WITH regard to your two excellent articles (M&G May 12 to18), “Abortion — A Test for Women’s Rights” and “Miscarriage of Justice”. It is estimated that over 200,000 illegal abortions are performed in South Africa each year — many of which are unsafe and even result in death. Three black women die every day due […]
M-Net corporate affairs manager Cawe Mahlati, tells Aspasia Karras how she hopes to see M-Net become the frontrunner of global broadcasting in Africa Articulate and determined, Cawe Mahlati is a force to be reckoned with in private broadcasting. Not only does she have a vision of what broadcasting can become in the future, but she […]
Views on where housing prices are headed are mixed — but economic growth and the RDP hold the key, reports Reg House prices are still set to show real gains this year, according to property economist Erwin Rode. He is still forecasting a 15 percent average increase this year. This is despite what Absa Bank’s […]
10th birthday: Ten Years of Front Pages.
Ivor Powell IT was, of course, a set-up for censorship in the first place. Approached by the Vita Art Now selection panel to participate in their annual showpiece exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, artist Kendell Geers put forward three works. One was uncontentious, a red overall to be positioned where the hanging committee saw […]
CINEMA: Stanley Peskin IN Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance (1893), Mrs Arbuthnot turns out to be of considerable importance to Lord Illingworth: she is the mother of his illegitimate son. In A Man of No Importance, a country house near London is replaced by Dublin and instead of the gentry, all the characters […]
Car sales hit new highs in May — and Volkswagen South Africa (VWSA) pushed aside previous market leader Toyota to take the lead in the passenger car market. New car sales of around 20 000 were 42 percent up on May last year, and almost 30 percent higher than April’s figure, according to figures released […]
Thomas Equinus was for many years the readers’ favourite anachronism, a horse-racing column for people who knew nothing about horse racing.
Ian Moultrie, a private shareholder in Iscor, takes issue with ANC MP Jenny Schreiner’s comments on opposition to the proposed Saldanha Steel Project JENNY SCHREINER is reported in last week’s Mail & Guardian as saying: “It is incredibly arrogant to assume that only the bourgeoisie are concerned about the environment.” Nobody I know is making […]
Bafana Khumalo Native Tongue EVERYONE knows I’m a sucker, don’t they? I have been taken for a ride on more occasions than there have been marches in this country. Every Tom, Dick and Harry wants to take me for a ride whenever they see me. They know they will succeed — all they need to […]
Pat Sidley Trainee teachers at the mainly black Colleges of Education throughout the country are seething over the textbooks they are required to study. The books, condemned as “paranoid drivel”, are just one of a number of issues that are intensifying the growing crisis in teacher training. A conference of college of education rectors met […]
Frans Rautenbach argues that the new Labour Relations Bill should be scrapped THE problem with the Labour Relations Bill is that, in the best possible scenario, such a system would be a disaster for the South African economy, growth, jobs, the Reconstruction and Development Programme and everything that goes with it. The Bill is largely […]
SOCCER: Gerald Combrinck UMTATA Bucks boss Chain Vilikazi refers to them as the unholy three, and by Sunday there will be only two left, because one of either Sundowns or Kaizer Chiefs will be out of the Coca Cola Cup. The remaining part of the pact, Orlando Pirates, face a tough task when they visit […]
Pat Sidley Last week’s march on Parliament by thousands of angry Christians highlights the rapid growth of fundamentalist Christian groups in South Africa, and mirrors the advance of the religious right wing in the United States. The marchers had come to protest the exclusion of the words “Almighty God” from the Constitution. But their agenda […]
Justin Pearce The self-appointed management team of Vista University — led by Armscor director Leon Bartell — is accused of stashing millions of rands of university funds to be used in case some of its staff are “chased off” campus. The university, originally the brainchild of Dr Andries Treurnicht, is now battling to transform itself […]
Reluctant to release any of its vast tracts of land, the Defence Force is being threatened with land invasions by displaced communities, writes Eddie Koch THE South African National Defence Force has come under fire for scuttling land reform in parts of the country where the army controls large tracts of unused territory — much […]
Alfred Nzo’s ministry stands accused of not having made the leap into the new South Africa, reports Rehana Rossouw Minister Alfred Nzo and his Department of Foreign Affairs came in for a barrage of criticism this week from the ANC alliance and academics who charged that it had failed to provide the moral leadership the […]
