australia, on Tuesday. Jan (JP) Hoffman, world youth shot-put champion and one of the top athletes at the meeting, won the discus for boys in the 17-to-19 category with a good distance of 48,43m.
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/ 26 November 2005
Power was restored all parts of the Western Cape on Friday after a controlled blackout earlier in the day, but Eskom has appealed for people to use electricity sparingly. The outages followed a shutdown of Koeberg nuclear power station, which supplies the bulk of the Western Cape’s electricity.
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/ 25 November 2005
Is Mbeki race-obsessed? Is President Thabo Mbeki obsessed with racism, as whites claim? I’m beginning to suspect he is. When whites first made the claim, I was among the first to come to his defence. As blacks, we couldn’t afford to let our former oppressors publicly insult our leader — not after what they’d put […]
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/ 25 November 2005
Come down, Peter Mokaba! Forgive me, commander Peter Mokaba, for not speaking to you before. We have been preoccupied with managing hypocrisy and mediocrity in the organisation you died for. Commander, the youth league of Anton Lembede is burning — particularly in the province of your birth, Limpopo — and we need fire extinguishers. The […]
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/ 24 November 2005
The <i>Weekly Mail</i> was the first home of the country’s best cartoonists, writes Julia Beffon.
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/ 24 November 2005
Two more tourists were robbed at gunpoint at Waterval Boven in Mpumalanga, South African Broadcasting Corporation radio news reported on Thursday. Last week, two tourists were stripped of a cellphone, a camera and cash at Waterval Boven, and earlier this month, 11 campers were robbed at gunpoint.
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/ 23 November 2005
The Gauteng and the North West legislatures will hold joint public hearings to consider the Constitution Twelfth Amendment Bill, which deals with South Africa’s cross-boundary municipalities. The Bill, which was recently passed by Parliament, proposes that some councils in Merafong be moved to the North West.
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/ 23 November 2005
Eight of South Africa’s nine provinces are being been severely affected by drought, the Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs said on Wednesday. Hardest hit are northern parts of KwaZulu-Natal, said the department’s senior manager of drought and risk management, Ikalafeng Kgakgatsi.
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/ 18 November 2005
A thousand Khutsong residents protested outside the office of Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa on Friday against plans to incorporate the Merafong municipal into the North West province from Gauteng. Stressing their dissatisfaction over the proposed re-demarcation, the group handed a memorandum over to officials.
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/ 8 November 2005
An audit report has revealed that the Mpumalanga education department has been defrauded of R26-million because of toilets and water tanks that were never supplied. According to the audit report the contractors were appointed to build toilets and provide water tanks to schools used as polling stations during the last national elections.
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/ 8 November 2005
South Africans should use water sparingly due to the drought in many parts of the country, Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry Buyelwa Sonjica said on Tuesday. Indications from the South African Weather Service are that prospects for above-normal rainfall this season are not good.
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/ 7 November 2005
A tip-off that led to the discovery of a stolen vehicle and four automatic rifles with 400 rounds of ammunition has prevented a major robbery at an upmarket Johannesburg shopping mall. Superintendent Chris Wilken said the police’s North West unit received a tip-off around 2pm on Sunday about a planned robbery at the Rosebank shopping mall.
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/ 3 November 2005
Although fires raging through South Africa are being brought under control, the Working on Fire programme warned on Thursday morning that fire danger has increased in three provinces. It said that in Mpumalanga, Limpopo and Gauteng the ”high orange” on the fire-danger rating index has risen to red.
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/ 1 November 2005
A fire in the Humansdorp area of the Eastern Cape and three fires in the Tsitsikamma area were out of control on Monday night, Working on Fire (WOF) said. ”They are burning commercial timber and indigenous veld,” WOF spokesperson Val Charlton said at 7.30pm. Gale-force winds expected on Tuesday would fan the flames.
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/ 30 October 2005
Municipal councils, ward councillors and committees must work together to ensure that problems experienced by the people of the Gert Sibande district municipality in Mpumalanga are addressed, President Thabo Mbeki said on Saturday. He addressed mayors from the district as well as ward-committee members.
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/ 28 October 2005
Crushed by sex bias It’s been years since I read a newspaper article that resonated as deeply as Natasha Walter’s incisive column about the ”cruel expectations of workplaces that are built around the working practices of men who sidestep their family responsibilities” (”Punished by biology”, October 21). Just because everybody writes about it, and it’s […]
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/ 24 October 2005
Thousands of workers belonging to the country’s largest union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), have embarked on strike action in the Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal provinces to protest against issues such as job losses, casualisation and racism in the workplace.
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/ 19 October 2005
Education quality-assurance body Umalusi on Wednesday said it has instructed all matric-examination assessment bodies not to use teachers found guilty of examination irregularities to administer matric exams. A total of 61 teachers were implicated in the incident last year.