The road death toll for December has risen to 1 215, the Department of Transport said on Wednesday. Spokesperson Collen Msibi said 512 of the fatalities were pedestrians, 414 were passengers and 289 were drivers. The figure is down from 1 234 reported in the same period last year.
Distell, South Africa’s largest listed wine producer, has launched the first wines under a new brand from its ground-breaking joint venture in the Gansbaai area of the Western Cape, called Lomond Wines. Started in 2000, the Lomond project was experimental, being situated in the southern-most area in South Africa to be planted with vines.
A ”lacklustre” performance by Minister of Safety and Security Charles Nqakula and the ”disappearance from the radar” of National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi have left the Democratic Alliance wondering who is in charge of fighting crime, the party said in a statement on Tuesday.
The case of the 47-year-old handyman accused of killing a six-year-old Johannesburg boy in Plettenberg Bay was on Tuesday postponed to March 3 in the Knysna Magistrate’s Court. The court ordered that the man, known as Theuns Christian Olivier or Raymond Sinclair, be held at the Knysna correctional centre.
Road deaths during the Christmas holidays were at 1Â 162 by the end of December, the Department of Transport said on Monday. There was heavy traffic on the country’s main routes on Monday as holidaymakers returned home. Meanwhile, the bodies of five people who drowned after their car plunged into the Vaal River have been recovered.
Western Cape police suspect that the 47-year-old handyman accused of killing a six-year-old Johannesburg boy in Plettenberg Bay might not be South African. The accused, who was on Tuesday expected to appear in the Knysna Magistrate’s Court, goes by the names of Theuns Christian Olivier as well as Raymond Sinclair.
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/ 28 December 2005
The death toll on South Africa’s roads over the holiday season has reached 965, the Department of Transport said on Wednesday. Spokesperson Collen Msibi said 411 of the casualties were pedestrians and 88 were children under 14. Msibi said that although ”shocking”, the figure was down from the 1 140 deaths over the same period last year.
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/ 28 December 2005
Bus subsidies cost the national Transport Department R2,17-billion in 2003/04, according to the department’s annual report for 2005. The report, tabled in Parliament, noted that Gauteng received the largest cut of the nine provinces — with R788-million — followed by KwaZulu-Natal with R452-million. The Western Cape received R380-million.
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/ 21 December 2005
Western Cape fruit farmers are over the worst of their diesel crisis, Agri WesCape chief executive Carl Opperman said on Wednesday. ”At the moment, there is diesel trickling in to the point where we can keep the [industry] going,” he said. ”The worst is over if the flow of diesel continues to increase.”
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/ 20 December 2005
South Africa’s Pebble-Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) company on Tuesday announced that it has signed a R17,5-million contract with United States group Westinghouse. The contract is for the basic design of automation safety sub-systems for the PBMR’s demonstration power plant at Koeberg in the Western Cape.
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/ 19 December 2005
Since the beginning of December, 560 people have been killed on South African roads — mostly due to drunken driving, driver fatigue and speeding. At about the same time last year, 726 road deaths had been reported. Road accidents have also decreased, from 619 up to this time in December 2004 to 466 thus far.
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/ 19 December 2005
A massive effort is under way to provide fuel to the two sectors most in need — the deciduous fruit farmers in the Western Cape and the summer rainfall farmers of Gauteng, Mpumalanga, the Free State and North West — the South African Petroleum Industry Association (Sapia) said on Monday.
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/ 14 December 2005
A Cape Town regional magistrate on Wednesday rejected a bid by former Western Cape premier Peter Marais and co-accused David Malatsi for their discharge on two counts of corruption totalling R400 000. Magistrate Andre le Grange did, however, discharge Malatsi on a third corruption count that he alone faced.
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/ 13 December 2005
A call for members of the public not to panic over fuel shortages was made by Minister of Minerals and Energy Lindiwe Hendricks in the National Assembly on Tuesday morning. In Gauteng, the problem has been exacerbated by panic buying among motorists who do not even need to fill up with fuel, she said.
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/ 12 December 2005
As motorists struggled to find petrol on Monday, the government denied any fuel shortages inland. The situation inland constituted ”an inconvenience rather than a crisis”, and motorists should not wait for their tanks to empty before filling up, Minerals and Energy Minister Lindiwe Hendricks told reporters in Pretoria.
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/ 12 December 2005
The state has failed to prove its corruption case against former Western Cape premier Peter Marais, his lawyer told the Bellville Regional Court on Monday when applying for his client’s discharge. Marais’s co-accused, former Western Cape environment minister David Malatsi, has also applied for his discharge.
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/ 12 December 2005
Satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, whose alter ego is Evita Bezuidenhout, has sent a Christmas message to South Africa and President Thabo Mbeki. He has played on the words of the Lord’s Prayer in what he described as a festive-season message of good hope for South Africa.
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/ 10 December 2005
A 49-year-old man arrested in connection with murders and rapes on farms around Philippi in the Western Cape was released on Friday. No evidence could link the man to the incidents, said police spokesperson Captain Elliot Sinyangana. ”He could, however, be re-arrested if new evidence emerges,” he said.
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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
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
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 […]