Last week we commemorated the brave women who marched to the Union Buildings in 1956 to protest against the discriminatory policies of apartheid. But, after the marchers have gone home and the banners are packed away, how free and equal are South Africa’s women really?
While many land claims in rural areas have been settled, land restored to communities has often failed to bring hoped-for jobs and income. But one Mpumalanga community has found a way to break the deadlock and use its land to start tourism ventures. The beauty of eastern Mpumalanga and the evident prosperity of tourism ventures disguises the endemic poverty in the area.
Motorists across the country, but particularly those still smarting from Gauteng’s latest fuel shortage, breathed a collective sigh of relief last Friday when Cabinet approved a new Energy Security Master Plan for liquid fuels. Since it’s not always possible to know whether your next litre of petrol will actually be available at the local service station, it is comforting to know that government Is Working On It.
With more than 80% of the South African land surface still legally in the hands of whites, it is a puzzle that the land question does not feature prominently in current political and economic debates. However one looks at things, land inequality remains one of the main indicators of social differentiation — and, indeed, it is at the heart of the struggle for citizenship and against poverty.
A sense of frustration is creeping into various groupings within the tripartite alliance and the business community, which want businessman Cyril Ramaphosa to enter the succession race for the leadership of the ANC and the country. Sections of the business community worry that the former general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers might be running out of time because he has not yet indicated an interest in running for the ANC’s top job.
The facts remain confused, the allegations wild and numerous, but one can’t help feeling that Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is being grossly misrepresented in the media. Firstly there is the issue of her alleged threat to "fix" fired deputy Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge and, in this case, no thinking South African can harbour any doubts about Tshabalala-Msimang’s innocence.
Once again, South Africa’s most debauched music festival was a riot. Lloyd Gedye and Lisa Skinner made the trek to Oppikoppi.
There might be millions of characters in the Chinese language, but English letters and even symbols are increasingly being used as names in China. In one of the strangest names, parents tried to call their son "@", while other people have used transliterated English names to make their own sound more Western, the <i>First</i> newspaper reported.
When the first CDs rolled off the presses at the Philips factory near Hanover, Germany, on August 17 1982, nobody realised these newfangled compact discs would revolutionise entertainment. By the 1990s, CDs had not only nearly pushed out vinyl records but also paved the way for other uses of the digital disc.
There is growing tension within the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) about its political mandate. Union leaders appear to be deeply divided over who should succeed Thabo Mbeki as ANC president in December. Although Cosatu will not have voting powers at the ANC’s elective conference, it resolved at its ninth congress last year that its members should actively participate in identifying the ANC leadership that will be sympathetic to the interests of the working class.
President Thabo Mbeki has unleashed a storm of controversy with his sacking of deputy minister of health Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge.
The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) opted on Thursday to increase its key repo rate by 50 basis points to 10%, its monetary policy committee said. The repo is the rate at which the SARB lends to commercial banks, whose prime lending rate will rise — also by 0,5 percentage points — to 13,5%.
World oil prices swirled higher on Wednesday as traders looked to stormy weather that could threaten energy facilities in the United States Gulf of Mexico. Market participants were also awaiting the latest update on crude reserves in the US. New York’s main futures contract, light sweet crude for delivery in September, rose to $72,56 per barrel.
The daily unleaded petrol price over-recovery on August 14 was 28,892 c/l, bringing the average over-recovery since July 27 to 27,081 c/l. An over-recovery means that the basic petrol price based on the daily product price and exchange rate is less than the basic fuel price used in the calculation of the monthly retail petrol.
A British woman who scooped the EuroMillions lottery jackpot of £35,4-million was said on Wednesday to be a £16 000-a-year postal worker. Newspaper reports said Angela Cunningham, who is said to be in her 40s with a 14-year-old son, paid £1,50 for a lucky dip ticket for Friday’s draw but did not know she had won until Monday.
The death toll from brutal truck bombings targeting the ancient Yazidi religious sect in northern Iraq rose to more than 200 on Wednesday, a local government official said. The mayor of Sinjar, a town in the northern province of Nineveh where four truck bombs exploded on Tuesday, voiced fears that the toll could rise further.
The death toll from the collapse of a bridge under construction in central China rose to 36 on Wednesday, with 23 others still missing, officials said. The 328m bridge over the Tuo River in Hunan province crumbled on Monday as workers were removing steel scaffolding erected during the building work, the State Administration of Work Safety said.
