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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.
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/ 17 October 2005
There were conflicting reports of the success of a Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) call for a worker stayaway in Mpumalanga, the Free State and Northern Cape on Monday. Cosatu said the protest was a ”magnificent” success, while the South African Chamber of Business said its impact on businesses was hardly felt.
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/ 15 October 2005
The Zululand Rhino Reserve could develop into the KwaZulu-Natal equivalent of Mala-Mala and Timbavati, provincial arts, culture and tourism minister Narend Singh said on Friday. He was speaking at the official launch of the 24 000ha privately owned reserve in the Msunduzi River valley, near Mkuze.
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/ 14 October 2005
Mike van Graan asks if we can move on to real transformation, now that we have generally replaced white people with black people at the trough of public funds.
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/ 11 October 2005
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Former deputy president Jacob Zuma will appear in the Durban Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday morning on two corruption charges. Security was stepped up on Monday evening when a large crowd of Zuma’s supporters held an all-night vigil in front of the court building. Police have warned that only those with accreditation will be able to enter the court for the proceedings.
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/ 10 October 2005
Several promising young black gymnasts showed their mettle at the weekend’s acro-gymnastics nationals, which were held at Ermelo in Mpumalanga. Elizke Blofield, a 12-year-old pupil at Laerskool Delmas, and Alexander Demianenko stole the show with brilliant routines to finish with a world-class score of 55,182 (out of 60).
Mpumalanga Premier Thabang Makwetla’s office on Friday morning vehemently denied reports that he had to be rescued from a stone-throwing crowd in Delmas the previous afternoon. Makwetla was meeting residents on the typhoid outbreak and was seeking to reassure them that the water in the area was safe to drink.
Recently the Pension Funds Adjudicator (PFA), Vuyani Ngalwana issued rulings on a further 22 retirement annuities (RAs). Life companies have chosen to settle 15 of these rather than face the negative publicity. This brings to 54 the total number of RA rulings since March. The life companies are appealing seven of these in the High Court.
Ntsundukazi Mvandaba and her family were the envy of the neighbours they left behind when they moved from the Mandela informal settlement to proper houses in Delpark, both in Delmas. They moved five years ago into an Reconstruction and Development Programme house: unplastered and small, but the first real home for this family from the Eastern Cape.
There is a steady increase in HIV prevalence in South Africa, a professor from the University of KwaZulu-Natal said at the opening of the Gauteng Aids Council conference in Johannesburg on Thursday. The life expectancy in the country would soon plummet from 63 years to 46, Professor Alan Whiteside said.
Cool and conditions moving over the northern parts of the country brought some relief on Wednesday for firefighters still battling veld fires in Mpumalanga. Earlier in the day, a fire that raged through the North West veld overnight was brought under control near the Vredefort Dome. However, the fire risk remains high in the northern parts of the country.
It is ”patently obvious” that the rights of patients in state hospitals are not being respected and that urgent action is needed, the Democratic Alliance said on Wednesday. DA MP and health spokesperson Dianne Kohler-Barnard released a damning report on the country’s ”five worst hospitals” during a press conference at Parliament.
A solid final-round 66 in the Vodacom Origins of Golf Tour at Erinvale reignited Eugen Marugi’s career after a rather non-descript 2004 season. Last week, Marugi underlined his comeback at the Seekers Travel Pro-Am. With back-to-back top-10 finishes, the 21-year-old Johannesburg golfer is finally back on the Sunshine Tour fairways.
Firefighting teams are battling to extinguish 15 forest and veld fires that continue to burn out of control in Mpumalanga, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal, Working on Fire (WF) said on Monday. WF spokesperson Val Charlton said about 26 WF firefighting teams are battling the blazes across the northern parts of the country.
About 50 Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) members on Sunday shackled themselves to railings at Parliament in Cape Town to highlight their jobs and poverty campaign. Cosatu’s Eastern Cape provincial secretary said marches would start at 10am on Monday in East London, Port Elizabeth, Mthatha and Queenstown.
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/ 30 September 2005
Benoni residents have been warned not to drink water from the town’s rivers, especially the Blesbokspruit, or use it for irrigation purposes, the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry said on Thursday. Spokesperson Marius Keet said the warning came after salmonella was found in effluent at Benoni Sewage Treatment.
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/ 29 September 2005
Work to uncover and eradicate corruption in the 2004/05 financial year has saved the government projected future losses of nearly R3,5-billion, the Special Investigating Unit said on Thursday. This was calculated on the premise that malpractices exposed during the year were likely to have continued on average for ten more years.
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/ 27 September 2005
A fifth person has died from typhoid after an outbreak in Delmas, a spokesperson for the Mpumalanga premier said on Tuesday. ”Twenty-three-year-old Alfred Thombeni died last night [Monday] at Bernice Samuel Hospital,” Lebona Mosia said. Since the outbreak was identified on August 22, 594 cases have been confirmed and 3 318 people have been treated for diarrhoea.
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/ 27 September 2005
Fires that have killed two people and ravaged large areas of land have largely been contained, but now the provinces are starting to count the costs. Crews from the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Gauteng, Free State, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo have been fighting fires since September 23.
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/ 26 September 2005
Wildfires began claiming lives — both human and animal — on Monday as they ran unabated across the hot, dry countryside, fanned by heavy winds. A six-year-old girl, Bonakele Ngema, burnt to death in a house where she was trapped while seeking refuge from a roaring blaze that bore down on her in Mntanenkosi reserve, KwaZulu-Natal.
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/ 26 September 2005
Organisations in Dullstroom denied on Monday that there is something wrong with the water quality in the popular Mpumalanga resort town. ”We would like to assure the public that the quality of water in Dullstroom has never been in question,” the organisations said in a joint statement.