Speculation is rife that Sol Kerzner is involved in South Africa’s first satellite TV channel, reports Justin Pearce South Africa entered the satellite television era on Wednesday evening when Africa Satellite Entertainment Corporation (ASEC) launched its sports and entertainment channel amid speculation that casino king Sol Kerzner is involved in the deal. The move is […]
ANC deputy secretary general Cheryl Carolus applied for life insurance — and discovered how HIV sufferers are The experience of buying our first home has been turned, for my husband and I, into a face-to-face confrontation with the irresponsible and discriminatory way in which the insurance industry continues to deal with HIV and Aids. It […]
CINEMA: Stanley Peskin JAMES LEVEN’S film Don Juan de Marco offers a refreshingly different viewpoint of a patient/psychiatrist relationship to the grim one taken by Peter Shaffer in Equus. Almost perversely, Leven eschews reality and opts for fantasy. In the course of 10 days, the patient Johnny/Juan not only transforms, with wonderfully serpentine subtlety, his […]
David Campese, the world’s great non-conformist, is facing up to a giant-sized challenge RUGBY: Mick Cleary ON THE horizon the cloud of dust tells of the stampede heading his way. Up above the birds are circling, ready to pick off the carcass. As he has always done, David Campese merely watches and waits. The young […]
Internal divisions in the IFP run even deeper than Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s recent attacks on whites in the party would suggest, report Ann Eveleth and Mehlo The house of cards the Inkatha Freedom Party stacked so hastily last year in a bid to project itself as a broad national party is swaying precariously this week, with […]
Robert Dowse, visiting professor of political studeies ar Rhodes University, rebuts the views of Prof MW Makgoba published in the M&G last week Professor Makgoba asks the question “what is a university in modern Africa?” and appears to believe that they should not be the same as elsewhere. Universities should, he suggests, be transformed “in […]
IT took three days of court argument, three-and-a-half months of deliberation and 244 pages of opinion for the Constitutional Court to re-establish the sanctity of life in South Africa by declaring invalid the death penalty. This week’s decision is a major break from the past. It brings to an end South Africa’s long-standing dominance of […]
Vista University is an animal with seven bodies and no head. The resignation of the university’s entire top management structure — rector, vice-rector and two registrars — in August last year has left the seven- campus institution floundering with no proper Executive functions have been taken over by a special committee of the university council. […]
A new ‘RDP bureaucracy’ has come in for some sharp criticism, reports Reg Rumney No one in government actually knows how much of the money in the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) fund has actually been spent, say two academics who have been monitoring the RDP. Their criticism of the government’s role in the ANC’s, […]
It was a perfectly normal lecture until Daniel Zikalala fell through the ceiling. But then, people who know Vista know it as the university where almost anything can happen. And after Zikalala had picked himself up off the floor and walked quietly out of the lecture room, class went on. The incident has become legendary […]
Olive Shisana, special adviser to the minister of health, in The Mark Gevisser Profile When Olive Shisana was appointed special adviser to the minister of health exactly a year ago, she found herself dreaming the same recurrent nightmare that had dogged her through her first five years of exile: “I am locked up in the […]
Aspasia Karras interviews Judi Priday, the managing director of newly formed Quantum Insurance Newly launched Quantum Insurance is breaking new ground in the corporate risk management industry. Not only is it the first major insurance company to appoint a woman managing director, Judi Priday (32), but it uses a different approach to combat the market […]
Shirley Kossick ELECTRICITY by Victoria Glendinning (Hutchinson, VICTORIA GLENDINNING is an accomplished and highly regarded writer, best known for her authoritative biographies of Rebecca West, Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell and Elizabeth Bowen. Her most recent biography — on Anthony Trollope — was published to widespread acclaim in 1992 and re-affirmed her status as a thorough […]
Rehana Rossouw DRAFT legislation spelling out the powers of the Gender Equity Commission has been prepared by the Department of Justice, giving the body the same teeth as the Human Rights Commission to perform its tasks of ensuring gender equity in Parliament and society. The Parliamentary Commission on Gender Equity met on Wednesday to grapple […]
GOLF: Jon Swift A HUGE test awaits reigning US Open champion Ernie Els at Shinnecock Hills next week when the South African has to shake off all the momentous events of the past 12 months … and start all over again. In many ways this will be a welcome factor for Els. For, as all […]