This year will signal the next phase in social media development in South Africa with more enterprise companies playing in the space as well as the growth in open source development of enterprise 2.0 platforms in the first quarter of 2008. A look at 2007's biggest trends reveals the key areas of development going forward into the New Year. Teenagers are not the only generation bent on enjoying the online media space, and what new technologies have to offer South Africa. Many companies are starting to join the numerous networks that have been promulgating the Internet in a quest to keep up with the growing demands of an informed public.

South African AIDS activists have called on doctors and nurses to act in the best interests of HIV-positive pregnant women and their unborn children by not waiting any longer for an official directive to switch from single antiretroviral (ARV) treatmentto more effective dual treatment for the prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT).

The Inner Circle, a Muslim gay rights organisation, is dismayed after declaration by the Ulema body of the Muslim Judicial Council (MJC) that any Muslim who believes that homosexuality is acceptable is regarded by the Muslim community as apostate.
This was said at an emergency meeting with full assembly of the MJC on 22 November last year, where the Ulema body said the decision was based on the Shariah Law and the Muslim way of life throughout the ages taught by all Holy prophets, and it is in the Holy Scriptures.

Attending secondary school might help reduce the risk of HIV among youth in rural South Africa, according to a study published in the February issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the South African Press Association reports. James Hargreaves of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Infectious Disease Epidemiology Unit and colleagues from the Wits School of Public Health examined the behavior and HIV prevalence among 916 young men and 1,003 young women ages 14 to 25 in rural South Africa.

Jackie Selebi, South Africa's police chief, has resigned as president of Interpol to fight corruption allegations in his home country. The world police organisation on Sunday said Selebi had stepped down "in the best interests of Interpol and out of respect for the global law enforcement community that it serves".

South Africa was an early adopter of GM crops and, more recently, introduced a national food-fortification program. This article discusses the country's experiences in developing an appropriate regulatory framework and the responses of key stakeholders. In addition, an assessment is presented of the prospects for the adoption of biofortified crops in South Africa.

The Arnett Drive Settlement has been in Reservoir Hills since 1972. Many of the people living there came there after being evicted from Cato Manor in 1959 and then Newlands in 1971. Today they are under armed attack by the eThekwini Municipality that has its notorious Land Invasions Unit demolishing shacks.

About 75 shackdwellers and one family living in a house in a section of Hangberg in Hout Bay, Cape Town are facing eviction from their land by South African Sea Products. The community will appear in the Cape High Court on Tuesday 29th January 2008 to oppose the eviction order. They will be assisted by the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign in opposing their forced removal.

On 3rd January more than 1000 backyarders from Delft and other areas of Cape Town, who occupied N2 Gateway houses in Delft before Christmas and were granted a stay of eviction by the Cape High Court, return to the Court. They claim that the order through which first the Cape Town City Council and then Thubelisha Homes tried to evict them was invalid and hence the evictions were illegal. They want to stop the evictions altogether.

Former national director of public prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka is driving the investigation against him, National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi claims. This allegation is contained in Selebi's founding affidavit lodged with the Pretoria High Court.

The monthly "Improvement Meeting" at Qumbu Health Centre, 50km from the Eastern Cape province town of Mthatha, is supposed to start at 9am, but rarely starts before 10am. Many of the nurses attending work at remote rural clinics scattered across Mhlontlo District and have to travel along rudimentary roads using the mini-bus taxis system to reach the meeting, so no-one complains about late arrivals.

Small scale sugar cane farmers in South Africa have managed to potentially reduce their direct irrigation costs by US$300 per hectare thanks to the use of a high cellphone technology system that is providing them with practical, real up to date information about when to irrigate their crops. A pilot project was implemented by the South African Sugar Association on two small scale irrigation schemes at Pongola in Mpumalanga province and Makhathini in KwaZulu Natal, meant at boasting production as well as saving water a precious commodity in these dry regions.

South Africa's top prosecutor believes there is enough evidence to bring renewed graft charges against Jacob Zuma, newly elected head of the ruling ANC, a local radio station reported on Thursday. Talk Radio 702 quoted prosecutor Mokotedi Mpshe as saying a decision was imminent on whether to take action against Zuma, who ousted President Thabo Mbeki as ANC leader on Tuesday.

Patrick Bond asks the question: With Jacob Zuma's election, shall we see a significant change in South African neoliberal policies?

Congratulations are due Jacob Zuma – apparently far more Machiavellian than even his arch-opponent since 2005, Thabo Mbeki – and the tireless band of warriors from the Congress of SA Trade Unions, SA Communist Party and African National Congress Youth League who kept his political life support on when everyone else declared him dead.

But after his election as ANC president on Tuesday, the disintegration of his voting bloc is not far off. As Brian Ashley of Amandla magazine explains, Zuma commands “a broad coalition of disgruntled elements within the ANC. A period of political instability awaits. The 'dreaded' two centres of power have materialised and given rise to a lame duck President.”

