South Africa

Just after midnight, in the early hours of Sunday morning, Johannesburg High Court Judge Zukiswa Tshiqi dismissed with costs the SABC’s application to have the Mail & Guardian Online remove a report on the blacklisting of certain analysts and commentators by the broadcaster. ”I don’t believe that it is okay to suppress information or to hide information written in the report,” she told the court.

The Mail & Guardian Online was on Saturday morning interdicted from publishing the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s report into whether there was a policy blacklisting some commentators because of their political views. On Saturday night, M&G lawyers were fighting the interdict in the Johannesburg High Court. It is probably the first time that a major South African online news publisher has been interdicted.

Six elderly people were killed in a fire at an old age home in Krugersdorp, the Mogale City municipality said on Saturday. The fire broke out on the fourth floor of the Moria Old Age Home on Friday night. Its cause was not yet known. ”One person was taken to hospital in a serious condition,” said public safety director Jorrie Jordaan.

The time has come for the Congress of South African Trade Unions to play a much more active role in the fight against crime, its general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said on Friday. ”The nature of the capitalist society… [is that] it breeds corruption, criminality, and immorality,” he told a Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) conference in Johannesburg.

More South Africans than ever before have electricity, water and sanitation — but local government is failing to run these services properly, the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) said on Friday. ”Local government has proved to be a most unreliable custodian of existing infrastructure,” said the IJR’s 2006 transformation audit, Money and Morality, released in Johannesburg.

Nearly 80% of South African high schools are failing their children, the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) said on Friday. ”The bad news in South Africa is that nearly 80% of schools provide education of such poor quality that they constitute a very significant obstacle to social and economic development,” wrote Nick Taylor in the IJR’s 2006 transformation audit, titled Money and Morality.

South Africans are angry about growing corruption, and that the politically well-connected seem to be the main beneficiaries of democracy, researchers said on Friday. ”It is a season of grievance,” the Institute of Justice and Reconciliation’s Susan Brown said.

The South African Broadcasting Corporation has violated the recommendations of the commission it appointed to probe a blacklist by releasing only a sanitised summary of its findings on Thursday. The commission’s 78-page report, of which the Mail & Guardian has a copy, is damning. It confirms the existence of an arbitrary blacklist of outside commentators who should not be consulted and says there is a climate of fear in the broadcaster’s newsrooms.

South Africa was on Thursday unanimously confirmed as the next chair of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, for the period 2007 to 2008, the Department of Foreign Affairs said in a statement issued from Vienna. The decision was taken at a consultative meeting of the group held in Vienna. South Africa was represented at the meeting by ambassador Abdul Minty.

Cricket South Africa chief executive Gerald Majola said on Thursday that he could not comment on reports emanating from India that batsman Herschelle Gibbs revealed the names of three former Proteas cricketers involved in a match-fixing scam in 2000.