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/ 25 November 2007
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The African National Congress (ANC) in the North West has come out in support of President Thabo Mbeki to retain his position as the party’s president, the South African Broadcasting Corporation reported on Saturday. Mbeki also received the Western Cape’s support.
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/ 22 November 2007
A final decision on which country will host the giant Square Kilometre Array radio telescope is now expected in 2011, the Cabinet announced on Thursday. South Africa was confident it would win the bid, government communications head Themba Maseko told a media briefing at Parliament on Thursday, following the Cabinet’s fortnightly meeting the day before.
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/ 22 November 2007
De Beers Consolidated Mines, the South African arm of diamond giant De Beers, on Thursday said it had agreed to sell the Cullinan Diamond Mine as a going concern to the Petra Diamonds Cullinan Consortium for a consideration of R1-billion payable in cash.
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/ 8 November 2007
Darfur has been falling off the radar a bit over the past few weeks. The child-adoption scandal in neighbouring Chad and the potential implosion of the peace deal between Khartoum and South Sudan pushed the troubled region off the front pages. The dearth of coverage of the subject doesn’t mean that there has been an improvement.
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/ 31 October 2007
Waterless or composting toilets are being touted as a promising solution to many of South Africa’s sanitation woes.Just less than 14-million of the country’s citizens lack access to sanitation and about 200 000 households are reliant on the bucket system. As more demands are placed on national water resources, it appears increasingly unlikely that homes without sanitation will be able to receive the popular flush toilet
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/ 17 October 2007
The cost of broadband internet access is set to drop significantly with the adoption in the National Assembly on Wednesday of the Broadband Infraco Bill. The Bill provides mainly for transferring Broadband Infraco to the state from Eskom Holdings. Broadband costs in South Africa are considerably higher than the country’s international counterparts.
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/ 17 October 2007
A military board of inquiry into an accident in which nine soldiers were killed has begun its work, Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota said on Wednesday. Lekota was visiting seven troopers in various Bloemfontein hospitals, who were injured in the anti-aircraft gun accident at the Lohatla training area in the Northern Cape last Friday.
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/ 14 October 2007
They roamed the savannahs and open plains for thousands of years, but the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of Southern Africa’s San tribes is slowly being squeezed towards extinction. About 30 000 San remain in Namibia, with the Haikom and Juhoansi the largest groups.
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/ 14 October 2007
Six names of the nine South African National Defence Force soldiers who died during a training accident at the South African Army Combat Training Centre in Lohatla, Northern Cape, were released on Saturday. The Department of Defence has appointed a high-level board of inquiry to investigate the accident.
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/ 13 October 2007
A female artillery officer risked her life at Lohatlha on Friday in a desperate bid to prevent members of her battery being killed by their own anti-aircraft gun. By the time the gun had emptied its twin 250-round auto-loader magazine, eight soldiers were dead. A ninth soldier, a woman, died soon after being airlifted to Bloemfontein.
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/ 11 October 2007
Polokwane will be a busy town come December with an expected 4Â 500 delegates, both voting and non-voting, attending the African National Congress’s (ANC) 52nd national conference. Smuts Ngonyama, head of the presidency of the ANC, on Thursday updated the media in Johannesburg on preparations for the conference.
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/ 10 October 2007
The exodus of police officers out of the Northern Cape must be addressed, the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) in the province said on Wednesday. Popcru provincial secretary Glisson Itebogeng said union members had expressed their dismay and concern over the ”massive transfer of members” who leave the province after being employed or promoted.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela has apparently thrown her weight behind leading businessman Tokyo Sexwale for the African National Congress presidency. Meanwhile, audited ANC membership figures have confirmed the Eastern Cape as the party’s strongest province, media reports said on Tuesday.
Most of the land claims in the Free State and Northern Cape are on schedule to make the cut-off date in March next year, newly appointed regional commissioner Sidney Hlongwane said on Tuesday. He said at least 90% of claims lodged at the two provincial offices have been settled.
The number of deaths in police custody or as a result of police action increased by 11% compared with the same period last year, a report by the Independent Complaints Directorate revealed on Monday. A total of 698 deaths occurred between April 2006 and March 2007, compared with 621 casualties in 2005/06.
South Africa’s unit of the world’s top diamond producer De Beers said on Monday it expects to produce 14,7-million carats in 2007, and saw a decline in output of 2-million carats in 2008. ”Very soon we will level at 12-million carats into the future,” said David Noko, managing director of De Beers Consolidated Mines.
