Staff Reporter

A DEUTSCHE Telekom-led consortium has concluded a $120m deal to buy a 35% stake in Tanzania’s state-owned telephone monopoly and take over management control, a government representative said this week. Detecon, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, along with Dutch group Mobile Systems International Cellular will pay the amount directly to the Tanzania Telecommunication Company in […]

THE death toll on South Africas roads has passed the 700 mark since the start of the holiday season on December 1, says road agency Arrive Alive. Of the 711 people killed, 282 were passengers, 257 were pedestrians and 172 drivers. Eastern Cape has recorded the highest death toll of 125, followed by KwaZulu-Natal with […]

THE African Development Bank will give Mozambique $120m in loans to fight poverty, the Mozambican Planning Ministry has announced. Mozambique, whose devastating, 16-year civil war ended in 1992, had been one of southern Africa’s economic success stories, with an average 10% annual growth. But the floods cut economic growth this year to 3.8%. About $32m […]

THE retail price of petrol will fall by 10 cents per litre on Wednesday, the department of mineral and energy affairs said on Friday. The wholesale price of diesel will fall by 19 cents per litre and that of illuminating paraffin by 22 cents per litre. From that date, 93-octane petrol will cost 362 cents […]

A TEENAGE girl who has just given birth in northern Nigeria now faces 180 lashes on conviction of premarital sex by an Islamic court in Zamfara state. Bariya Ibrahim Magazu, 17, was sentenced to be flogged by a court at Isafe in September, but the punishment was not to be carried out until at least […]

LIBYAN leader Muammar Gaddafi has once again distanced himself from terrorism in an interview to be published by the German daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. Libya under Gaddafi has been widely accused of backing and organising terrorist attacks. Gaddafi said new possibilities to resolve conflicts by democracy, in hotspots such as Nicaragua and Northern Ireland, meant […]

THE UN Security Council has urged Rwanda and Uganda to halt military offensives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and to withdraw their forces from that country. But it stopped well short of reacting to a call from the government of DRC to slap an arms embargo and other sanctions on Rwanda and Uganda, […]

SOUTHERN African foreign ministers are meeting in Pretoria to discuss a constitutional crisis in the Comoros. Also attending the meeting will be ministers from the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) troika – Algeria, Togo and Zambia – and OAU Secretary General Salim Ahmed Salim. The three-island republic between Madagascar and east Africa was plunged into […]

GINA DOGGETT, Accra | Saturday GHANAIAN voters have opted to turn their backs on the past, electing opposition leader John Kufuor to succeed longtime ruler Jerry Rawlings in the country’s first democratic transfer of power. Rawlings’ protege John Atta Mills, the incumbent vice president, conceded defeat as near-final results showed Kufuor with an unassailable 15% […]

GAMBIA’S President Yaya Jammeh has announced that his government plans to introduce Islamic Sharia law from next year. Jammeh, who was born into a Catholic family and converted to Islam in the mid-80s, promised however to guarantee that religious freedom would be respected. He has been in power since 1994 in this small west African […]

ANGOLAN President Jose Eduardo dos Santos has confirmed that new elections will be held in his war-torn country some time in the second half of 2002. The last and only elections to date in the country were held in 1992. In that poll, Dos Santos’ MPLA won a majority of seats in parliament, which it […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, San Francisco | Sunday WHEN analysts and other observers of the Internet industry look ahead to 2001, they see nothing but pain. And like a canary in a coal mine, San Francisco, the epicentre of the Internet boom, is starting to show real signs that the dot-com craze is running out of air. […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Washington | Saturday US officials and authorities in the states of Ohio and Kentucky have mounted a massive search for a Cameroonian teenager who mysteriously disappeared last week near the end of a bizarre odyssey to be reunited with his mother. “We have no idea whatsoever where he is or what happened to […]

NIGERIA’S President Olusegun Obasanjo has admitted that governing Africa’s most populous country has been rough. The elected civilian Obasanjo came to power in May last year, ending more than 15 years of military rule. This week the retired general and a former military ruler himself told reporters governance had not been easy. “God is in […]

ANOTHER four people have died of cholera in South Africa, bringing to 50 the death toll since the outbreak of the epidemic in mid-August, health officials said this week. A total of 9 824 cases of cholera, including 264 at the weekend, have been diagnosed in KwaZulu. The latest victims were two girls aged six […]

