Schabir Shaik, closely associated with Deputy President Jacob Zuma, is to face fraud and corruption charges in the Durban High Court in October, SABC radio news reported. The trial is set to start on October 11. Shaik faces charges of corruption, fraud, theft of company assets, tax evasion and money laundering related to the government's arms deal.

The following responsibilities and qualifications are required for this position:
- Facilitate the implementation of the Principles for Election Management, Monitoring and Observation in the SADC region (PEMMO)
- Coordinate EISA's programmes on the use of PEMMO to prevent and manage election-related conflict
- Provide technical support to domestic observer groups on the implementation of PEMMO in their respective countries
- Set up and participate in workshops, roundtables and conferences
- Ensure all programmatic and financial reports are delivered to donors timeously
- Contribute to the growth of the Department's work and identify new opportunities.

The Municipal Services Project (MSP) is looking for an experienced Project Coordinator to manage research and administrative activities in the project. This is a two-year contract position from March 2004 to March 2006 with the possibility of a one-year extension. The Coordinator will be based in Cape Town at the International Labour Research and Information Group Trust (ILRIG) offices, affiliated with the University of Cape Town.

A man is HIV positive. His doctor prescribes Bactrim, a common anti-biotic used as a prophylaxis (prevention) and for the treatment for pneumocystis carinii pneumonia – a generally treatable condition if the person is HIV negative, but potentially fatal if he or she is HIV positive. At present, the pharmacist, private hospital or doctor who dispenses this patient’s prescription will charge up to R126,94 for 20 adult-strength Bactrim capsules. After May this year, when government enacts the recently-published draft regulations relating to a transparent pricing system for medicines and scheduled substances, the same prescription could cost as little as R46,56. The old pricing structure in South Africa is notoriously complicated, secretive and confusing with incentives, discounts and mark ups hidden along the drug chain. Until now, South African consumers, who pay amongst the highest prices for prescription drugs in the world, have suffered the brunt of these huge markups and profits.

The South African Council of Churches (SACC) and apartheid victims' groups have come out in support of Archbishop Desmond Tutu's last-minute appeal to an American court to allow apartheid victims' litigation for compensation against foreign companies to go ahead. But government chief spokesperson Joel Netshitenzhe was dismissive of Tutu's appeal who said that not settling the matter (of apartheid victims) inside South Africa would have "profound implications for the future of the country, for instance for the assessment of the country risk profile, and for investment and job creation."

The controversial Children's Bill has been resubmitted to Parliament, but children's rights groups say the Bill still has holes that leave children vulnerable. The Bill involves only national stipulations concerning parental rights and duties, the rights of children, surrogate motherhood, adoption and child courts. Another Bill on implementation within the provinces will be tabled before the new Parliament after elections. "Some steps need to be taken now rather than later," explained Ministry of Social Development spokesperson Mbulelo Musi, adding that the debate on complex implementation issues and cost should not be allowed to delay assistance to children now.

AIDS activists from the advocacy group, AIDS Therapeutic Treatment Now, South Africa (ATTN SA) expressed outrage and frustration over the move by the South African government to cut by two-thirds of its AIDS budget. According to the Financial Times (UK) newspaper (2/2/04), "The initial budget of R296m (pounds Sterling 22m, $42m, euro 34m) for the first phase of the roll-out of treatment, up to the end of next month, has been cut to R90m by the Treasury, without explanation."

The Executive Director will be responsible for the overall management of C A S E, including financial matters, procurement of contracts and quality control. The successful candidate will combine highly developed research skills, leadership and managerial qualities. The Deputy Director will assist the Executive Director with both the general management of the organisation and procurement and execution of research projects.

The proposed criminalisation of people who have sex without telling their partners of their HIV status has been slammed as "rubbish" and a "very dangerous approach". That's the view of Mark Heywood, law and human rights sector representative on the SA National Aids Council, who said the stance had already been opposed by the SA Law Commission after a "lengthy investigation". This follows a proposal on Monday by Johnny de Lange, chairman of the parliamentary portfolio committee on justice, that the transmission of HIV become a separate crime. Heywood responded that the proposal "goes against the recommendations of the World Health Organisation", and that criminalising people with HIV would further stigmatise them.

