South Africa

South Africa, riding the wave of a tourism boom, is touting Survivor-style business meetings to turn it into one of the world’s top 10 conference venues by the end of the decade. The new ”Business Unusual” brand unveiled at roadshows in the United States, Europe and Asia, offers executives a chance to swap pinstripe suits for shorts in the bush.

The Tshwane Metro Council has dispatched metro police to guard and protect city water engineers working on restoring water supply in Mamelodi and parts of Eersterust, east of Pretoria. South African Broadcasting Corporation news reported that the area had been without water for almost a week following acts of vandalism on the main water reservoirs control system.

South Africans should fight a malign racial obsession from seeping into the country’s discourse again, Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said on Monday. In his Heritage Day message, Leon said warning signs were flashing that under an African National Congress government, South Africa was in danger of moving towards a new racial nationalism all over again.

Erecting five new soccer stadiums and upgrading the FNB stadium will cost more than four times more than the amount projected in the 2010 soccer World Cup bid book, the Sunday Times has reported. While the bid book anticipated construction costs of R2-billion, that amount was now put at R9,1-billion.

The Western media is portraying Africa in a negative light and fails to cover positive economic and democratic developments, according to some of the continent’s top journalists. Africa has traditionally made the news for all the wrong reasons with reports on famine, civil war or the blight of HIV/Aids dominating international news coverage from the world’s poorest continent.

Slave wages and slave-like restrictions on job mobility — that’s what a Bulgarian stripper says she encountered while working for strip club owner Lolly Jackson (50). Jackson, owner of the Johannesburg ”adult club” Teazers, appeared in court this week on four charges of contravening the Immigration Act, including keeping the passports of workers in his office.

The Zimbabwean government has banned gays and lesbians from a United Nations workshop on the creation of a commission to monitor human rights there, ZimOnline reported on Friday. ”We are concerned and we have raised a complaint that they must be allowed to enjoy their freedom of association as any other individuals [do],” said Fambai Ngirande.

A vindication, a temporary reprieve, an affirmation of South Africa’s justice system, an indictment of the National Prosecuting Authority: the interpretations of Wednesday’s dismissal of corruption charges against former deputy president Jacob Zuma are many, and varied.

The congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) passed a resolution on Thursday calling on President Thabo Mbeki to reinstate his former deputy Jacob Zuma immediately, following the collapse of a graft case against him. Political analysts ruled out any such move by Mbeki, but said the call by Cosatu signalled that the controversy around Zuma could seriously rock South African politics.

The application by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) to broadcast the appeal of Schabir Shaik has been dismissed by the Constitutional Court, the SABC reported on Thursday. The SABC had approached the Constitutional Court after the Supreme Court of Appeal refused it permission to broadcast the hearings.

According to the Sowetan‘s editorial on Thursday, entitled ”Justice in Shambles”, Judge Herbert Msimang’s striking the Zuma case off the court roll weakened the credibility of the National Prosecuting Authority, and speaks volumes about South Africa’s justice system as a whole.