Reg Rumney Crime and violence have pushed their way to the top of the list of business people’s concerns. Business respondents to the Weekly Mail & Guardian survey put prevention of crime and violence as the top priority of the Government of National Unity (38 percent of respondents). Job creation is second, and ensuring delivery […]
A programme focused on illegal immigrants won an Artes award for investigative journalism this week for Weekly Mail Television producer Harriet Gavshon, and Nicolaas Hofmeyr, who directed the episode. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday was flighted in the Ordinary People series. The programme showed police raids in restaurants and hotels; the deportation of an illegal immigrant; and, […]
Dr Sibongile Zungu in the Mark Gevisser profile Something quite miraculous happens to Dr Sibongile Zungu, nkosi of the Madlebe tribe, when she dons her chiefly regalia: the rather frumpish, prematurely-matronlike woman, swaddled in a faux-kente caftan, transforms into the coquettish ntombi; flirtatious and swaggering in equal measure. Previously, sitting inside her classically bourgeois living-room […]
DR ALLAN Boesak’s embattled FPJ suffered huge losses in a $40-million bungled bank loan that lead to the doorstep of Indonesia’s President.
Gaye Davis SPAIN’s counter-trade proposals if South Africa gave it the contract to supply four corvettes amounted to a “rand for rand deal” but would first have to be closely scrutinised by cabinet, Deputy Defence Minister Ronnie Kasrils said this week. In terms of the offer, South Africa would be able to pick counter-trade proposals […]
Gave Davis reports at the struggle by woman MP’s to break down the old boy’s club mentality of parliament. AFRICAN National Congress MP Jenny Schreiner leaves Parliament each day at 5 pm. If she’s in a meeting, she excuses herself. If the National Assembly is sitting late, it does so without her. As a principle, […]
Gerald Combrinck ORLANDO Pirates take the ever growing reputation of South African soccer a step further this weekend when they travel to Nigeria to face BCC Lions in an African Champions Cup second round first leg game. To say that Pirates will be stepping into the “lion’s den” is an understatement, because there is no […]
Marketing Clive Simpkins GOING to the movies has always been a somewhat ritualistic event. Right from my childhood, going to Johannesburg’s Yeoville “bughouse”, as we used to call it, was a great adventure. Buying “coolies” (cool drinks) and noisily wrapped sweets was all part of the entertainment, as was being daring enough to rest your […]
Business considers the March 15 Budget a resounding success, reports Reg Rumney Business response to the first Budget of the Government of National Unity was overwhelmingly positive. A survey of 100 of South Africa’s top business people, undertaken by the Community Agency for Social Enquiry (Case) just after the Budget of the GNU, shows almost […]
The Arts and Culture Task Group’s report casts new light on the Biennale, writes Ivor Powell IS there anything left to say about Johannesburg’s Africus Biennale? It happened; there was a lot of good art to be seen, but more that was indifferent or bad. Sixty-three countries participated, along with a sizeable number of South […]
South Africa’s arms industry will be discussed in Parliament next week. Armscor spokesman Krish Naidoo looks at the industry’s options IN the hope of reaping a peace dividend, the form, composition, and even the need for an indigenous arms industry has predictably come under public scrutiny. Some 800 companies make up the defence industry in […]
SAILING: Jonathan Spencer Jones JUST over seven months and some 27 000 miles after setting out from Charleston, United States, 35-year-old Frenchman Christophe Auguin on Sceta Calberson, sailed into the record books when he arrived back in Charleston on April 27 to capture his second straight Class I and overall victory — and the $100 […]
After sitting among the fanatical crowd at Newlands last weekend, Luke Alfred believes it was a futile exercise WE can surely all agree that the game between the South African President’s XV and Western Province at Newlands last Saturday was a fairly futile exercise. At times the bad tempered, money-spinning event looked almost worse than […]
Critical Consumer Pat Sidley THABO MBEKI, the deputy president, raises some important issues as he tramples on some dearly held principles. But, perhaps, in the debate which follows in the wake of his desire for the government to colonise our airwaves to get its message across, he may take stock of what this critical consumer […]
Some 63 percent of business respondents to the survey vote “no” to the question, “Should the ANC/Cosatu alliance continue?” Seventy-one percent of whites say no, and 39 percent of blacks. The contrast, says Case, mirrors the divisions between black and white business leaders on economic issues like redistribution, and contract quotas for small businesses. Many […]
Cinema Stanley Peskin WHEN, in 1977, Herbert Ross made The Turning Point, it was possible in a mainstream film to deal explicitly with women’s rights, but it was certainly not commercially advisable to explore with any sympathy gender issues and gay liberation. That film was soap-ballet, self-conscious and maudlin. In 1995, Boys on the Side […]
Gaye Davis SOUTH Africa’s new status as not only a democracy, but one where women have significant representation, has not come about without cost. The influx of women into Parliament has drained the women’s movement of some of its dynamos. Speaker Frene Ginwala identified the problem in her keynote address to a conference on Gender […]