The World Movement for Democracy will convene on February 1-4, 2004 in Durban, South Africa, for its Third Assembly. "Building Democracy for Peace, Development and Human Rights,” is the theme of the Assembly, which will take place at the International Convention Centre in Durban. More than 600 democracy activists, practitioners, and scholars from more than 100 countries in every region of the world will discuss practical solutions to a wide range of challenges. In more than 40 workshops, participants will explore how to expand and strengthen democracy in their countries and in their regions of the world; how to strengthen civic groups, political parties and the media; how to increase accountability of political institutions; and how to use civic education and culture as a means of promoting democratic values. Other areas of discussion include increasing women’s participation, the challenges of working in conflict-ridden societies, transitional justice, among others. Three South African partner organisations - the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD, http://www.accord.org.za), the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS, http://www.cps.org.za), and the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA, http://www.idasa.org.za) - are working with the World Movement Secretariat to organize the Assembly.

MMINO, a South African-Norwegian Music Education and Music Programme, is currently calling for funding applications for music projects. Grants are available for music education, documentation and research, choral music and music festivals. Funding will be granted twice a year and interested parties must submit their applications on the official MMINO application form.

A high-powered African National Congress delegation led by Deputy President Jacob Zuma met with the Inkatha Freedom Party leadership in Durban to look at ways to repair damaged relations between the two coalition partners ahead of the elections. The meeting was held at a presidential guest house in Morningside, Durban, on Tuesday, and came as relations between the two parties reached the lowest point.

South Africa's most influential AIDS pressure group the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) slammed the government on Tuesday for delays in rolling out a planned anti-retroviral (ARV) drug program. Amid mounting pressure from home and abroad, President Thabo Mbeki's government agreed last November to give sufferers anti-retroviral drugs which can prolong life and stave off full-blown AIDS in people with the HIV virus that causes it. The long-awaited announcement was universally welcomed after years of controversial debate about the science of HIV/AIDS, but now activists are unhappy about further delays.

With its successful democratic transition, South Africa emerged during the second half of the 1990s as a new political and economic factor on the continent. Within this process, Thabo Mbeki's foreign policy approach could be characterised as 'a complicated and sometimes contradictory mixture of ideology, idealism and pragmatism' (Gerrit Olivier in International Affairs, no. 4/2003). South Africa's Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, in a keynote address to the German Foundation for International Development, characterised as early as December 1998 the emerging South African strategy in a revealing way by asserting 'there is a new resilience and a new will to succeed in the African continent. We in South Africa have called it a renaissance, a new vision of political and economic renewal. It takes the global competitive marketplace as point of departure.'

Such understanding gave birth to The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NePAD), for which Thabo Mbeki and his team can be considered to be the midwives (if not fathers – due to the absence of women in the male dominated process). NePAD has managed to obtain - after some diplomatic manoeuvring and a number of strategic compromises - the blessings of the African Union and subsequently the United Nations General Assembly. It can be considered as a blue print for Africa's further socio-economic integration into the dominant global market.

Critical assessments of this strategy, which had been successfully promoted as the development paradigm by a number of African governments with the backing of the G8, have pointed out that its concept blends nicely into the neo-liberal mainstream of globalisation. It is fully in line with the economic strategy of South Africa's present government, seeking closer integration into the dominant structures of the world economy. As Ian Taylor and Philip Nel have warned (in Third World Quarterly, no. 1/2002), the inherent danger of such a strategic move might lie in the message that it serves to legitimise instead of aiming to restructure the existing global power relations, to which African countries have been a victim. They further articulate the suspicion that the driving force behind such a policy might be the 'linkage between globalisation, export-driven trade policies and a nascent transnational elite', and maintain that 'making neoliberalism somehow "work for all", rather than rethinking the overall global trading system, is the key strategy of South Africa particularly and New Africa more generally'.

