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/ 9 December 2005
The fire which broke out on Friday on the back slopes of Table Mountain is still raging out of control and has damaged buildings in a youth camp. Cape Town fire control officer Mark Bosch said the fire was now burning on two fronts. There had been reports that the south easter, which is driving the flames, was reaching 45kph, he said.
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/ 6 December 2005
The African National Congress in the Western Cape says it has not decided whether to investigate rumours that two senior newspaper journalists were secretly being paid to boost provincial premier Ebrahim Rasool’s image. ”Maybe we can consider that, but we have not taken such a decision,” provincial secretary Mcebisi Skwatsha said in response to questions at a media briefing on Tuesday.
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/ 2 December 2005
The Western Cape government is not investigating claims that two senior Cape Town newspaper journalists have been secretly working for the premier’s office. The two journalists have been suspended by their employer, the Cape Argus, pending the outcome of an investigation launched by its editor, Ivan Fynn.
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/ 1 December 2005
A group of 40 German travel agents were robbed of their handbags at gunpoint in their bus at Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township on Wednesday, SA Tourism said on Thursday. Two armed men stormed into the group’s stationary tour bus and demanded that passengers hand over their valuables and money, SA Tourism said.
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/ 30 November 2005
The electricity supply to consumers in the Western Cape was interrupted twice in November — but the Koeberg nuclear power station was not the cause of the supply interruptions, the Department of Public Enterprises said on Wednesday. ”On both occasions, Koeberg reacted exactly as it was designed to do,” the department said.
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/ 30 November 2005
South African athletes won four gold medals on the second day of the 2005 Pacific School Games in Melbourne, Australia, on Tuesday. Jan (JP) Hoffman, world youth shot-put champion and one of the top athletes at the meeting, won the discus for boys in the 17-to-19 category with a good distance of 48,43m.
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/ 30 November 2005
Deon van der Walt, a well-known South African opera singer, and his father were found shot dead at the family’s Veenwouden farm in northern Paarl on Tuesday, Western Cape police said. Van der Walt was counted among the leading tenors and has performed at all the world’s major opera houses.
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/ 30 November 2005
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The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has filed an urgent application in the Cape High Court for an interdict against the activities of controversial vitamin entrepreneur Matthias Rath. It has also asked the court to find that Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and her department have a duty to stop Rath.
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/ 26 November 2005
More than 150 people were left destitute after a fire swept through the Joe Slovo informal settlement in Langa in the Western Cape on Saturday morning. Cape Town emergency-services spokesperson Johan Minnie said the blaze began in the early hours of Saturday and has since been extinguished.
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/ 26 November 2005
Power was restored all parts of the Western Cape on Friday after a controlled blackout earlier in the day, but Eskom has appealed for people to use electricity sparingly. The outages followed a shutdown of Koeberg nuclear power station, which supplies the bulk of the Western Cape’s electricity.
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/ 25 November 2005
Basotho are gatvol The current Lesotho Congress of Democrats government has riled me, a proud Mosotho. In 2004 the government decided to increase the salaries and packages of MPs, ministers and permanent secretaries by a whopping 85%. Some are reported to have received more than a 90% increase. In one of the world’s poorest countries, […]
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/ 25 November 2005
Kirby’s nuclear ignorance Robert Kirby writes complete nonsense (”Alex in wonderland”, August 25) when he says Russia’s Chernobyl nuclear power station ”went out of control because of what Nersa [the National Electricity Regulator] recently diagnosed at Koeberg”. The primary reason for the accident at Chernobyl was a crazy reactor design that would never be allowed […]
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/ 25 November 2005
Enough of the crocodile tears I read with dismay Nomboniso Gasa’s open letter to Jacob Zuma (March 17), and cringed at her crocodile tears. I am not politically correct and shall nail my colours to the mast: I align myself with Zuma’s fight to be accorded respect and dignity, not least by the partisan character […]
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/ 25 November 2005
It’s the economy, stupid Editor Ferial Haffajee makes some bold statements and assertions in her article ”Meaning of the Selebi saga” (December 21). She should have been more cautious and thoughtful; I found her arguments loosely constructed. High-personality crimes usually give rise to such outcries. While the government believes one murder is a murder too […]
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/ 25 November 2005
Kirby’s colonial project Robert Kirby writes that Shakespeare’s plays and poetry ”stand on their own, immune from any historical context” (June 9). Really? How was he able to achieve this feat? Surely any writing is influenced by, and rooted in, contemporary public discourse and the prevailing mores of its time. It stands to reason that […]
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/ 25 November 2005
All faiths used violence Pope Benedict, in trying to argue that religion should not be spread by force, failed to say that the Catholic Church, indeed Christianity, has been guilty of this. Strife between Catholicism and Protestantism, and the use of force to maintain orthodoxies by the rack, burning and warfare, are an unedifying history. […]
