South Africa needs to revise its approach to land reform to end racial inequalities, government officials say. At a national land summit in Johannesburg, Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said the current market-based approach was not working.The land summit - which brings together politicians, landowners and organisations representing people who hope to benefit from land reform - will discuss ways of speeding up the redistribution process.

This paper is a critical examination of strategies and policies implemented by the South African government to end violence against women in South Africa. The paper aims to draw some tentative conclusions about strategies and good practices in relation to reforming legislation addressing violence against women. The paper starts with a brief history of the South African domestic violence act. The paper then describes some of the key innovations of the Domestic Violence Act (DVA), before examining how some of the Act's provisions have been implemented. It also examines which women have been most likely to benefit from the DVA.

Unexpected and overwhelming support for sacked former deputy president Jacob Zuma has given President Thabo Mbeki and the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) some pause for thought. Mbeki's attempt to have the ANC's national general council endorse his "handling" of Zuma - which means approve Zuma's dismissal - backfired, leading to the president having to give concessions he would rather have done without.

This paper examines gender equity within the 2005 South African budget. The authors highlight that women and girls are often most vulnerable to conditions like HIV/AIDS and poverty, but that programmes to address these conditions will fail without a significant earmarking of funds. Ensuring that there is adequate funding for men's and women's programming does not mean having separate male and female budgets, but rather giving critical consideration to the imbalances that exist in society and respond effectively to addressing these. The authors claim that the South African budget in 2005 gives some consideration to tackling gender inequities, but these interventions tend to be gender-blind.

An estimated 200 000 South Africans living with HIV and AIDS are in urgent need of anti-AIDS drugs, but supply is not keeping up with demand. And, despite good nutrition being an essential pre-requisite for starting anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment, only a fraction of HIV and AIDS patients are receiving the supplements and food parcels. This is the finding of a monitoring report compiled by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and Aids Law Project, 18 months after the government approved the national HIV and AIDS treatment plan.

On the 5th of July 2005, in the Johannesburg High Court, Professor Dennis Brutus and Jubilee will make ex-parte applications to the High Court, stating their opposition to the takeover of Absa by Barclays. The anti-apartheid activist and poet Professor Dennis Brutus will approach the Court, advising it that Barclays Bank aiding and abetted the Apartheid Regime and has been misleading in information provided to the JSE and SRP, including the glaring omission that Barclays is the lead defendant in ongoing litigation in the USA.

The African National Congress will adopt a "zero tolerance" approach to corruption - no matter who it involves. This was the commitment made by ANC chief whip Mbulelo Goniwe when he announced that the five serving ANC members of parliament who pleaded guilty to fraud with parliamentary travel vouchers have resigned from parliament.

Actionaid International's Southern Africa Partnership Programme (SAPP) is an eight-country innovative programme whose purpose is to work in solidarity with community groups, NGOs, alliances and movements to strengthen responses to and accountability on the issues of poverty and HIV and AIDS. Actionaid is looking for a dynamic, energetic, analytical and highly-organised newly qualified graduate to work with the Southern Africa Partnership Programme policy team.

Minerals and Energy Minister Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka was appointed on Wednesday as South Africa's second-in-command after the sacking of former deputy president Jacob Zuma last week. Mlambo-Ngcuka is the country's first female vice-president and has been a member of parliament since 1994.

It has become a tired cliché that the face of AIDS is a woman's face but it is questionable whether infected or affected women's voices are really being heard loud and clear in the AIDS field. Often, women are the majority of AIDS organizations' members, yet they are usually underrepresented in publicly-visible leadership positions. Women are on the margins of AIDS activism yet they want to move to the strategic centre of decision-making, policy-making, and addressing the media about AIDS activist campaigns.

Former deputy president Jacob Zuma will be prosecuted on two counts of corruption, the National Prosecuting Authority said in Pretoria on Monday. Zuma was sacked last week following the ruling by Durban High Court judge Hilary Squires, who found that he had a "generally corrupt" relationship with his friend Schabir Shaik, who acted as his financial advisor. "This afternoon advocate [Vusi] Pikoli informed deputy president [Jacob] Zuma that he has decided to bring criminal charges against his person. Such charges will be constituted by, among others, two counts of corruption," spokesperson Makhosini Nkosi said on Monday.