As if to confirm, South Africa's Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel, in his capacity as the Chairman of the Development Committee to the International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey on 18 March 2002 stated: 'There is general consensus that globalisation provides an opportunity for countries to improve standards of living, but its not an end in itself … The key challenge is to attempt to manage globalisation in such a way that it does lead to poverty reduction' (http://www.dfa.gov.za/docs/ffd253b.htm). But clearly so, NePAD will not be able to replace demands for a fair share in the world's resources by those who have been the victims of domination and exploitation for far too long. At best it might be able to slightly increase the far too tiny piece shared from the global cake with stakeholders in Africa (stakeholders should in this context of course read as shareholders). Instead of a meaningful radical alternative, NePAD seems to be much closer to "more of the same" - namely capitalism as a new form of global apartheid, as Patrick Bond keeps on warning in his recent writings. Along similar lines, Ian Taylor reminds of the active role elites in the South have played in this recent process of capitalist expansion termed (misleadingly) "globalisation" by supporting the new Washington Consensus, resulting in the promotion of the liberalisation of trade and capital movements. It remains to be seen if there is from the point of view of those outside of these elites any substance in the pragmatism, which argues: better this capitalism than no capitalism at all.

Such affirmative response to re-structuring the access to potential resources among others through a "trade as aid" paradigm has been articulated by the South African Foreign Minister Dlamini Zuma in an address on 22 March 2002 to the University of Alberta, in which she had the following to offer: 'To the private sector, the continent of Africa is endowed with the human capital, mineral wealth and unlimited opportunities for trade, investment and partnership as proposed in the NePAD programme. Other countries are taking advantage of this burgeoning market; it is imperative that you are not left behind. The opportunities abound in Africa.' (http://www.dfa.gov.za/docs/unal253a.htm) She did not need to send such a message to the capital at home: the windows of opportunity had already been discovered by the big companies operating from a South African base.

There is massive expansion of South African capital into the continent of hitherto unprecedented dimensions. This is illustrated in a chapter written by John Daniel/Varusha Naidoo and Sanusha Naidu to the "State of the Nation" volume for 2003-2004, published by the Human Sciences Research Council. Its title says it all: "The South Africans have arrived". And an article in the Financial Times (17 November 2003) identifies 'a strategic shift by South African businesses' through companies 'striking out in search of bigger profit margins in their backyard'. Already since 1991 South Africa has been the largest foreign direct investor (with an annual average of $ 1.4 billion) within the continent. Large scale operations are undertaken by a variety of private companies as well as (ex-)parastatals, ranging from Spoornet and Portnet via Eskom and Sasol to South African Airways. MTN and Vodacom compete as operators in the telecommunication business also abroad and invest in the potentially huge markets of Nigeria and the DRC. Financial institutions such as Standard Bank join the "traditional" multinationals in the mining sector, which have a longstanding experience in seeking other profitable opportunities to accumulate further.

Presumably greener pastures are explored and invaded by the local giants in the wholesale and retail business. South African chain stores mushroom all over the continent, South African Breweries owns and controls large parts of the beverage sector elsewhere. This penetration of neighbouring and continental markets goes hand in hand with the particular pro-active role of South Africa in engaging in and addressing international trade issues through a strategic involvement of the ministers for trade and for finance respectively in the current efforts to modify the global economy under the WTO. It is complemented by a parallel intensification of South-South cooperation seeking the consolidation of an alliance between the economically more powerful transitional economies such as South Africa, Brazil, India and China.

The South African economist Stephen Gelb, previously member of Thabo Mbeki's team drafting the original policy documents preceding NePAD, reminded in a recent analysis published with his Edge Institute of the South African president's earlier approach. In a 1997 speech the then-Deputy President referred to the need for South Africa 'to "walk on two legs" in its foreign policy – to cultivate strong relations with the South, as well as strategic relations with the industrialised countries'. Gelb concludes, that NePAD 'is grounded in the full realities of South Africa's relations with the continent, including those beyond its immediate regional neighbourhood in Southern Africa. At the same time it is also grounded in the realities of globalisation, especially the unevenness of its impact amongst and within nations, and reflects an attempt to shift the continent, including South Africa itself, towards a more effective engagement.' More radical critics, who had opted to remain outside of the centres of political and economic power in present South Africa, speak out more directly. This is among others reflected in a number of articles published in the South African Labour Bulletin (no. 3/2003) under the thematic title "NEPAD – a wish to build a dream on". They suggest from a more or less critical distance that NePAD offers the opportunity for South African capital to expand further in Africa by creating new market access. NePAD is hence considered as a lubricant for a South African expansion into other parts of the continent, which under an Apartheid regime until the early 1990s would have not been conceivable. Almost ironically, only a politically correct post-Apartheid government allows the promotion of and greases a process, which is again (though not exclusively) to the benefit of those who already profited from the previous undemocratic system at home and can now enter spaces abroad.

