"Everyone in this country now has a right to choose, and I choose 'Whites Only'." South Africa's well-known nudist Beau Brummell is at it again. This time he plans to start a nudist resort on water at the Vaal Dam. "If you are black, coloured, Indian or anything like that, you can't come". "This has absolutely nothing to do with racism. It is business."

Race is still a key factor in access to wealth in South Africa, says a government report on macro-social trends. The 109-page document released in Pretoria, 'A nation in the making: A discussion document on macro-social trends in South Africa', revealed a society still grappling with transition. Race is still a big factor, in economic access, identity and social relations, says the document.

Cape Town is home to 35,000 refugees, and Muizenberg has become home to the city's largest concentration of Congolese: several thousand, it is believed. Listening to their stories of xenophobia and administrative bungling, it becomes clear that South Africa - a country that sees itself as Africa's leader in the human rights field – does very little for refugees.

South Africans, it is fair to say, are frightened by China. We complain about the cheap imports that are doing South African garment workers out of their jobs, we fret about the “insatiable” demand for natural resources, and the re-ordering of influence on the rest of the continent. And when we are really nervous, we talk about drug gangs that trade smuggled abalone for mandrax in the coastal villages of the Western Cape.

Telkom's current tariffs will be adjusted, resulting in an overall decrease of 2,5% in the price of its basket of products, the company has announced. There are cuts in long-distance (more than 50km) and international-call charges. The price for long-distance calls has been reduced by 10%, reports the Mail and Gaurdian.

A rise in HIV infection rates in South Africa's Western Cape Province could be linked to the growing popularity of a relatively new but highly addictive and easily accessible drug, some analysts are beginning to suspect.

With South Africa still struggling to improve education standards, a new report has called on the government to consider using local languages as a medium of instruction in schools. "An inadequate command of language, whether by the teacher, the learner or both, constitutes a serious barrier to effective schooling and education," said the report.

South Africa's new health legislation, the National Health Act 61 of 2003, designed to tackle the public health crisis and the HIV/Aids pandemic, conflicts with binding commitments made by the former apartheid regime under the World Trade Organization's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). This illegitimate trade treaty makes meeting the health needs of most South Africans far more difficult, says a new report released by the South African Municipal Workers Union and the Municipal Services Project.

South Africa’s new flagship health legislation, designed to combat a daunting and urgent public health crisis, conflicts with legally binding commitments the former apartheid regime negotiated under the World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).

This trade treaty conflict threatens to undermine the much-needed legislation and, if left unresolved, would make meeting the health needs of the majority of the population far more difficult.South Africa’s dilemma should serve as a world-wide warning that health policy-makers, governments and citizens need to be far more attentive to negotiations that are now underway in Geneva to expand the reach of the GATS.

South Africa’s National Health Act (NHA) aims to remedy past injustices by creating a more uniform and egalitarian national health care system. It is the current government’s chief legislative response to continuing health care challenges in a country where the social and economic costs of the worsening HIV/AIDS pandemic have greatly exacerbated the structural problems inherited from the apartheid era. Scarce health resources are still disproportionately directed to rich and urban citizens. South Africa’s National Health Act (NHA) aims to remedy past injustices by creating a more uniform and egalitarian national health care system.

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is no ordinary trade treaty. It is exceptionally complex and broad in scope. It aims to expand international commerce by restricting government measures that impede the ability of foreign companies and investors to maximise profit by supplying services, including health services. Once a national government agrees to cover a particular service sector under the GATS, this “specific commitment” binds all future governments, under threat of punitive trade sanctions.

This is the difficult situation in which the current South African government finds itself. In 1994, South Africa made GATS commitments covering a huge swath of the country’s health services. Almost all human health services delivered outside of hospitals by doctors, dentists, nurses, midwives and other health professions are directly and explicitly covered. However, these commitments are not classified under health but under the Professional Services sub-sector of Business Services. This bizarre classification system, together with the commitments having been made by the apartheid regime some 10 years before the drafting of the National Health Act probably explains why both South African trade and health officials denied for so long that the country’s health services are covered under the GATS.

