Microsoft will want to be a player rather than just a big spender in South Africa’s black empowerment policy, the company has said following the announcement it would spend about half a billion rands (about US$ 64 million) in the next seven years to boost local business partnerships.

On Sunday 18 April an ANC MP in the Provincial Parliament by the name of Dora Dlamini intimidated Nozuko Hulushe, a Kennedy Road resident and Abahlali baseMjondolo member, and demanded that she withdraw her assault charge against a local ANC leader before the case goes to trial.

There are growing calls for a forensic audit into Khomanani, Government’s flagship HIV prevention campaign which has cost the taxpayer millions of rand but has very little to show for it. The Khomanani Communication Consortium (KCC), with principal parties Sadmon Projects and Consulting, Sizwe Ntsaluba VSP, Izwi Multimedia and TBWA Hunt Lascaris, won the lucrative R190-million government tender in May 2007.

Hotel Yeoville, is a ground-breaking public art project which, by way of freshly designed digital interfaces, keys into the diversity of Forced Migrant, Refugee and South African experiences that make the controversial suburb of Yeoville such a hot melting pot. This neglected suburb on the eastern edge of Johannesburg is home to 40 000 people, 70 percent of whom are migrants and refugees from the rest of the African continent.

The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) would not allow for the privatisation of State-owned power utility Eskom, deputy general secretary Oupa Komane has said. He was speaking at the NUM's energy mix workshop in Johannesburg. However, deputy Public Enterprises Minister Enoch Godongwana, speaking on behalf of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), said that government's plans did not involve the privatisation of the power company.

Just how dangerous is the World Bank and its neo-conservative president Robert Zoellick to South Africa and the global climate? Notwithstanding South Africa's existing US$75 billion foreign debt, on April 8 the bank added a $3.75 billion loan to South Africa's electricty utility Eskom for the primary purpose of building the world's fourth-largest coal-fired power plant, at Medupi. It will spew 25 million tons of the climate pollutant carbon dioxide into the air each year.

As South Africa prepares to celebrate Freedom Day on 27 April, Motsoko Pheko warns that the negotiated settlement that ended apartheid 16 years ago failed to take into consideration ‘the primary objectives for which the liberation struggle was fought’. The country’s constitution may be the best in the world, but isn’t it time it was amended on the fundamental issues that affect the majority poor, Pheko asks.

Twenty years after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, the majority of black South Africans remain excluded from the country’s land and formal economy. Udo W. Froese asks whether the talk of national reconciliation and nation-building is simply propaganda.

The Lesbian and Gay Equality Project (LGEP) wrote to the President on 19 January 2010 regarding the appointment of John Qwelane to the post of High Commissioner to Uganda. Despite assurances that the matter would be addressed, there has been no reply, prompting this follow-up letter

As the case of Millicent Gaika (30), a Cape Town lesbian who was beaten up and raped by a man known to her, is presently being heard at Wynberg Court, government has condemned the ongoing acts of “corrective rape” in the country and has vowed to put an end to them. After the man was arrested, the case was first heard at the Wynberg Court on Tuesday, 6 April but was postponed to today, Tuesday 13 April. Speaking outside the court where people are marching in support of Gaika, Ndumi Funda of Lulek’isisizwe LBT Women’s Project said, “We are strongly opposing bail for the perpetrator and we want to see justice being done for Gaika."

South Africans are facing tough times. It is a time when there is no humanity, a time when no one in government is interested to listen to your story if you are a poor person. There are good thinkers in this country, but if their ideologies are coming from the bottom up, from poor communities, no one is prepared to listen carefully.

Oxfam GB’s Global Centre of Learning on HIV and AIDS, based in the Pretoria Regional Office, seeks to recruit a Grant Manager to manage the CS Health Policy Action Fund supported by WHO. The grant was awarded in recognition of Oxfam’s growing record of work on health in international development, covering issues related to health systems strengthening (particularly health financing and health care delivery), access to medicines, sexual and reproductive health and HIV and AIDS

‘There is no doubt that South Africa will become the next frontier for "land invasions"', writes Grasian Mkodzongi, ‘the situation in the country is a ticking time bomb. It’s almost impossible to think that a system of extreme injustice and poverty reflected across the country could be sustained forever.’

ANC Youth League President Julius Malema’s racial pot-stirring coupled with the gruesome murder of white supremacist leader, Eugene Terre Blanche, has led to a rise in racial tensions in South Africa and lots of soul searching about the future of the 'Rainbow Nation'.

Our country is in crisis. The internal contradictions of the African National Congress have bought it to the point where it is no longer able to give leadership to society. It continues to speak the language of nationalism and national liberation but it has degenerated into an association of predatory elites hell bent on using the state to plunder the society. The gap between the ANC’s language and its practice is now so large that the organisation can no longer speak to the national interest with any conviction, clarity or credibility.

Tens of millions of domestic workers world-wide, and hundreds of thousands in South Africa, suffer exploitation and abuse. Confined within an invisible and poorly regulated segment of the labour market, they are mainly unorganised and without knowledge of their legal rights. The Social Law Project at the University of the Western Cape is hosting a conference in Cape Town on 7-8 May 2010 under the banner "Exploited, undervalued - and essential" as part of an international initiative towards promoting more effective legal protection, decent work and empowerment in the domestic employment sector.

The South African office of the Public Protector has more vicious teeth than anyone ever imagined, but what lacks are the resources to expedite the duty without hindrance. This is what the newly appointed public protector in South Africa, Advocate Tuli Madonsela, told the media yesterday following her consultations that took her and her team across the breath and width of the country.

Gender DynamiX has asked victims of Dr Aubrey Levin, well known during the apartheid era for using electric shock to “cure” homosexual soldiers, and recently arrested on charges indecently assaulting his male patients, to come forward in order to strengthen the case against him. Also known as Dr Shock, Levin is a psychiatrist who left South Africa for Canada in the 1990’s amidst charges of chemically castrating gay men as part of their therapy and had been identified by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) as having committed “gross human rights abuses.”

Dozens of farmers, veterinarians and farm workers have been infected with Rift Valley fever in South Africa, and at least two people have died, the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) has reported.

When Mbuyiselo Botha decided to take the African National Congress League President, Julius Malema, to court for hate speech against women, he was confident from the start that the case had merit. But he also knew that this would be the most challenging test of his 15 years of gender activism.