Big Business is both the primary consumer of electricity and the principal culprit when it comes to non-payment for services By DALE T McKINLEY AMANDLA NGAWETHU! We hear it all the time and many regularly shout it. Indeed, “power to the people” has been a crucial part of South Africa’s political vocabulary for decades, first…
By JANE DUNCAN On 21 March 1960, the apartheid police opened fire on a crowd of protestors in Sharpeville, killing 69 people. Five decades on, post-apartheid South Africa remembers these events annually, on Human Rights Day. The government has attempted to depoliticize the event, shifting the day from one that is associated with the Pan Africanist…
By MANDISI MAJAVU Sexual Attraction and Online Dating Last month Christian Rudder, co-founder of OkCupid, an online dating website, released statistical data collected over a five-year period about how people who subscribe to the website “weigh race in deciding attraction.” The data doesn’t reveal any new insights into the issue, which people of colour are…
By ANNA MAJAVU South Africa has a growing number of unemployed teaching graduates, especially newly qualified Black teachers. When Dr Blade Nzimande took office as Higher Education minister, he increased the number of bursaries for teacher training, supposedly to remedy the extreme shortage of teachers. Last year, R2.4-billion was allocated by the Higher Education ministry…
By RICHARD PITHOUSE At a public discussion on the land question in Johannesburg on Friday, February 27, Dikgang Moseneke, the Deputy Chief Judge of the Constitutional Court, began his remarks with a well-known quote from Frantz Fanon: For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land:…
By BUSISO MOYO Everyone seems to have an interest in food policy these days, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with its Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, to the G8 with its New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, to social movements, civil society networks and those who simply care about what…
By ALEXANDER O’RIORDAN What happened in the South African Parliament last week was a carefully engineered spectacle of power Last week’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) and the subsequent fallout is being voraciously dissected in the press. Most of the analysis, however, is on what the media presumes are unintended consequences of President Jacob…
By MANDISI MAJAVU Early this month, Serena Williams wrote an article for TIME magazine announcing that she has decided to end her 14-year boycott of the Indian Wells tennis tournament. The last time she played at the tournament in 2001, she was subjected to racial abuse. She recounts the whole incident in chapter four of her autobiography, My life:…
Nothing Changes Until Something Big Happens By SALIEM FAKIR Last week the Mining Indaba came and went just like it does every year. Some 7,000 people attended. On its margins, outside of the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC), a different kind of mining indaba, a people’s indaba, took place in close by Woodstock. This…
Harvard University surgeon, Dr Mark G. Shrime, MD MPH FACS, has proved that anybody can publish fake medical research for a fee of about $500. While they won’t get it used in respectable medicals journals accredited by PubMed, there are many legitimate looking publications online that will publish anything supposedly scientific, as long as the…