The conflicts between South Africa’s health legislation and the international services treaty are substantial. In general, public planning policies that allocate health resources more equitably between urban and rural areas, between rich and poor people, and between public and private sectors conflict with the GATS prohibitions against limiting the numbers or activities of private sector service providers.

In particular, the NHA’s “certificate of need” system conflicts with the GATS Market Access rule (Article XVI). This system is the legislation’s primary policy instrument, requiring all health establishments to acquire a “certificate of need” in order to operate. The legislation gives the health minister the authority to grant or refuse certificates based on community needs, and to set conditions on certificates, such as requiring health establishments to service poorly-served regions or populations, or to train community health care professionals.

These basic measures, which are moderate and typical by world health policy standards, conflict with GATS Article XVI:2. This GATS provision explicitly prohibits the application of such “economic needs tests” to the approval of new facilities or the expansion of existing health establishments. The GATS also threatens the health legislation and related policies in other ways. The application of the GATS National Treatment rules (Article XVII) to all health sectors and sub-sectors listed in the South African schedule of commitments creates a host of regulatory issues and problems. Community-based control and decision-making, local training and technology transfer options, directed health care subsidies and incentives, and black economic empowerment policies are all at risk.

GATS negotiations are currently underway on Domestic Regulation (GATS Article VI:4). If these negotiations result, as planned, in new restrictions on non-discriminatory government regulation, the apartheid-era commitments covering health services would create further problematic conflicts with the National Health Act.

The approaches embodied in South Africa’s current health policies and its GATS commitments are incompatible. The government can choose either to conform to legally binding, but illegitimate, treaty commitments made by apartheid-era negotiators, or it can implement the NHA and related policies to try to achieve a more equitable health care system. The existing inequities within the health care system are in need of urgent reform. There is also an overarching responsibility, enshrined in South Africa’s now democratic constitution, for the state to protect health and other basic human rights. Accordingly, the morally and constitutionally valid way for the government to resolve these conflicts is to bring the country’s GATS commitments into conformity with South Africa’s health policy imperatives.

Failure to resolve this trade treaty issue promptly could, over time, divert effort and scarce resources from the central task of health care reform. It would enable foreign for-profit health service corporations, through their home governments, to launch GATS challenges that could thwart the implementation of the National Health Act and related policies.

There are several possible options for dealing with the GATS problem. One option is for South Africa to implement the National Health Act as planned, and deal with any potential GATS issues as they arise. This “wait-and-see” approach is, however, unlikely to be effective over time. Due to the stark inconsistency between the NHA and the GATS, disputes are to be expected. Losing such a case would expose South Africa to the threat of trade sanctions targeted against the country’s key exports.

Another option is for South Africa to withdraw its GATS commitments covering health services. This approach would resolve the immediate GATS threat to the NHA. A drawback, however, is that South Africa would be required to negotiate increased GATS coverage in other sectors to compensate affected WTO member governments for their service suppliers’ lost “market access” in health services.

A third, more ambitious approach would begin with the withdrawal of the GATS commitments. This would be accompanied by the South African government leading or participating in collective action by like-minded governments and citizen movements to tackle the threats that the GATS poses to progressive health policies. This would be consistent with the GATS and similar treaties being fundamentally changed to address the basic incompatibility between their commercializing imperatives and policies to realise health as a human right for all. The GATS is corrosive to a variety of public service systems and to regulation in the public interest.

Instead of the current negotiations to broaden and deepen GATS coverage, there needs to be a thorough assessment of the treaty’s defects from a health policy and public interest perspective, and joint international action for concrete changes to remedy its structural flaws. Bringing South Africa’s GATS obligations into line with its new national health legislation should be viewed as a necessary first step towards the vital goal of creating more democratic international governance frameworks for human and social development. Instead of the current negotiations to broaden and deepen GATS coverage, there needs to be an assessment of the treaty’s defects and joint international action to create more democratic international governance frameworks.