This is promising indeed, after 13.5 years of unrelenting neoliberalism mixed with triumphalist nationalism (often, in turn, flavoured with 'Breshnevite Marxism', as the ANC's left discourses have been termed in rare moments of autocritique). Indeed amongst the general public, there is a widespread conviction that a new balance of forces within the ANC presages a genuine left policy turn. To make this impression more palatable to bourgeois society and those near-mythical foreign investors, a seductive – yet incorrect - line of analysis also arises now to explain the logic behind Zuma's landslide victory. The first period of ANC rule (1994-2001) required 'macroeconomic stabilisation', so the argument goes, and subsequently a 'developmental state' with a strong welfarist bias has been under construction. Hence Zuma's victory will not change anything, really.

Actually, Zuma's huge (nearly 20%) margin reflected not a heroic new ruler, but rather a ruling regime out of touch with the misery experienced by its mass base, no one denies. The SA Police recently revealed that the rate of social protests has risen from 5800 in 2004-05 (when it would have been the world's highest per person, I reckon) to more than 10 000/year since, and no doubt even higher numbers will be released for 2007/08 given the long public workers' strike.

Zuma wasn't an instigator of more than a few of these, such as when disgracefully in May 2006 he let his rape trial devolve into an orgy of misogyny, with effigies of his victim burned outside the courthouse. No, indeed, the grassroots protests were largely against the ANC's neoliberal economic policies, prior to and after Zuma's firing as deputy president in mid-2005 in the wake of his friend Schabir Shaik's conviction on corruption charges.

Zuma was subsequently harrassed no end by Mbeki's vindictive state. This meant that at the ANC conference and in the words of commentators, the angry rumble from below was readily channeled away from structural critique of neoliberal nationalist rule, and into the song Umshini Wami ('Bring me my machine gun'). The prodigious venality of the Zuma-Mbeki squabble threw copious amounts of toxic dust high into the air, blinding most to what's really at stake here: class struggle, to borrow a worn but potent phrase.

Indeed the tone of the internecine battle with Mbeki was sufficiently vicious as to require cries of 'unity' immediately from both camps immediately afterwards, as well as from Zuma's speech on Thursday afternoon. But like much that happens in this party, the lovely rhetoric concealed yet more brutal power plays.

The other major ANC vote – for 80 positions on the ANC National Executive Committee – confirmed that the Zuma majority took no prisoners, leaving Mbeki's most trusted allies in the political wilderness. Although six cabinet ministers were elected in the top 20, those who lost their NEC places and are now ANC outsiders include some formidable names: Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka (who replaced Zuma), Mbeki's top state official Frank Chikane, his top political advisor and hatchet man (and Minister in the Presidency) Essop Pahad, Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils, the man who served as ANC chairperson until Monday, Terror Lekota, the head of the Mbeki's office at ANC headquarters Smuts Ngonyama, and Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqkula (formerly SACP chairperson).

The top vote-getter was veteran and often flamboyant populist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (ex-wife of Nelson), who gets counted out as irrelevant by the mainstream media periodically and makes comebacks worthy of the Zuma camp.

There really has been a change of the guard. But is it a move left? SACP intellectual leader Jeremy Cronin - who was #5 in the ANC vote – offers this spin about the party's ideological direction. The ANC conference just complete witnessed a “deepening and consolidation” of the progressive trajectory already underway, says Cronin. Hence under a President Zuma, “There would be no dramatic U-turn” on matters already under contestation: Pretoria's tight monetary policy, chaotic credit market regulation, and the liberalised trade and industrial policies which have killed a million jobs. For those like Cronin, the recent revival of the “National Democratic Revolution” is already undermining the neoliberal bloc within the ANC.

Is it? In reality, many on the centre-left – Cronin too - have been rather lukewarm about the Zuma campaign, because as national deputy president starting in 1999, Zuma was nowhere visible with workers and the poor (or women, needless to say) pulling against Mbeki and the other weighty neoliberals: Trevor Manuel (finance), Alec Erwin (trade/privatisation), Tito Mboweni (central bank governor), Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi (public service) and Sydney Mufamadi (local government). Of these, only Manuel retained an NEC seat, voted in at #57 after having been #1 in the 2002 vote.

In his first speech to the ANC as its president, Zuma himself intoned that there was “no reason why the business or international community or any other sector should be uneasy.” Quite so; after all, a mealy-mouthed Zuma made this clear last month in closed-door meetings organised by officials of two New York banks, Citi and Merrill Lynch, which are themselves making the world markets rather uneasy with their financial shenanigans.

Still, even Manuel, in a Mail & Guardian interview last week, condemned the private outsourcing of state services, something he himself has promoted harder than anyone since 1996 as keeper of the ever-tightening SA fiscus, notwithstanding that this 'New Public Management' technique is the root cause of many a fierce protest. Bizarrely, Manuel even endorsed the core legal argument put forward by the Soweto left-left in constitutional case earlier this month against Johannesburg Water (whose policies were products of Paris-based Suez's eco-social engineering during a failed 2001-06 outsourcing), namely, that the key water problem for the poor is the inordinate access that rich people enjoy at a too-cheap price.

With such rhetoric in the air these last few days, South African society does indeed feel like a 'post-Washington' semi-liberated zone. Free marketeers, who still run many a Pretoria ministry's policy units and finance departments, have had to hunker down.