Many refugees in South Africa find themselves unable to begin or continue with their education. A 2003 study, the ‘National Refugee Baseline Survey’, found that almost 40 percent of persons surveyed had children who were not attending school, mostly because their parents were unable to afford the fees. Those surveyed also reported that refugee children were turned away from primary schools because the facilities were said to be full, or unwilling to accept children with asylum seeker and refugee permits.

President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has relieved the country's deputy president, Jacob Zuma, of his post. Mbeki announced this to a joint sitting of South Africa's parliament in Cape Town. His move came in the wake of the conviction of Zuma's financial advisor, Schabir Shaik, on charges of corruption and fraud last week. Mbeki said he took into account the basic pillars of South African jurisprudence, including the presumption that someone was innocent until proven guilty. Zuma - who was not charged in the trail of Shaik - "has yet to have his day in court." Mbeki also noted that Shaik was taking his case on appeal and that it was possible the judgement might be overturned.

Taddy Blecher must be the first person to have founded a university from a fax machine.
Five years ago, from his office in Johannesburg in South Africa, without any university buildings, courses or staff, he began faxing out a letter of invitation to 350 schools. He asked the brightest and poorest students to apply for a new university - and promised them the "best business education in Africa".

South Africa will next week seek to defeat a Japanese proposal to expand whale hunting as it would threaten a growing industry catering to people who enjoy watching the huge mammals, a senior official said. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) is due to vote on Japan's plans at a meeting in South Korea from June 20-24.

Anti-rape campaigners in South Africa are outraged about a new invention intended to catch rapists. The device, designed for a woman to insert, attaches itself to a rapist and has to be surgically removed. Its inventor says this will help in the prosecution of the rapist. Critics say the invention represents a return to the days of the chastity belt. Some 1.5 million rapes occur in South Africa each year - one of the highest rates in the world. "This is a medieval instrument, based on male-hating notions and fundamentally misunderstands the nature of rape and violence against women in this society," said Charlene Smith, one of South Africa's most prominent campaigners against rape.

Despite good outcomes in many treatment centers, the message from reports and demonstrators at the Second South African AIDS Conference in Durban last week was that the government's 18-month- old plan for AIDS treatment in the public sector is still falling far short, reports the latest edition of the Africa Focus Bulletin. Results are very uneven among provinces, few children are receiving treatment, nutrition programs as well as antiretroviral (ARV) drugs are failing to reach the majority of those needing treatment, and there is still no plan to address the critical shortage of medical personnel.

For Africa to move forward out of stagnation means Africans all over Africa should move beyond pettiness and babyness. The world is changing and with the change is the reality of integration and intermingling of the races. This new age integration and intermingling of the races especially Black and White has always been in existence previously. It started with the moving into Africa by European adventurers in the 13th and 14th century.

The moving into Africa of these Europeans and the subsequent intermingling of Black and White was characterized by animosity and such hatred such that the Europeans abhorred the Africans in such a way that they called them Monkeys and Apes. The reduction of Africans by Europeans to animalism eventually let to Africans transported like donkeys to Europe and America's as slaves.

* For the rest of this response to Issa Shivji's article, The “Second Great Boer Trek” (http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=28321) and a response from Pambazuka News, please click on the link below.

EDITORS' COMMENT: It is surprising how many people seem to have missed the point of Issa Shivji's article. He wrote about the penetration of South African capital into the rest of Africa, the growing sub-imperial role of capital into the region, and its consequent growing dominance within the region's economies without necessarily a concurrent development of productive forces. This is not a matter of white penetration of Africa. We strongly recommend readers to re-read Shivji's important contribution. It has a direct bearing on the struggle for emancipation and self determination.

More than ten years after South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, apartheid’s social and economic legacy remains. The majority of its nearly 45 million people continue to live in conditions resembling those of a decade ago. The bulk of the country’s wealth remains in the hands of a small percentage of the population. Though corporate giving is one of the largest sources of funding for civil society,[2] companies remain reluctant to address inequalities and take on social justice grantmaking.

Ironically, it was apartheid, and its consequent social unrest and threat to the economy, that provided the first real stimulus for corporate social investment (CSI). After the 1976 student uprisings in Soweto, several companies banded together to establish the Urban Foundation, which focused on urban development, housing and education in black townships. At about the same time, the Sullivan Principles were introduced, requiring American companies to justify their presence in the country by contributing to local communities, which encouraged more formalized giving by the private sector in general. In 1984-85, the groundswell of the liberation movement against apartheid and the international attention it brought provided a further stimulus to corporate giving.