FORMER senior Malawian cabinet minister Brown Mpinganjira, sacked last month by President Bakili Muluzi, has been arrested on corruption charges after allegedly authorising payments to “ghost contractors” when he was education minister several years ago. Mpinganjira, 50, was widely tipped to succeed Muluzi as leader of the governing United Democratic Front (UDF), but was abruptly […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Luanda | Thursday THE Angolan government has vehemently denied that the country’s official diamond trader has been buying gems from the rebel Unita movement, which is at war with the regime. A Portuguese daily claimed that the Angola Selling Corporation (ASCORP) has been trafficking in diamonds bought from traders supporting the rebels. “It […]

ABOUt 30 people are feared dead after a bus plunged into the River Nile in central Uganda. Police said the bus was travelling from the northwestern district of Arua to Kampala when the accident happened. A rescue team, including several divers, was flown to the scene. Most of the passengers were residents of Kampala returning […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Kiev | Thursday UKRANIAN authorities have refused to comment on the sale of a pontoon bridge which is at the centre of a major corruption scandal involving the president of the island nation of Madagascar. Senior Madagascan MP Jean-Eugene Voninahitsy was this week jailed for 11 months after he claimed that President Didier […]

SUSPECTED Muslim fundamentalists clad in military uniforms slit the throat of a young Algerian cabaret singer and kidnapped six people from a discotheque where she was performing, the press reported. The singer known as Sihem, 24, was thrown to the ground by two of the attackers who on Friday stormed the nightclub at Berrahal, where […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Thursday AFRICAN diamond producer Namibian Minerals Company (Namco) says South Africa’s latest development in underwater diamond technology, the MV Ya Toivo, has proved “extremely” successful in recovering the precious stone off the Namibian coast. Designed by Namco’s engineers and built in South Africa, the R42m diamond mining ship set sail […]

HUNDREDS of women in the northern Nigerian city of Kano were expected to spend the next few days in detention after a crackdown ordered by religious officials, police said Sunday. A policemen in Kano, the largest city in northern Nigeria, confirmed that more than 200 women had been arrested in the past week after being […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Friday ZIMBABWE’S Supreme Court this week again tried to end a violent squatter campaign on white-owned farms, and gave President Robert Mugabe’s government six months to craft an acceptable land reform program. The nation’s highest court told police for the third time in two months that they had to evict squatters […]

Evidence wa ka Ngobeni It is difficult to believe that the relaxed man stirring his steaming pot at the plush Pretoria lodge is the leader of the largest and most violent vigilante group in the country. Sipping his favourite Amstel lager, Monhle Magolego, the controversial president of Mapogo a Matamaga, is contemplating his organisation’s achievements […]

102 Dalmations. She’s back. Cruella de Vil (Glenn Close) re-emerges with a social conscience that lasts a full 10 minutes. Representing us dull, ordinary good folk is the pretty probation officer who will keep an eye on Cruella but keeps Dalmations. Her boyfriend looks like a male version of her and keeps dogs, too, but […]

People have been staring into crystal balls for hundreds of years, sometimes with alarming accuracy. But usually they have been hugely, and entertainingly, wrong. Jonathan Margolis looks back at the history of futurology and risks a few predictions of his own Buried deep in the stack at the Bodleian library in Oxford, from which it […]

THE corpse of man was left lying in Kampala’s main taxi park for two days because of fears that he had died of the highly contagious Ebola fever. The old man had been bleeding through the nose, eyes and mouth shortly before he collapsed and died on Sunday morning, according to media reports. A lorry […]

Andrew Muchineripi soccer Just when I thought it was safe to put my weary feet up, light the pipe (sorry, Mrs Tshabalala-Msimang) and forget about the sometimes beautiful game for a couple of weeks, the telephone rang. My worst fears were realised. It was the sports editor of your favourite newspaper on the line to […]

The Mail & Guardian introduces you to the movers and shakers of the rainbow nation In compiling our top 100 stars of the future, we sought to have fun. But more importantly, we wish to reflect the direction we believe our country will take over the next decade. This will be a decade in which […]

Signs are not good for future Western participation in peacekeeping missions Chris McGreal There are two views of what the British are up to in Sierra Leone. The critics contend that the dispatch of hundreds of Royal Marines and paratroopers to occupy Freetown, the quiet takeover of many functions of the Sierra Leonean government by […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, United Nations | Friday CANADA has proposed that the UN Security Council create a team of experts to permanently monitor the sanctions regime applied against diamond and weapons smuggling that funds armed conflicts. The best way to ensure a follow-up of UN sanctions is “establishing a permanent office … to monitor the sanctions,” […]

“The daily slaughters of men, women and children is an indictment against each and every one of you.” Former president Nelson Mandela, addressing the belligerents in the Burundi conflict in Tanzania “The only way in which Dene Smuts was disadvantaged by apartheid was that she was prevented from having sex across the colour line.” Minister […]