PETER CAPELLA, Geneva | Thursday NIGERIA has reached a landmark deal on the restitution of more than one billion dollars embezzled by the late dictator Sani Abacha, the Swiss authorities and Nigerian government lawyers said on Wednesday. Under the terms of the out-of-court settlement, the Nigerian government “has agreed to release to the Abacha family […]
Aids dissidence remains a powerful current in South Africa despite this week’s shift in government policy on the disease. Drew Forrest analyses the dissident mentality both in its Internet and its South African forms It is a wonder President Thabo Mbeki has the mental endurance to trawl the Aids dissident network on the Internet. It […]
Andy Capostagno The International Rugby Board’s (IRB) decision to award the 2003 Rugby World Cup to Australia means the New Zealand Rugby Football Union (NZRFU) can be referred to as the boy who cried “wolf”. The tournament had been due to be co-hosted by the two unions, but when the deadline for ensuring venues free […]
Khadija Magardie and Bongani Majola Monitors of the fiscus will be pleased to note that the aim of the “Moral Regeneration Movement” is “to revitalise existing organisations, and not start new ones”. As delegates met in Pretoria this week to discuss why we’ve become a nation of rapists, murderers and cellphone thieves the collective sigh […]
EMSIE FERREIRA, Sun City | Wednesday ROLLERCOASTER talks on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) hit a low on Tuesday two days before their close as rebels and the Kinshasa regime remained far apart and the facilitator warned a deal might not be found. “If they continue to argue like they have for weeks then […]
Even the government is entitled to exhaust legal remedies in asserting its rights, writes Eric Mabuza There are serious but unsubstantiated allegations against the African National Congress-led government in Jonathan Berger’s article “So much power, so little rule”, which appeared in your publication of April 5. The theme of his article is that the government […]
Gavin Foster The day of reckoning has come, and we’re still not really any the wiser. We’ll have to wait for the second MotoGP of the year at Welkom’s Phakisa raceway on Sunday to find out if Honda’s 1 000cc V5 RC 211V is really that much quicker than everything else in the new premier […]
In “Afloat but not alone in oil maelstrom” (April 12) Sarah Bullen writes “an oil price rise … hits consumers at the pumps and then creeps up everywhere in price rises”, and “a rand slide … plays an inflationary role”. No they don’t! The rand price of petrol, or of dollars, is just one price, […]
Dakar, Antananarivo | Wednesday MADAGASCAR’S rival leaders, Didier Ratsiraka and Marc Ravalomanana, had separate meetings early on Wednesday in the Senegal capital with four African presidents attempting to mediate in their long-standing election dispute. Ratsiraka and Ravalomanana both claim to be the legitimate leader of the Indian Ocean island state following an inconclusive presidential election […]
Mike Berger So Richard Calland finds “Schadenfreude” in the events of September 11 and Israeli casualties a cause for quiet celebration (“A murderer unleashed”, April 12). Since the Mail & Guardian is hardly different to other South African publications reporting on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, let’s examine the issue. It kicks off with a front page […]
I was Judge Willie Hartzenberg’s clerk for almost the entire duration of the Wouter Basson case. That being said, I must point out that I am writing this letter without the knowledge of Judge Hartzenberg. I have no affiliation to any sphere of the political spectrum, I am not a Basson groupie and do not […]
Deon Potgieter Cassius “the Hitman” Baloyi wrote his name into the local boxing history books on Wednesday night at Carnival City in Brakpan when he became the first South African fighter to win three world titles in different weight divisions. Baloyi added the International Boxing Organisation (IBO) junior-lightweight world title to his tally by stopping […]
Hazel Friedman A bitter battle over ownership of shares threatens to rip the black empowerment community apart Former political prisoners are starting to feel the fallout from the battle between the Makana Trust, set up to improve their lives, and Safika, the empowerment company Makana accuses of appropriating for itself millions of rands in shares […]
Sandra Cattich An attractive man pulls up in a convertible to ask me where he can find The Vagina Monologues. I have to tell him that I’m still looking as I wander towards the closest building at Caesar’s Palace, venue of South Africa’s first V-day event, musing that the bizarre interchange is probably one of […]
Inkatha Freedom Party national chairperson Lionel Mtshali’s appearance at the Democratic Alliance’s national conference in Johannesburg at the weekend underlines the fact that in politics there are no permanent enemies. In 1999, when neither the IFP nor the African National Congress could secure an outright majority in the provincial elections, Mtshali was the only obstacle […]
Sally Burdett How do you handle criticism? You know, that little churning ball of anxiety that starts to move around your gut when someone tells you that you screwed up or got it wrong, or hurt them? The reflex response is to defend. It is certainly one way of calming the sick feeling inside. Unfortunately […]
Under the dictates of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Haiti began a programme of rapid trade liberalisation in the 1980s, writes Charlotte Denny. The import tariff on rice, the staple crop of Haiti’s largely rural population, was cut from 50% to 3%, opening the country to a flood of cheap United States imports. […]
Nellie Brand “My name is Magdalena Isaaks. I was born in 1945 in Warmbad. I am a Nama-speaking Namibian and I live in Gibeon. I sew for a living.” This is the wording on one of the cards that introduced individual artists from remote communities in South Africa, Namibia and Zambia at a craft exhibition […]
<b>REVIEW:</b> <i>Shane Warne: My Autobiography</i> (Coronet). This is a pies-and-beer rather than a cabernet-and-camembert book, writes John Young.