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/ 25 November 2005
Kasrils a man of honour I am not a supporter of any political party, but I believe your readers should know what kind of man Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils is and will continue to be. I met Kasrils when he was deputy minister of defence. As part of his VIP detail, I was his personal […]
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/ 25 November 2005
Campus racism insidious Auditors Deloitte have found that there is no racism at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s medical school (July 7), only “small incidents, which appear to be nothing more substantial than personal differences, or wrong perceptions, or misunderstandings …” Case closed, let’s get on with it! The problem here is one of perspective, because […]
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/ 25 November 2005
Come down, Peter Mokaba! Forgive me, commander Peter Mokaba, for not speaking to you before. We have been preoccupied with managing hypocrisy and mediocrity in the organisation you died for. Commander, the youth league of Anton Lembede is burning — particularly in the province of your birth, Limpopo — and we need fire extinguishers. The […]
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/ 25 November 2005
DA is getting stronger In her analysis of the 2006 local election results (March 3), Vicki Robinson reached the premature conclusion that support for the Democratic Alliance had dropped and that the DA had once again failed to make inroads in the townships. A proper post-election analysis shows that the opposite is true: in 2006, […]
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/ 25 November 2005
When Sir Francis Drake hove into view of the south-western appendix of our great land, hyperbole was inevitable. No doubt ankle-deep in Elizabethan upchuck, his britches starched by pig fat and a robust bout of dysentery, his bodkin cruelly ravaged by months of salty air and now nothing more than a rusty tool dangling between his thighs, he was primed for rhetorical excess.
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/ 23 November 2005
A campaign to stop controversial German vitamin entrepreneur Matthias Rath from conducting ”illegal” HIV trials in South Africa will be stepped up, three organisations said on Wednesday. ”He has got to be stopped,” Congress of South African Trade Unions president Willie Madisha said.
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/ 23 November 2005
Eight of South Africa’s nine provinces are being been severely affected by drought, the Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs said on Wednesday. Hardest hit are northern parts of KwaZulu-Natal, said the department’s senior manager of drought and risk management, Ikalafeng Kgakgatsi.
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/ 22 November 2005
Both the media and the Western Cape Directorate for Public Prosecutions got a lashing in the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court on Monday — the media for sensational coverage of the shoplifting case against the son of Cape Town mayor Normaindia Mfeketo, and the directorate for incompetence.
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/ 18 November 2005
The unemployment rate for youths aged between 16 and 25 is 52% in South Africa, while in the Western Cape it is 49%, compared with a national average for all ages of 26,5%, Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel said on Thursday evening in Cape Town. "A large chunk of the answer to unemployment lies in upgrading the available skills," he said.
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/ 16 November 2005
A power failure that blacked out large areas of Cape Town on Wednesday left MPs attending a National Assembly debate in the dark when Parliament’s back-up generators failed to kick in. Areas affected by the cut included the Cape Town city centre and the towns of Caledon, Hermanus, Kleinmond, Bredasdorp and Cape Agulhas.
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/ 16 November 2005
Health-services provider Network Healthcare Holdings (Netcare) on Wednesday reported a 34,4% rise in fully diluted headline earnings per share to 58,6 cents per share for the year ended September 30 2005, from 43,6 cents a year ago. The group declared a final capital distribution of 15 cents per share.
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/ 14 November 2005
Increased interaction of warders with prisoners is important in pre-empting gang attacks and other gang-related activity in prisons, a study released on Monday reveals. The Department of Correctional Services is looking at issues such as staffing levels and the provision of equipment at a representative 36 prisons around the country.
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/ 14 November 2005
Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota, who was admitted to Cape Town’s Gatesville Medical Centre last week after a heart attack, was transferred to Two Military Hospital on Sunday. Earlier on Sunday, ANC Western Cape chairperson James Ngculu said Lekota was in high spirits when an ANC delegation visited him at the Gatesville Medical Centre.
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/ 11 November 2005
The African National Congress government seems paranoid about disaffected minorities staging a counter-revolution, Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said on Friday. ”The president seems to think that foreign-funded non-governmental organisations are out to undermine the government,” Leon said.
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/ 10 November 2005
Tensions in the tripartite alliance in the Western Cape have flared anew with a stinging rebuke in a letter published in the Cape Times on Thursday to Congress of South African Trade Unions provincial secretary Tony Ehrenreich by the chairperson of the African National Congress in the province, James Ngculu.
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/ 9 November 2005
The African National Congress in the Western Cape has disciplined a member who fired shots in the air at a chaotic branch meeting in September, and accepted his protestations of loyalty to the provincial leadership. A disciplinary committee has sentenced Douglas Ndawonde to expulsion, but suspended the punishment for one year.