South Africa’s predicament is a cautionary tale. All the evidence suggests that the drafters of the Health Act either did not know about the country’s health commitments under GATS or had forgotten about them. The officials who knew about GATS resided in South Africa’s Department of Trade & Industry. But they knew nothing about the Health Act until it had already passed through parliament and were alerted to the problem by the South African Municipal Workers' Union (Samwu). These same trade officials now publicly accuse Samwu of being “unpatriotic” in bringing public attention to the conflict between GATS and the National Health Act.

* This is a summary of a report "The GATS and South Africa's National Health Act: A Cautionary Tale" based on a research project commissioned by the South African Municipal Workers Union and the Municipal Services Project, published in June 2006. Contact Jeff Rudin of Samwu ([email protected]) for more information or a copy of the report.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Voices of Protest: Social Movements in Post-Apartheid South Africa,. Editors: Richard Ballard, Adam Habib, Imraan Valodia. Publisher: UKZN Press

The Mail and Guardian newspaper reports that the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has written a letter to the group chief executive of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), asking him if there was any truth to reports that his corporation had banned four top political commentators. This comes after reports that Aubrey Matshiqi, William Gumede, Karima Brown and Vukani Mde have been banned.

Rather than finding safety from violence and persecution in the country, refugees and asylum seekers face administrative delays, extortion and the constant threat of deportation. In commemoration of World Refugee Day the National Consortium of Refugee Affairs, in collaboration with Lawyers for Human Rights and the Wits Forced Migration Studies Programme, issued a report outlining these hazards and government’s efforts to address them.

Glynis Clacherty, a South African researcher, initiated an art therapy programme for unaccompanied refugee children called the Suitcase Project, five years ago. Children from Ethiopia, the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Angola have taken part in the programme, which has enabled them to decorate suitcases in a way that reflects their experiences.

The South African Human Rights Commission has found that South Africa has two basic education systems -- the dysfunctional and impoverished schools used by the majority of children, and those for the privileged minority comprising well-resourced islands of educational excellence.

Telkom is cutting the cost of its high-speed ADSL internet access services by an average of 24%, but the service is still 800% more expensive than comparable international offerings. Users who think the price cuts are generous probably do not realise that SA remains expensive even compared to African countries such as Morocco, say critics. Telkom's fastest ADSL 1024 service is 600% slower than the international average of 6MB/s.

Less than fifteen years after liberation, it is no longer clear that the country has the moral and intellectual capacity to generate an alternative meaning of what our world might be, or to become a major centre in the global south. The deputy chair of the South African Institute of International Relations, Moeletsi Mbeki speaking recently at Witwatersrand University, made an arresting comparison between the current political situation in South Africa and the one prevailing in the period leading to the Xhosa cattle-killing in 1856-57.

Farm dwellers from Impendle occupied the offices of the Regional Land Claims Commission. They arrived to meet government officials to discuss their concerns, and on finding that no one had taken their request for a meeting seriously elected to stage a sit-in until the relevant officials arrived to meet them.

Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Lulama Xingwana said her department would "deal drastically" with landowners who deliberately delayed the land restoration process. The Minister's remarks come amid the revelation by the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights (CRLR) that, in the North West alone, it had been experiencing resistance from landowners who deliberately delayed the restoration process.

"There is a tendency by those who write books and essays for leading journals to downplay the seriousness of today's racial oppression in South Africa," writes Mandisa Majuva in an article posted on "This is achieved through silence around issues of race (or by portraying whites as being the new victims of racism meted out by blacks in the new South Africa) or by choosing to explain reality in terms of economics only."

Almost 30 years have passed since the Soweto uprising on 16 June 1976, that defining day in South Africa's history when thousands of black students rebelled against apartheid. To commemorate the anniversary, pupils at Phefeni Secondary School in Soweto, South Africa and Hesketh Fletcher CofE High School in Wigan, UK shared the school day via a LIVE laptop link-up.

Stilbaai deputy mayor Lorna Scott, victim of a string of racist attacks, says she is planning to take "legal action" over the harassment. Speaking at a media briefing in Cape Town with members of the African National Congress' Western Cape executive, she said this could include a defamation action against provincial Democratic Alliance leader Theuns Botha for what she said where "attacks on my character".