An agreement has been signed which allows banks to enter the inner stockbrokers’ circle. Jacques Magliolo reports on this and other changes at the stock exchange Chaos was averted at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange last month, but not completely eliminated. The JSE and the Council of South African Banks (Cosab) reached an agreement to provide […]
Jacques Magliolo The Board of Executive Corporation (BOECorp) has once again proved to investors that it is a financial force to be taken seriously. In the first six months of its present fiscal year, the company has more than satisfied its shareholders, producing a 94,4 percent annualised increase in attributable income. Other annualised figures are […]
Provincial governments may be on the verge of bypassing the IBA, reports Justin Pearce Provincial governments, furious at being sidelined by SABC television coverage, are planning to hit back at the Auckland Park monolith. Representatives of eight of the nine provinces met last month in Ulundi to discuss their unanimous concern that the SABC is […]
Justin Pearce How can the provinces turn the idea of provincially-based broadcasting into a reality? While this matter is still up for discussion, the Bophuthatswana Broadcasting Corporation this week presented the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) with a proposal to open up Bop Broadcasting’s facilities as a resource for all the provinces. This plan would see […]
Anne Eveleth hit the deck with hundreds of others as bullets flew at Umlazi’s King Zwelithini Stadium on Monday The deadly crackle of gunfire punctured the air as tens of thousands of African National Congress and Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) supporters thronged the stands of Umlazi’s King Zwelithini Stadium for a Cosatu […]
Ann Eveleth ENGEN’S oil refineries are the biggest air polluters in the Durban South Industrial Basin, a Durban Water and Waste representative Niel MacLeod said this week. He told about 200 delegates at a workshop on pollution problems affecting residents of Austerville, Wentworth, Merebank, Isipingo,Lamontville and Umlazi, that Engen produces nearly 48 percent of sulphur […]
The points of agreement and disagreement between business and labour about weighty issues are seldom scrutinised together. The Community Agency for Social Enquiry (Case) research agency did just this in a survey commissioned by the Weekly Mail & Guardian, the South African Chamber of Business (Sacob), and the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Business editor Reg […]
Gerald Combrinck TO THE average man, this Sunday’s derby between Cape Town Spurs and Hellenic will be just another game, but to the soccer die-hards of the Cape the game is more important than the Milan derby at San Siro, or the London one between Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal. Be it on the field or […]
Passing trend, ritual adornment or self-mutilation — whichever way you look at it, body piercing is ‘in’. Malu van Leeuwen investigates IN Tsukamoto’s cult film Tetsuo: The Iron Man, a metal fetishist inserts a large tubular bar of steel into an open, self-inflicted wound in his thigh. We may not have reached this level in […]
THEATRE: Guy Willoughby THERE’S a certain sly satiric purpose behind Dylan Thomas’ poetic drama Under Milk Wood (first produced 1953); like the similarly folksy tales of Herman Charles Bosman, which date from the same period, Thomas’ detailed recreation of a little seaside village, Llaregyb, was not intended as soppy pastoral. There are all kinds of […]
Furniture companies’ are beginning to shine on the stock exchange, reports Jacques Magliolo For the first time in five years, furniture companies are performing well on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange dispelling investor concerns that these companies are doomed never to resurface as players of note. Their return to prominence on the JSE board is a […]
A Garankuwa liquor wholesaler is fighting a battle in court with South African Breweries over contaminated quart beer bottles. Pat Sidley reports A FASCINATING tale of bootleggers, shebeens, condoms in beer bottles, monopolies and homelands is unfolding in the Mmabatho Supreme Court as beer giant South African Breweries fights a court case which, if it […]
Two recently listed, black-controlled firms=20 may not meet the stock exchange’s new requirements,=20 reports Jacques Magiolo=20 The listing of Real Africa Investments (RAI) and Real=20 Africa Holdings (RAH) is a significant boost for black=20 empowerment in South Africa, but the group’s complicated=20 organisational structure and its diverse range of target=20 markets are not expected to […]
Take the world’s highest homicide rate. Add a shocking salary structure and go-slow force. Allow to simmer and you’ve got a blueprint for mayhem, reports Stefaans Simmering police discontent had to boil over, adding steam to the pressure cooker of a society reeling from the world’s worst crime wave. Even the hurried appointment this week […]
Director Gregory Doran has produced a travesty of=20 Shakespeare’s bloody tragedy in his attempt to root the=20 play in South African militarism, argues Digby Ricci=20 FIRST acted and printed in 1594, Titus Andronicus is=20 regarded as Shakespeare’s earliest and bloodiest=20 tragedy, and, although immensely popular with=20 Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences, it has subsequently=20 been savaged […]