ANC Youth League president Fikile Mbalula drew a lot of anger when he reportedly referred to the experience of walking into the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) as something akin to being in Bombay. As far as I know, UKZN was not staging a Bollywood production at the time, writes Aubrey Matshiqi.
The charm of Oxford University rests as much in its oddities as in its academic excellence. Be it the graduation ceremony that has always been conducted in Latin or the luxury of tutorial teaching, which gives undergraduate students weekly sessions with Oxford dons, Oxford offers its 18 000 students a richness of life and intellectual challenge few universities can rival.
Towards the end of every year things hot up in the corridors of British universities. Upon the brow of even the most dapper English vice-chancellor gleams a damp sheen caused by the anticipation of The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) rankings for the year. Of course, academics all tease one another over cordials about the fallacious categorisations.
There is a national skills shortage in critical areas. There are many graduates who are unemployed. About these two facts there is little dispute. Task groups and commissions have been put together to find out why this is the case and to find ways of bringing the graduates back into the formal economy in a productive manner.
The Council on Higher Education plays an important role as an adviser to the education minister. Established in 1998, it has produced pertinent sets of research on, for example, institutional redress, throughputs and student success, cross-border education, disability in higher education, the funding of higher education and the use of ICTs in education.
A British clown has had the smile wiped off his face after being told he couldn’t use balloons in his act because children might be allergic to latex. Barney Baloney said he was told by bosses at a supermarket where he was booked to appear that he should leave his balloons at home because of the potential for allergic reactions.
"Wherever I go, I make friends," says Thoko Mokgosi-Mwantembe, chief executive of Hewlett-Packard’s South Africa operations, and I can’t help but believe her. I’ve just witnessed her charming a waitress with such effortless sincerity that I ask if they know each other. "You’ve got to do what makes you content. I love what I do. I thrive on it," she says.
Two progress reports on BEE in the past week appear to come to startingly different conclusions. Is the empowerment glass half-full or almost empty? Still, it is encouraging that a start has been made on measurement. Recently, <i>Business Report</i> quoted the Presidential Black Business Working Group, which met President Thabo Mbeki last Friday, as finding established companies’ BEE performance wanting.
The world’s oldest person, a Japanese woman who counted eating well and getting plenty of sleep as the secret of her longevity, died on Monday at age 114, a news report said. Yone Minagawa, who lived in a nursing home but was still sprightly late in life, died "of old age" on Monday evening, Kyodo News reported.
Organisers of a kissing event in Budapest said on Monday they have earned a place in the <i>Guinness Book of Records</i> for the most number of couples locking lips at the same time. They said they would submit video footage and documentation showing 7 451 couples were locked in simultaneous buccal bonding for 10 seconds on Sunday.
While stock markets are still reeling from the bad news surrounding subprime lending in the United States, a similar meltdown is unlikely in South Africa, according to Jack Trevena, MD of bond originator BondExcel and ex-CEO of Nedbank home loans. He explains that the US home-loan market is completely different to the South African home-loan market.
The department of trade and industry has at last released its national industrial policy framework. But anyone who was waiting for some specifics — say, economic modelling — would be surprised to find that the department calls instead for a process of "self-discovery". If you think that sounds like something teenagers do behind locked bathroom doors, or what their parents learn at self-help seminars, you wouldn’t be far wrong.
Amid the top-level dialogue, public debate and opulent functions dedicated to solving the scourge of violence against women and children, is it possible that we are losing sight of the obvious? Could we be suffering from the "bullshit baffles brains" syndrome instead of allowing common sense and reason to prevail?
For weeks now, the United States and Israel have talked up the idea that, contrary to all appearances, a peace initiative may be afoot in the Middle East. Last week Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, announced a $63-billion package in military aid to the Middle East, aiming to counter Iran’s growing influence in the region, but also shoring up Arab support for a peace initiative.
Last month Bidvest Bank was launched officially in South Africa, the latest project of diversified industrial giant Bidvest. Brian Joffe’s company appears to have taken the view that there’s nowhere to go but up, although Bidvest is taking a conservative approach. Joffe founded his empire 18 years ago with one acquisition, Chipkins, a catering services company.