There is no certainty that if South Africa’s petrol price is deregulated that it will stay down, a senior official of the Department of Minerals and Energy Affairs told MPs on Wednesday. Addressing the National Assembly minerals and energy committee, the chief director of hydrocarbons, Nhlanhla Gumede, asked the question whether, indeed, the consequence of deregulation would be that the price would go up.
New Zealand coach Graham Henry said on Tuesday that the rigours of playing last weekend against Australia and then travelling immediately to South Africa had led him to make 11 changes to the All Blacks team for Saturday’s Tri-Nations Test against the Springboks.
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Former deputy president Jacob Zuma on Tuesday said he had been ”tried and convicted” together with convicted fraudster Schabir Shaik even though he had never appeared in the dock. Zuma on Tuesday filed papers in the Pietermaritzburg High Court in response to the state’s replying affidavits that seek a postponement of his corruption trial.
French arms group Thales, whose South African subsidiary Thint is accused of corruption alongside Jacob Zuma, has a new headache, media reports said on Tuesday. A dossier that Thales thought French investigators had closed has been opened again, with a South African connection.
Smiles have been rare in the Bok camp recently, but Springbok coach Jake White managed to produce a few after his team’s practice session at Loftus Versfeld in Pretoria on Tuesday. There seems to be some enthusiasm back in the Bok camp with White at his tactical best — board and all — out on the training field.
Shun Chetty, who was struck off the roll of attorneys in 1980 for his political affiliations, was posthumously reinstated following a ruling in the Johannesburg High Court on Tuesday. Chetty acted for members of the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement during the 1970s.
Twenty-seven Iranian doctors have been offered jobs in South Africa as part of an agreement signed by the two countries on Tuesday. According to a joint communiqué signed by Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and her Iranian counterpart, the first group of Iranian doctors has already arrived in South Africa.
Zackie Achmat, one of South Africa’s top Aids activists, appeared in court on Tuesday on trespassing charges after leading a protest against government policies to fight the disease. A judge ruled that the trial will open formally on September 7. In the meantime, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) vowed to step up its protests.
Quinton Fortune, the not-so-young enfant terrible of South African soccer, is still in caretaker coach Pitso Mosimane’s plans for the key African Nations Cup qualifying game against the Democratic Republic of Congo at FNB Stadium next Saturday. ”I will select him for the Congo game if I feel he warrants a place in the squad,” said Mosimane.
Five labour leaders were found not guilty of public violence by the Pongola Regional Court on Tuesday after they were arrested at a demonstration at the Swaziland border in April, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said.
The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) denied reports on Tuesday that Major Mmathabo Zikalala, wife of the head of news at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), Snuki Zikalala, was being investigated for refusing to do her duty.
A Shoprite employee appeared in court in Butterworth on Tuesday after supporters of a strike stopped a shopper and forced her to drink the fish oil she had just bought. Captain Jackson Manatha said the 19-year-old woman from Ngqamakhwe had visited the Shoprite store in Butterworth on Monday.
Police divers recovered the body of an eight-year-old child from a farm dam near Odendaalsrus on Tuesday. Captain Rosa Benade said police divers from Welkom were called earlier in the day to help with a search for the eight-year-old child on the farm Weltevrede in the Odendaalsrus district.
Former provincial and Springbok rugby player James Dalton will go on trial on October 12 after the case against him was postponed by the Hatfield Community Court in Pretoria on Tuesday. The 33-year-old former hooker is accused of malicious damage to property and discharging a firearm in public.
All Blacks coach Graham Henry on Tuesday made eleven changes to his team to take on the Springboks in their Tri-Nations Test in Pretoria on Saturday. There is a total overhaul of the reigning Tri-Nations champions team, with 10 new faces making it into the starting line-up and one positional change from the team that beat Australia last week.
Forty-three members of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), including the organisation’s chairperson Zackie Achmat, appeared in the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday on charges of trespassing. The appearance follows last week’s TAC occupation of a provincial government building in Cape Town.
Opposition parties on Tuesday decried the appointment of Brigadier General Ernest Zwane as the South African National Defence Force’s (SANDF) director of prosecutions. ”The decision by the SANDF to appoint convicted criminal Brigadier General Ernest Zwane as the new director of prosecutions is disgraceful,” Democratic Alliance spokesperson Roy Jankielsohn said.