Most of South Africa’s leading sports-medicine practitioners will gather in Kimberley on October 5 and 6 to deliberate on the health, medical and doping-control requirements for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. The medical workshop will be held at the newly established Mayibuye Sports Science Institute in Galeshewe.
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/ 26 September 2007
The businessman who complained about an alleged cash donation to the South African Communist Party that went missing appeared in the Kimberley Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday. Charles Modise’s court appearance relates to charges of alleged fraud, forgery and defeating the ends of justice in relation to tenders awarded to him.
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/ 25 September 2007
The government is committed to meeting its target of eradicating the bucket-toilet system in all formal settlements established before 1994, it said on Tuesday. To ensure this deadline was met an amount of R1,6-billion had been made available ”to provide better and more acceptable sanitation for all”.
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/ 23 September 2007
Hundreds of children in the Northern Cape dustbowl town of De Aar have been diagnosed with foetal alcohol syndrome, giving the town the unenviable distinction of the world’s highest reported incidence of the condition. Unfortunately, alcohol’s grip on the community will be hard to loosen.
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/ 17 September 2007
South Africa’s decision to invest in a nuclear power future has raised concerns about what will happen to the nuke waste generated. Last week it emerged that nuclear power would account for about half of Eskom’s planned new generating capacity. At present South Africa’s nuclear waste policy is vague and does not list a clear end-plan of what will happen to high-level nuclear waste.
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/ 16 September 2007
South African police traded gunfire with angry crowds on Sunday as they arrested 180 suspects in two operations in a crackdown on crime including murder and drug-trafficking, state-run media said. Police returned fire after they were shot at from a crowd of onlookers during an operation in which 25 people were arrested for public violence at Mankweng in Limpopo, it was reported.
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/ 14 September 2007
The Independent Democrats (ID) came out winners on Friday in a last-minute flurry of applications to the Cape High Court by ID defectors to retain their seats. The party said bids by four former ID local councillors in the Western Cape to keep their seats were rejected by the court with costs. Two of the four were members of the Cape Town city council.
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/ 13 September 2007
The world’s biggest diamond mining group, De Beers, has agreed to sell its loss-making Kimberley underground mines to Petra Diamonds and its black partners, De Beers said on Thursday. De Beers said in a statement details of the transaction, including the financial settlement and output figures for the underground mine, would be given at a media briefing on Friday.
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/ 6 September 2007
”Regardless of the BEE types’ penchant for emaciated white girls whose figures might be attributed to the sort of galloping bulimia offensive to any self-respecting peasant living below the bread line, it is time to ensure transformation occurs at all levels of society. Including the air-heads,” writes Niren Tolsi.
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/ 5 September 2007
The Pan African Congress (PAC) on Wednesday became the first casualty of the floor-crossing season as its former deputy president launched a new party. Themba Godi announced the launch of the African People’s Convention (APC) at a hotel near Kempton Park. APC spokesperson Mafemane Maringa said the party had been joined by 40 councillors.
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/ 3 September 2007
The schooling of about 15Â 000 children in the Northern Cape is to be disrupted, South African Broadcasting Corporation news has reported. This follows a decision by the provincial department of education to merge several schools in the Frances Baard municipal district.
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/ 2 September 2007
Businessman Cyril Ramaphosa on Sunday said he has no interest in joining the African National Congress presidential succession race — this after the Sunday Times reported that Ramaphosa had joined the race. ”I have no interest in standing for this position,” he said in a statement.
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/ 2 September 2007
Uncertainty over the future of Cape Town’s coalition government continued on Sunday as the newly formed National People’s Party claimed to have secured the allegiance of 10 councillors. The coalition, led by the Democratic Alliance, holds power by a majority of 20 in the 210-seat council.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) on Monday accused police of brutality by using excessive force during workers’ protests, saying they had fired tear gas and rubber bullets without warning. It said in a statement that rubber bullets were fired at striking mineworkers in the North West last week.
New land acquisitions have enlarged two of the Northern Cape’s national parks to more than 100Â 000ha. The parks’ bigger footprints will allow them to cope better with climate change, Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said on Monday.
Rude graffiti on a wall in Orania had the conservative Afrikaner community in the Northern Cape in a rage recently, media reports said on Wednesday. A resident who was apparently squatting on a plot spent the weekend in jail in Hopetown after he fired shots when residents gave him a tin of paint to cover the crude words.