BENINS incumbent President Mathieu Kerekou was re-elected with more than 84% of the vote, the country’s autonomous electoral commission (CENA) announced on Saturday. Late Friday, challenger Bruno Amoussou, one of Kerekou’s cabinet ministers, conceded defeat, even before the CENA had tallied the final results of Thursday’s second-round run-off. Amoussou was the only candidate to run […]
NAMIBIAS largest low-cost housing provider, the National Housing Enterprise (NHE), has stopped paying out mortgage insurance to relatives of home buyers who die of Aids-related illnesses after its own insurance company, South Africas Fedsure, complained that it was processing too many Aids-related claims. This means that the family of the home buyer will lose the […]
THE rebel Congo Liberation Front (FLC) and Mai-Mai tribal militia leaders have agreed to set up a peacekeeping force to operate in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the FLC leader said. Jean-Pierre Bemba, a businessman who now leads one of the two main rebel groups which have been fighting the Kinshasa regime, said that […]
ZIMBABWES fuel shortages worsened this week as the country’s only rail company cancelled all its passenger services for a second day running, while captains of industry warned that companies were beginning to close shop. The fuel shortage has also affected the public transport system, with workers reporting late for work due to cancelled services. Private […]
ZIMBABWE?S government hospital doctors launched an indefinite strike on Friday over non-payment of on-call allowances. ?We have withdrawn all services,” said Aspect Maunganidze, vice president of the Hospital Doctors Association. Health Minister Timothy Stamps was quoted by state television declaring the strike illegal, and adding if anyone died, the doctors would be held responsible. Maunganidze […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Ivory Coast | Saturday WORLD Health Organisation (WHO) director for Africa Ebrahim Mailick Samba on Friday said he personally favoured cheap generic drugs to fight the HIV/Aids pandemic. Ending a five-day fact-finding mission to the Ivory Coast, Samba said he backed the easy access to cheap medicines as “I am primarily a doctor […]
TWO Mozambicans were injured when a truck hit a landmine in flood-stricken central Mozambique on the road between the port city of Beira and the inland town of Caia, a United Nations official said on Friday. UN media coordinator Frances Christie said that the accident, which occurred on March 15, involved a truck belonging to […]
Own Correspondent, Johannesburg | Sunday A SOUTH African company called Strategic Digital Technologies, in Selby, Johannesburg, has, together with a Norwegian company called Scandec, manufactured what they say is the first machine capable of passively monitoring cellular telephone conversations, The Sunday Independent reports. Until now it has been possible to tap cellphone conversations, and apparently […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Saturday ZIMBABWES President Robert Mugabe on Friday scoffed at white farmers sincerity, who this week pledged to work with the government to resolve a land reform crisis. “Now they are saying ‘we want to negotiate with government, we want to work together with government’” Mugabe said in an address on state […]
ROWAN Atkinson, the British comic actor best known for his role as the accident-prone “Mr Bean” seized the controls when the pilot of his light aircraft fainted in the sky over Kenya, it was reported on Friday. Atkinson, 46, who does not know how to fly, kept the plane carrying his wife and two children […]
ZAMBIAN Education Minister Godfrey Miyanda says he will not resign, despite mounting pressure for him to step down for opposing President Frederick Chiluba’s third term bid. Miyanda said he will not support calls for a third term because Chiluba personally told him in 1996 and 1997 that he had no intention of going for a […]
THE mighty Zambezi River has swelled further in Mozambique’s flood disaster, with the death toll rising to 81. The Natural Disaster Management Institute (INGC) said the flood situation persists in Mozambique as the Zambezi River, whose levels had started declining, was beginning to rise again due to rains. This year’s floods have affected 635 000 […]
PAUL KIRK, Durban | Friday AUDITORS have recommended that the national office of the South African National Tuberculosis Association (Santa) be closed down following revelations that Dr Andrew Ratsela, the CEO of Santa, is paid a salary of R500_000 a year for working two days each month. Ratsela also had a Santa credit card with […]
PAUL KIRK, Durban | Friday LUCRATIVE illegal casinos are operating openly in Durban under the protection of a secret agreement between the police, the Department of Justice and two of Durbans most notorious illegal casino owners. The deal makes a mockery of state attempts to claim that the suspended head of KwaZulu-Natals organised crime unit, […]
THE Zimbabwe government has granted permanent residence to Ethiopia’s former dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, who has been exiled in the country for nearly 10 years. Mengistu, whom Addis Ababa wants extradited to face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity back home, now enjoys permanent residence in Zimbabwe along with seven members of his family. […]
On the eve of the Oscars (and a strike) Salman Rushdie looks at the state of the cinematic art.