Harare | Tuesday THE editor of Zimbabwe’s only independent daily newspaper has been arrested over a story published about last month’s controversial elections won by President Robert Mugabe, his lawyer said. Three officers from the criminal investigation department of the police took Daily News editor-in-chief Geoff Nyarota from his office on charges of falsifying and […]
HUGH NEVILL, Johannesburg | Tuesday SOUTH Africa’s trade with the rest of the continent is booming since the end of apartheid in 1994, with its wine and food now a common sight on supermarket shelves in African countries. The government, unlike its apartheid predecessor, encourages imports from other African countries as well as exports to […]
EMMANUEL GIROUD and CHRISTIAN CHADEFAUX, Antananarivo | Tuesday MADAGASCAR is a country that has two of everything two heads of state, two capitals and government ministries that double up, not to mention two central banks. All this since presidential elections on December 16, 2001, in which mayor of the capital Antananarivo, Marc Ravalomanana, claimed victory […]
AMINU ABUBAKAR, Kano | Monday A DISABLED Nigerian boy believed to have been adopted and raised by chimpanzees for 18 months is in care in a specialist children’s home in the northern city of Kano. Named Bello by nursing staff at the Tudun Maliki Torrey home in Kano, he was brought to them six years […]
DELEGATES to a major conference in Accra, Ghana, have recommended the setting up of a 10 billion dollar annual fund to develop water supplies and sanitation in Africa.<br>
Johannesburg | Monday A SOUTH African man wanted for the murder of two Namibian men in 1993, was extradited to Namibia this week, an Interpol official said on Sunday. Senior Superintendent Mary Martins-Engelbrecht said Interpol in South Africa handed over Hermanus Herbst to Namibian authorities Thursday afternoon. He had jumped bail and fled to South […]
Doctors say disorders such as obesity, depression and chronic fatigue syndrome are not diseases
Dakar | Monday THE New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) is a global plan aimed at lifting Africa out of its acute poverty through increased foreign investment, both private and public, and good governance by the continent’s leaders. A two-day summit on financing the initiative opens in the Senegalese capital Dakar on Monday in the […]
SUZANNE GOLDENBERG, Nablus | Friday The fight went out of al-Ayn refugee camp at dawn and the men came out with their hands in the air after a punishing Israeli bombardment forced them to the cruellest of choices: death or surrender. It’s not that we are scared to fight, but we have nothing to defend […]
Mail & Guardian reporter, Johannesburg | Friday A NEW “suspect” – the Reserve Bank, custodian of South Africa’s currency and reserves – is emerging in the quest to understand the rand’s nosedive late last year. Suspect number one – Deutsche Bank, fingered by South African Chamber of Business CEO Kevin Wakeford in a letter to […]
AFRICAN leaders were due to meet hundreds of global business chiefs in Dakar on Monday in a bid for cash to pay for an ambitious plan to lift the world’s poorest continent out of misery. But some continental heavyweights, who played a key role in putting the programme together, have pulled out at the last minute or are not attending.<br>
You can now use your TV satellite decoder to buy sushi, lingerie and much more, writes David Shapshak First there was e-commerce, then came m-commerce and now there is t-commerce. All have evolved through technology revolutions via the Internet, mobiles (cellphones) and interactive television, hence the e-, m- and t- prefixes. Shopping via the Internet […]
Jaspreet Kindra A violence monitor has highlighted “continuing low-intensity conflict and gross human rights abuses” in rural KwaZulu-Natal, warning that the 2004 election in the province may be no freer than Zimbabwe’s. University of Natal academic and violence monitor Mary de Haas called for the immediate intervention of the government, including the deployment of the […]