However, while the Urban Foundation supported community centres, education and training in black townships, it disposed of relatively small financial resources, and did little to dismantle the system that kept black people in those townships in the first place. Other efforts to pool company funds (the Joint Education Trust (JET), formed in 1992, and the Business Trust, formed in 1999) similarly focused more on service delivery than on attacking the root causes of problems. While JET did contribute to the development of government policies and programmes throughout the 1990s, it focused primarily on educational service delivery. The Business Trust’s main focus was on job creation, education and crime. Although it was established jointly by the private sector and government, it appears as yet to have focused little on policy reform.

CSI in South Africa today

Overall, the picture has changed little. The 2004 CSI Handbook covers issues such as knowledge management, employee involvement, evaluation, communications and sustainability, but there is no discussion of policy reform or advocacy. As of 2003/04, CSI funds have gone predominantly to education and training (46 per cent) and health and social development (24 per cent), with the remainder going to a combination of job creation, sports, environment, arts and culture, safety and security, and housing (in descending order of size of contribution).

Over the past four years, with companies recognizing the impact of HIV/AIDS, there has been a significant increase in funding for health and social development. One example is provided by Anglo American’s programme, principally directed towards its 13,900 employees. Initially focused on education and prevention, this has now grown to include voluntary testing and counselling as well as anti-retroviral (ARV) therapy, a controversial stance in South Africa, given the government’s initial reluctance to recognize the need for ARVs (see p58). Another example is Absa Bank, which has over 2,500 employees participating in its ‘give as you earn’ campaign, which deducts contributions from employees’ monthly salary. The contributions are then matched by the Absa Foundation (the separate organization responsible for the bank’s CSI) and given to NGOs focused on HIV/AIDS treatment and care.

These HIV/AIDS programmes represent some of the most creative and forward-thinking elements of CSI, but they hardly amount to social justice grantmaking. The private sector has been hesitant to fund advocacy organizations such as the Treatment Action Campaign. In general, the emphasis is on service delivery. Relatively few CSI initiatives advocate major policy reform or fund organizations that provide a voice for those who are usually outside the arena of policy formation. CSI has not tended to promote public debate on issues such as economic policy and the development of a social safety net that could result in greater attention to social justice. Nor has it paid much attention to rural areas or the needs of women.

Why is CSI not focused on the most marginalized?

An urban focus
Most companies are urban-based and their development efforts reflect this. In 2003, two-thirds of CSI spending was targeted towards urban and peri-urban areas, with only 34 per cent targeted towards rural communities. Given the high levels of poverty in rural areas, this funding pattern is in almost inverse proportion to need.

An insular focus
Fifteen per cent of funds from CSI programmes focus on company employees and their families and another 49 per cent on the communities in which the companies operate. While this may seem logical, it also means that those people and communities who have little or no connection to corporate South Africa, as employees or customers, are badly underserved. With the broadly defined unemployment rate at over 40 per cent, CSI is not reaching those who are most marginalized with least access to resources and information.

Promoting the government line
The new government has promoted the concept of public-private partnerships to address social needs and implement government programmes. Companies are encouraged to support this trend in order to achieve greater exposure and win government favour. It is unlikely, therefore, that companies will publicly criticize government policy or support local communities and organizations that do so. Promoting a social justice agenda would inevitably involve this.

Internal considerations
The majority of CSI budgets in South Africa are not determined through a formula, as they are in the UK and the US, which makes them more vulnerable to the arbitrary decisions of management and less likely to be strategically focused. When it comes to evaluation, companies tend to focus on inputs and anecdotal evidence, with little effort to assess developmental impact, lessons learned and implications for policy reform.

CSI in South Africa is thus limited in scope, often unstrategic, and emphasizing service delivery not structural reform. Without giving attention to the areas of weakness outlined above, it is unlikely to make any significant contribution to social justice. A set of initiatives that have encouraged greater reflection and improved reporting are described below. They are not specifically aimed at promoting social justice programmes, but it is possible that the greater reflection on the role of companies in society that they encourage could lead in this direction.

Broader corporate accountability needed

CSI needs to be complemented by broader corporate accountability in regard to workplace conditions, approach to the environment and sustainable development. In recognition of this, the UN Global Compact and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) encourage a ‘triple bottom line’ approach. There are several developments in South Africa that have built on this approach.