FORMER National Party cabinet minister and convicted fraudster Pietie du Plessis died of a heart attack in Pretoria on Wednesday morning, his friend and former cabinet colleague Pik Botha said. Although Du Plessis served three years of a nine-year prison term in Pretoria Central Prison for company fraud, he always retained his self-esteem and respect, […]
Park plans to sell rhinos to ease a cash crisis Fiona Macleod The Kruger National Park is urgently selling 21 white rhinos in an attempt to stave off a cash-flow crisis that has seen it overdrawn by millions of rands in the past month. The sale includes eight rhino cows and their calves, who will […]
Katy Chance cornered Dr Iqbal Surv, the businessman who was once Bafana Bafana’s first team doctor, and got some knee-jerk reactions Dr Iqbal Surv is CEO of Sekunjalo a position he says he initially thought he would occupy for possibly a year. Five years on he is still firmly in the driving seat. How and […]
Belinda Anderson In his spare time, charismatic fund manager Peter Major dons his hang-glider and jumps off mountains in Cape Town. Now he’s taking another leap away from the world of big institutional fund management, to team up with South Africa entrepreneur-turned information technology billionaire Mark Shuttleworth. Major joins Shuttleworth’s newly formed company HBD (Here […]
THE convoy of Nigerian Vice President Atiku Abubakar has been involved in a pile-up, injuring several people, adding to what Nigerians call the government road toll. Since Nigeria returned to civilian rule in May 1999, more than 15 top officials, including three ministers and a slate of governors, have been involved in fatal road accidents […]
Accidents and arson have highlighted the urgency of updating South Africa’s railways Jaspreet Kindra and Glenda Daniels At least six metropolitan councils in South Africa will be given responsibility for developing and planning Metrorail routes in the near future. Provinces will also have these powers. Transport authorities representing provinces and municipalities will plan and develop […]
#David McKay Brian Gilbertson, chair of Billiton, collects clocks. Isn’t that odd as well as intriguing? Odd because Gilbertson is renowned in mining circles for the more outward shows of his material success: the ostentatious commuting to and from his Johannesburg office by helicopter, the Porsche apparently permanently on display in an underground bay at […]
David Beresford another country The weekend was quite spoilt for me by the sudden apprehension that South Africa might be brain dead. That the body is kept alive for sentimental reasons by well-intentioned medics, functioning with the help of bits and pieces of machinery. But that the professionals attendant on the body would, if polled, […]
Ken Gooding in London, Barry FitzGerald in Melbourne and Tim Wood in New York Australian-headquartered BHP, the world’s fourth-largest resources group, and United-Kingdom-listed Billiton, the seventh-largest metals and mining company, announced earlier this week that they are to merge to “establish a premier diversified global resources group”. BHP Billiton will have a combined value of […]
STATE security troops stormed Liberia’s national university to break up a students’ rally which was raising funds to pay the legal fees of four journalists detained for alleged spying. Witnesses said the troops arrested several students and added that many had been injured. “Officers of the Special Operation Division of the police and the elite […]
With the HIV/Aids pandemic on the increase, the university’s dismissal of the head of its Population Research Unit has raised questions about where its priorities lie David Macfarlane Try to make sense of this scenario. A liberal university is situated at the heart of one of South Africa’s highest HIV infection rate regions. One of […]
Alec Hogg boardroom talk If you ever needed confirmation of the underlying trend for local share prices, the market’s response to some major announcements of the past month provided it. The investment terms bull and bear are in themselves rather innocuous, the first used to describe optimists, the other of the genre that believe the […]
David McKay inside mining No matter how you slice it, the proposed $28-billion merger between Australia’s BHP and the United Kingdom’s Billiton is a deal that functions on size. Every stated aim of the proposal geographical diversity, range of mined products, balance sheet power, need to access capital markets accepts the notion that big is […]
Andy Capostagno rugby There are a number of truisms that are regularly trotted out when the Super 12 is in progress. There is no such thing as an easy game, beware the team that can win away from home, it’s about peaking in May and not in March, don’t get carried away with home wins. […]
Two leading congressional inquisitors into former US president Bill Clinton’s pardon of sanctions-buster Marc Rich also worked against the embargo Josey Ballenger The role played by fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich in supplying oil to South Africa’s apartheid government, violating international sanctions, has been buried in the furore over the pardon he was granted in […]
SOME 200 Ethiopian refugees in Sudan are staging a protest against a decision by the UN High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR) to strip them of their refugee status because the reasons that drove them from Ethiopia vanished with Mengistu Haile Meriam’s 1991 ousting. The refugees may now accept to be repatriated with UNHCR help or […]