Features

With the dust barely settled on the streets from last year’s 100 Men March, South Africa continues to grapple with alarming gender-based violence and femicide.

For decades children of farm workers could not wait to complete high school so they could leave the farms where their parents were being overworked and underpaid.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has cited changes made to visa regulations for tourists and highly skilled professionals, financial support for black farmers and black industrialists and the upgrading and creation of industrial parks as evidence of government’s efforts to secure economic growth and deal with unemployment.

In 2018, South Africans watched in disgust and shock as alleged rape survivor Cheryl Zondi endured gruelling and invasive questioning by defense advocate Peter Daubermann about her rape ordeal.

Patricia de Lille is a woman on a mission. The recently appointed Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure is no stranger to taking the bull by the horns, and that is exactly what she is doing in her new role at the helm of the department entrusted to be government’s infrastructure custodian.

At the age of 23, Tshepo Seame was at the peak of his career and one of the youngest IT system engineers at the company he worked for. However, his hunger for success saw him losing everything he had worked so hard for as he became addicted to drugs.

South Africans on 8 May took to the polls to elect the sixth administration, 25 years since the advent of democracy, with much optimism.

Being a single mother is a challenging, every day job, especially when you are in the often overlooked informal labour sector.

It is often said that ‘a leopard never changes its spots’ - a phrase known to mean that changing one’s character is almost always impossible to do. However, as far as township economies go - the opposite is true, for these are being turned on their heads.

Returning home to South Africa seemed like a distant dream when Thandi Lujabe- Rankoe went into exile, spending 33 years of her life fighting for her home country’s liberation.

In its own quiet, no frills, no thrills way, a community-based care and protection intervention project has been providing a life line to South Africa’s orphaned and vulnerable children, as well as the youth, so much so that a large number have now become strong, successful individuals - contributing to their communities.

Tainted supply chain processes have for the longest time been regarded as the genesis of bleeding the fiscus of Billions of Rands in wasted expenditure.

State land alone is simply not enough to redress land reform. In a country where the majority of the population is black – it is a bitter pill to swallow that only 1-2% of black farmers operate in the commercial space, writes Keamogetse Kgomanyane.

A few moments of pain and emotion stand out in South Africa’s young democracy. One of these was an image of Emeritus Archbishop Desmond Tutu being overcome by emotion during the highly-charged Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s where testimonies of South Africa’s difficult past – how apartheid activists went missing and how some were executed by ruthless police officers – were narrated.

When apartheid negotiations reached a sensitive stage in the late 1980s, former President Nelson Mandela was taken to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with Tuberculosis. This was on 12 August 1988. Three months later, and after receiving treatment at two hospitals, the former statesman was then transferred to a house at Victor Verster Prison near Paarl, where he spent the last 14 months of his imprisonment.