* The King Report on Corporate Governance (King II) Launched in 2002, this provides a South African voluntary code of conduct, which embraces the ‘triple bottom line’ concept.
* The Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) Index Launched in 2004 on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, this assesses companies on a range of social, environmental and economic issues.
* Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Initially focused on extending black equity participation, predominantly to a small black elite, government now encourages BEE to take a broader approach to empowerment that includes guiding government’s procurement decisions to benefit black-owned companies, development of small businesses, skills development, etc. Unfortunately, to date, BEE has focused on redistribution at the apex rather than at the base.[3]
* Industry charters Developed by several industries (banking, mining and finance), with government encouragement, these provide a scorecard for transformation, featuring issues such as black ownership and control, skills development, financing and procurement, and CSI.

Working through other grantmakers

Working through other types of grantmaker, especially those that focus on human rights and reaching the most marginalized, offers a potential way for companies to give their CSI activities a social justice focus. Possible partner organizations include community foundations and women’s funds, two new institutional forms of philanthropy in South Africa in recent years.

Community foundations
A community foundation pilot programme led by the Southern African Grantmakers Association (SAGA) resulted in the creation of the Greater Rustenburg Community Foundation (GRCF) in Northwest province and the Uthungulu Community Foundation (UCF) in KwaZulu Natal. Both serve populations that are predominantly rural with high levels of poverty. Local corporations have shown great interest in the idea. Billiton (a mining corporation) provided UCF with R5 million in endowment support and Impala Platinum provides support to GRCF. Community foundations can channel CSI funds in a way that permits greater community control and influence on how the funds are spent. It remains to be seen, however, whether this will help shift funds away from charity towards social justice.

Women’s funds
There is even greater potential in the WHEAT (Women’s Hope Education and Training) Trust, a women’s fund in Cape Town, with an explicit social justice agenda. WHEAT focuses on issues of violence against women, women’s rights as human rights, HIV/AIDS and support to local women’s community organizations. WHEAT has tapped corporate funding from the retail and IT industries as well as building a R1 million endowment with contributions predominantly from individuals.

Other local grantmakers
Corporates have also begun to partner with other local grantmakers such as the Social Change Assistance Trust (SCAT) and the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund (NMCF). SCAT is a grantmaking development agency that funds rural, community-based organizations focusing on human rights, gender equity, HIV/AIDS and local economic development. It has received money from the De Beers Fund and has helped develop Ditikeni, an investment company that is building assets for a set of non-profit organizations, SCAT included. Given its name and profile, NMCF has received numerous corporate contributions. The organization has been affected by political influences but, given its R250 million endowment, may develop greater independence and a stronger social justice emphasis in the future.

Working through local grantmakers such as these could enable companies to reach those communities outside their immediate ambit. If that greater outreach combines with well-designed advocacy campaigns driven by local communities, there is the potential to influence corporate grantmaking for the better.

1. This article is part of a longer paper by Christa Kuljian commissioned by the Global Equity Initiative (GEI) at Harvard University as part of a series on philanthropy and equity in China, India, the Philippines, Brazil and South Africa. The full paper will be available later this year at www.fas.harvard.edu/~acgei/philanthropy.htm. For the purposes of this paper, social justice is defined as promoting advocacy and policy reform to benefit those who are most marginalized in society.

2 According to Mark Swilling and Bev Russell, ‘The Size and Scope of the Non-profit Sector in South Africa’, linked to the Johns Hopkins international comparative study, private sector funding accounts for 25 per cent of all non-profit income in South Africa compared to an average of 11 per cent in 28 other countries in the study.

3 For those interested in a longer analysis of BEE, see ‘Black Economic Empowerment: Elite enrichment or real transformation?’ by Frank Meintjies in the Isandla Development Communique at www.isandla.org.za

* Christa Kuljian is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg. She can be contacted at [email protected]

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Lobby group Jubilee SA has accused Johannesburg police of harassing its demonstrators outside the Barclays head office in Sandton on Friday. "Jubilee SA demonstrators had been peacefully voicing their dissent of the Barclays-ABSA deal - within the bounds of the Gathering Act - for over 45 minutes, when a police van drove up to the demonstration with its siren wailing," said Tristen Taylor, spokesperson for the organisation.