Confronted with this view on occasion of a public NePAD seminar in Stockholm (held on 9 October 2003 on occasion of the 3rd meeting of the Swedish-South African Binational Commission) the South African Vice President Jacob Zuma and the Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad seemed not amused. Their responses suggested that they perceive the South African type of capitalism as better suited for African conditions than other forms of capitalism (or no capitalism at all), and by no means a problem. The suggestion that the (class) struggle continues also in democratic South Africa was brushed aside as another example of the notorious "ultra-leftism". But maybe they should join in with Robert Zimmermann (aká Bob Dylan) to intonate the meanwhile classical refrain "and the times, they are a-changing" – or, for that matter, admit that they (the times) haven't changed as much as one might have thought a couple of years ago that they would.

* This editorial is a revised short version of a presentation to the Stockholm seminar mentioned in the last paragraph. It was based on a considerably longer manuscript on NePAD for a volume on Africa and International Politics, edited by Ulf Engel and Gorm Rye Olsen, to be published during 2004 with Routledge. The author is Research Director at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala/Sweden and has been Director of The Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek from 1992 until 2000.

* Send comments on this editorial - and other events in Africa - to

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. While we are pleased that several print publications have used our editorials, we ask editors to note that if they use this article, they do so on the understanding that they are expected to provide the following credit: “This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa,

The controversial Communal Land Rights Bill was passed unanimously by parliament's committee on land, but gender and land rights activists have vowed to step up their fight against it. Preparation of constitutional challenges to the Bill's provisions on Tuesday shifted into top gear, after the committee adopted the Bill, which gives traditional leaders more power than ever in communal areas, including the allocation of individual land transfers. The adoption confirmed fears expressed last week by activists that the Bill would be bulldozed through parliament as an election sop to chiefs.

Thandanani Children's Foundation (TCF) is a well-established NPO situated in Pietermaritzburg. KZN. The present Director has been in the organisation for 8 years and is leaving at the end of March 2004. TCF therefore wishes to employ a new Executive Director of calibre and with experience in the NPO sector and children's issue; who is dynamic, a powerful leader and is business minded.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Human Rights Week’s keynote speaker Nontombi Naomi Tutu gave a speech on the importance of honesty when dealing with racial differences. She phrased America’s suppressed prejudice as “internalized racism” and addressed South Africa’s current racial status by claiming that in twenty years, it would be “better than America’s,” because the nation was formerly under apartheid but now the citizens were able to be open and expressive about their differences, thus exploring shared ground.

Ferial Haffajee really has something to smile about. The 36-year-old journalist has been appointed the new editor of South Africa's weekly Mail and Guardian - making her the first female editor of a major newspaper in her country. The M&G, as it is known in the industry, is an investigative, campaigning newspaper, born during the height of the anti-apartheid struggle in 1985. It appears on the newsstands in South Africa every Friday. Haffajee has come full circle, starting at the M&G as a journalist trainee in 1991. She takes up her new job as editor on 1 February. Her appointment comes in an important year for South Africa, which is celebrating its 10th democratic anniversary and preparing for the country's third non-racial elections. In this interview with allafrica.com, she outlines her future plans for the newspaper.

The 2003 (6th) edition of the Corporate Social Investment (CSI) Handbook is out. If you engage with - or want to engage with - the corporate sector in a development context, this is a must-read. CSI Handbook captures the breadth and depth of the social investment arena through a combination of in-depth primary and secondary research and independent editorial content.

Fahamu (http://www.fahamu.org) is looking for a part-time Administrator who will perform duties associated with the production of ourelectronic newsletters and associated websites.

The position involves:
- The transfer of content into new databases;
- The research of relevant material online;
- The writing of summaries for publications;
- Helping with the maintenance and administration of the databases associated with newsletters and websites;
- Assisting with the promotion of newsletters and websites produced by Fahamu;
- Providing such other support to the production of newsletters as may be required from time to time.
 
We envisage that this will be a two and a half day a week position. Applicants must have a high-degree of confidence in using the Internet for communicating, basic research and finding information online.  Ideally the applicant will be based in Cape Town, South Africa and have access to their own computer and internet connection. Please send a CV and a brief covering letter to [email][email protected]