But like so much other 'talk left walk right' activity here, that's precisely where the problem of seduction emerges, in illusions that Zuma's long and winding road to the country's presidency in 2009 (when Mbeki must retire) will generate conditions for social change along the route. We all witnessed how most of the US progressive movement fell flat on its face in 1993, suckered by Bill 'Slick Willy' Clinton – whose defeat of an elite incumbent (George Bush Sr), rural roots, home-boy humility, traditions of Southern patriarchy (and promiscuity) and apparent empathy for ordinary people presaged Zuma's own character flaws – and I think this is probably going to be the fate of a large portion
of the SA centre-left.

South Africa's left-left forces don't buy it, though. No one from the new social movements believes that a small increase in anti-poverty grants and other social wage improvements – amounting to less than 3% of GDP over apartheid-era stats – represents more than tokenistic welfare. With a 14% increase in electricity prices set for next year, and privatisation of 30% of generation capacity also on the cards, any suggestion of expanding basic services runs up against a contrary, commodified logic.

And then looking at the vast ($60 billion) spending planned for what amounts to a small herd of white elephants – 2010 soccer stadiums, big dams largely for mining houses, dicey nuclear power plants, aluminum smelter co-investments, speedy trains for the rich (who won't use public transport) and the rearmaments craze replete with corrupting German, French and British weapons dealers – it is hard to see anything 'developmental' about this crony-capitalist state.

Because of this week's momentous events, though, the centre-left's hard reality check lies a couple of years away, after Zuma takes power (if he is not in prison for bribe-taking, a distinct possibility, according to the National Prosecuting Authority in a statement on Thursday) and reverts to his militarist roots. Those who are championing his cause now may have reason in 2009 to renew their disgust at what we thought was 'Mbekism' – as Ashwin Desai has termed local neoliberalism - but can soon be renamed Zumism. We could well see the deepening of macroeconomic policies that do not deliver 'stability' (the currency has crashed four times since 1996 after all) but instead one of the world's highest current account deficits (trade shortfalls and financial outflows) at 8% of GDP, and hence repeated hikes in interest rates to draw in global financial assets, which are in turn making the credit-saturated middle-class scream in pain.

Unless I'm mistaken (and I really hope I am), there's simply no basis for believing Zuma is lying to Citi, Merrill or his audience when he says none of Mbeki's economic policies will change. So the root cause of the rebellion against Mbeki's malgovernance of the ANC – which is described too often as haughty style but which is grounded in a commitment to a haughty new class apartheid socio-economic structure – will reassert itself within weeks or months.

Only then will South Africa enjoy the possibility of a fully liberatory, post-Mbeki set of politics, not personalities, as the far-sighted left-left makes common cause with serious comrades in labour and the Communist Party, egged on no doubt by increasingly angry feminists and other democrats. This week's Polokwane theatrics will be looked back upon as a bit of distraction, at that stage in the making of South Africa's real history.

* Patrick Bond directs the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal:

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

After a protracted delay, tough new laws against sexual abuse will finally go into effect Sunday in South Africa, which is often called the "rape capital" of the world. The Justice Ministry said today that the Sexual Offenses Amendment Act would help the country "fight the scourge of sexual offenses head-on" and would at last give greater protection to victims of sexual crimes. For the first time, victims will be able to go to court to force their attackers to take AIDS tests.

Jacob Zuma, the Teflon politician of South Africa, has performed one of the most stunning comebacks in the country's history. Despite having been sacked by Thabo Mbeki in 2005 for alleged corruption, remaining the target of an ongoing corruption investigation, and having faced accusations of rape, he swept to the leadership of the ruling African National Congress, defeating the incumbent, President Mbeki.

I am 47 years old, married with children. I have a son and two daughters age 24, 19 and 14. I got married at the age of 19. When I got married I was already working. I started to work in the age of 15. I come from a poor family. My parents drink heavily and used to fight everyday. When I grew up I looked for a job. When I married I had been working for four years. In our culture or tradition women they must bow down and worship their husband as king. I had to give him my salary even though he was working too. He earned a lower salary than me.

I started living with my husband in 1984, and we were in love and were very happy. The problem started after we got married in 2004 when he became ill. In 2005 he started beating me and forcing me to have sex with him even when I told him I was not well. He accused me of having another man, and hit me so hard that I ended up at the clinic to get help for my husband. Indeed they did not help me for they wrote me a referral letter to take him to Baragwanath Hospital.

Advocacy organisation WomensNet is disappointed by the lack of response from mobile providers to a request for free cellphone calls to anti-gender-violence and AIDS help-lines. Last month, WomensNet, Gender Links and Nisaa partnered with LifeLine Southern Africa to urge Cell C, Vodacom, Virgin Mobile and MTN to declare these help-lines an essential service, with calls to them being free.

We as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and inter-sexed people (LGBTI), activists in the human and legal rights sector, feminists, trade unions, activists in the women and HIV/AIDS sectors as well as individuals from diverse backgrounds, constituting the South African civil society;