Former African National Congress chief whip Tony Yengeni, due to report to Pollsmoor prison by Thursday, will be treated like any other prisoner and be subjected to a strip search and have his fingerprints taken. ”We don’t have a category of more important or less important inmates,” Correctional Services ministerial spokesperson Luphumzo Kebeni said on Tuesday.
The South African government has been told that progress has been very slow in achieving black economic empowerment (BEE) in South African business, with government itself contributing little in terms of procurement from black business. This emerged in a meeting between President Thabo Mbeki and his economic cluster ministers on Tuesday.
The United Democratic Movement (UDM) says it has instructed its legal team to take action against public representatives ”who owe the party” following their defection to other parties. Party spokesperson Star Khonco said on Tuesday that the UDM has already ”won its case” against MP Martin Stephens, who crossed the floor to the Democratic Alliance.
The call by the Independent Democrats (ID) for Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s dismissal is about saving lives, not egos, said ID leader Patricia de Lille on Tuesday. De Lille was responding to the ministry of health’s swipe at her on Monday for urging Tshabalala-Msimang’s sacking.
Convicted paedophile and serial killer Sipho Dube should be jailed for life, prosecutor Joanie Spies told the Johannesburg High Court on Tuesday. In pre-sentence submissions Spies said Dube’s crimes were premeditated and he had treated his victims with ”absolute contempt”.
Eleven women and eleven girls were raped in Mpumalanga over the weekend, police said on Tuesday. Superintendent Leonard Hlathi said nine minors were raped in Siyabusa and four suspects were arrested. In one incident a 40-year-old man was caught in the act of raping a six-year-old girl. He was arrested.
Three Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) members who went to the Durban Westville prison on Tuesday to screen prisoners’ CD4 counts were threatened with guns and dogs by warders, they said. ”They are removing us forcefully, pointing [at] us with guns and they don’t want to let us through,” the TAC’s treatment project coordinator for KwaZulu-Natal, Cindy Blose, said.
Pick ‘n Pay chairperson Raymond Ackerman confirmed on Tuesday that company CEO Sean Summers would be succeeded by current retail MD Nick Badminton in March 2007. Summers will have spent 34 years at the company and eleven years at the helm.
Oprah Winfrey used her talkshow tactic of springing surprises on her audiences at the weekend, when she told 73 girls who had turned up for an interview that they had been selected for a new school she is building in South Africa. Winfrey has been working for six years on creating the school for disadvantaged girls.
New Zealand completed their first training session in South Africa with a clearer idea of how tough it will be to achieve only their second series victory on Springbok soil. Only Sean Fitzpatrick’s 1996 All Blacks have come away from the tough, rarefied conditions of South Africa with victory and with the Tri-Nations won, the team are treating the two Tests as a mini-series.
Barack Obama, the only black United States Senator, criticised South African leaders on Monday for their slow response to HIV/Aids, saying they were wrong to contrast ”African science and Western science”. Aids activists say Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is creating confusion by pushing traditional medicines and a recipe of garlic, beetroot, lemon and African potatoes to combat HIV/Aids.
Former LeisureNet boss Peter Gardener on Monday conceded that he should have disclosed his interest in a German gym operation that LeisureNet bought out. Gardener was being cross-examined in the Cape High Court on issues of corporate governance in LeisureNet and its previous incarnation, the Health and Racquet Club Group.
Seismic monitoring networks need to be improved and monitoring should continue, a panel examining seismic events in gold-mining areas said on Monday. The panel was appointed after the 5,3-magnitude quake in Stilfontein last year that killed two people and injured several dozen others.
Police were ”worried” on Monday after a fifth man allegedly involved in the burglary of a Benoni police safe was killed, a spokesperson said. One of the three police officers arrested in connection with the theft, 40-year-old Inspector Khomani Robert Mashele, was gunned down in his Kempton Park home early on Monday morning.
Former African National Congress chief whip Tony Yengeni is to begin serving time in prison for fraud this week after his final bid to challenge his 2003 sentence failed on Monday. The Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein dismissed his application for leave to appeal against the four-year prison sentence.