Five hundred people from eThembeni and Transit Camp in Grahamstown blockaded a national road on Tuesday, in a demonstration for housing, electricity and water, the Unemployed People’s Movement reports.

Multinational Wal-Mart is trying to acquire South African retailer Massmart. Khadija Sharife explains why the deal would be bad for the country and bad for workers.

South Africa continues to be the most unequal social formation in the world. Sehlare Makgetlaneng reviews proposals by the African National Congress Youth League to radically overhaul the economic structure of the country.

Ten years ago, Khayelitsha, in Cape Town, was the first place to make antiretroviral drugs available to the public sector, marking a milestone in the beginning of the end of AIDS denialism and the fight for treatment in South Africa. With more than half its population unemployed, Khayelitsha is one of South Africa's largest and fastest-growing townships, and home to one of the highest burdens of HIV and TB infection nationally and globally. In 2009, antenatal HIV prevalence was 30 per cent. Alarming as the figures may be, Khayelitsha is a beacon of hope for the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, where the provision of ARVs had been fraught, marked by a bitter stand-off between AIDS activists and government over the slow pace of the rollout.

There was a slight increase in the number of women running for elections in this year’s local government elections. More than 19,700 women stood as candidates, compared to 15,718 in the 2006 local elections. This means that 37 per cent of the candidates were women, a two per cent increase from 2006. Women remained the majority on the Independent Electoral Committee voters' roll, which has more than 24.5 million South Africans registered.

The so-called 'cabriolet' became a powerful symbol of failed service delivery ahead of local government elections last week. 'There is nothing more powerful than the image of a woman sitting on a toilet without an enclosure,' said Judith February, head of the political information and monitoring service at the Idasa democracy institute. 'Those are very powerful images and they show the lack of compassion there is when politicians are simply not listening to people. It’s a graphic description of local government failure.'

The Presidency tried to convince the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg on Tuesday (17 May) that it should not be compelled to release a report on the 2002 presidential elections in Zimbabwe to the Mail & Guardian newspaper. However, the Mail & Guardian argued the release of the report was in the public interest because it would throw light on whether President Robert Mugabe legitimately remained in office after the elections. Both the North Gauteng High Court and the Supreme Court of Appeal agreed with the newspaper. The Presidency had now turned to the Constitutional Court in an attempt to keep the report secret.

SA is not in any kind of energy crisis, despite the unfolding crisis at nuclear plants in Japan, an activist organisation has said. 'It's [the energy crisis] a complete fabrication. Of our total capacity, domestic users account for 18 per cent,' Muna Lakhani, Cape Town branch co-ordinator for Earthlife Africa told News24. Recently the government has announced that it intends to move toward a green energy production, but has come under fire from environmentalists for continued discussions on nuclear energy.

An open field in Tafelsig turned into a war zone at the weekend as a group of land invaders pelted police and city law enforcers with rocks and bottles. The officers retaliated by firing rubber bullets and blasting the invaders with a water cannon to bring them under control. The group, who call themselves the Mitchell’s Plain Backyarders’ Association, moved on to the Swartklip Sports Field on Saturday.

Political parties have ratcheted up the rhetoric ahead of the local government elections on Wednesday. Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille told a crowd in Lebogang, Mpumalanga, that they could choose five more years of poor service delivery and toyi-toying, or they could choose five years of steadily increasing access to housing and basic services by choosing the DA. ANC Youth League president Julius Malema was on the warpath taking swipes at Zille and Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) president Mangosuthu Buthelezi. He referred to Zille as the 'madam' who 'moves around doing a monkey dance looking for votes'.

Government will pay out millions of rands to compensate victims of apartheid era atrocities, the Sunday Times reported. Those who qualify for financial assistance include victims and their children, even if they were born in or out of wedlock or were adopted. People with parental responsibilities over victims and their children will also be eligible for compensation.

Employment wise, in sub-Saharan Africa women occupy just one in three paid jobs outside agriculture, and it comes as no surprise that women are typically paid less than their male counterparts and have less secure employment. Despite this, there is an increase in women entering the labour force throughout their child-bearing years, finding ways to juggle the pressures of their unpaid family work and paid employment.

‘As the public, we all have a right to know what rules and regulations govern the financial behaviour of our public officials and how they spend our public monies so that we can hold them accountable,’ writes Dale T. McKinley. So why is the South African government so keen to keep the contents of its ministerial handbook out of the public eye?

A 13-year-old lesbian has become the latest victim of 'corrective rape' in South Africa, prompting activists to call for direct retaliatory action. The girl, who is said to be open about her sexuality, was raped in Pretoria, a government spokesman said. Campaigners say so-called corrective rape, in which men rape lesbians to 'cure' them of their sexual orientation, is on the increase in South Africa. Last month, a 24-year-old woman who belonged to a gay and lesbian rights group was stoned to death after an apparent gang rape.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) election posters, which feature party leader Helen Zille, Cape Town mayoral candidate Patricia de Lille and party spokeswoman Lindiwe Mazibuko, do not necessarily mean that a vote for the party is a vote for women, analysts say. Amanda Gouws, a political analyst from Stellenbosch University, says a vote for the DA, the country’s official opposition, would not be a feminist vote or victory for women. 'The DA is not a feminist party and many of their women members in government are not either. De Lille and Zille do not have a feminist rhetoric - and let’s not forget that she appointed 10 men to her cabinet,' she said.

The extent of tuberculosis and HIV co-infection rates in South Africa has firmly placed tuberculosis on the agenda of the South African National AIDS Council. This, after studies have shown that in some parts of the country, like in Khayelitsha in the Western Cape for example, about 73 per cent of HIV-infected people also have TB. The South African National AIDS Council (SANAC) took a decision to include tuberculosis as part of its mandate after a World Health Organisation (WHO) review in 2009 of South Africa’s national TB Control programme. The review found that the levels of TB and HIV co-infection in South Africa were enormously high.

Cosatu has called on the Competition Tribunal to reject Walmart's planned acquisition of Massmart, spokesman Patrick Craven said. The Anti-Walmart Coalition - consisting of various trade unions, including the SA Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers' Union (Saccawu), SA Clothing and Textile Workers' Union (Sactwu), labour federation Cosatu and civil society organisations - opposes the deal because of the negative consequences it sees for Massmart workers, the wholesale and retail sector and its supply chains.

The ANC 'didn't know' about 1,600 toilets in a Free State municipality which have been left without enclosures for the past eight years, secretary general Gwede Mantashe said on Monday (09 May). 'We didn't know about open toilets,' he told journalists at as press briefing at Luthuli House in Johannesburg. Earlier, the Human Rights Commission spokesperson, Vincent Moaga, said the body's legal committee would discuss the issue after a complaint had been laid with the commission on the issue.

'The rebellion of the poor in this country is growing,' writes Ayanda Kota, the chair of the Unemployed People's Movement in the Mail and Guardian, days before South Africans vote in local elections on 18 May. 'More and more organisations are emerging. More and more people have become radicalised. More and more communities have lost their illusions after experiencing the violence of the predator state. More and more people are starting and joining discussions about the way forward for the struggle to take the country back.'

Forty per cent of South Africa's 48-million people are poor and more than half of poor people are female, notes Jocelyn Newmarch, the author of an Earthlife Africa Johannesburg report 'Second Class Citizens: Gender, Energy and Climate Change in South Africa'. 'About 2,5-million households are still without any access to electricity and four million households do not use electricity for cooking. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that, assuming a household of five people, 20-million people still rely on polluting fuels and they are more likely to be female.'