Barely hours after Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene was sacked by President Jacob Zuma Wednesday night, the rand plummeted to an all-time low and social media started going crazy asking for Zuma’s head. Today #ZumaMustFall is still trending like crazy. The tweets range from the outraged (in by far the majority) to those calling for immediate […]

More than three-quarters of South Africans faced with having to pay a bribe pay it, according to a new survey, and almost half of all bribery takes place in Limpopo. The South African Citizens’ Bribery Survey 2015 was released this week by the Ethics Institute of South Africa. Of the 6,380 people surveyed, 26 percent […]

PRETORIA – The Minister of Finance Nhlanhla Nene has been replaced by President Jacob Zuma, the presidency has announced. The markets reacted quickly. The statement by the presidency said that Nene would be replaced by member of parliament David van Rooyen, who serves as a whip of the standing committee on finance and as whip of […]

Global campaigning community Avaaz has created a petition to put urgent pressure on President Zuma – and the leaders of India, China and Brazil – to join over 100 nations in a climate agreement that they believe would help “avoid catastrophic climate change”. Avaaz says: “Finally – great news from the global climate talks in Paris! A coalition of more than 100 rich […]

Chances are getting stronger that South Africa’s Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa will be the next leader of the country, says powerful US financial news agency Bloomberg. In a story today titled “Once Militant, Now Millionaire. Next Up: South Africa President?” journalists Michael Cohen and Amogelang Mbatha write that Ramaphosa is the only serving politician in South Africa who has led both a […]

Madiba could be closing down. The first totally South African restaurant in New York, it opened 17 years ago in an area – Fort Greene, Brooklyn – that was way off of everyone’s map. And for a long time it did very well. Any South African in New York was invariably asked, “Have you been […]

Anglo American will cut its work force by two-thirds, the mining giant said on Tuesday, a move that is seen to reflect China’s diminishing appetite for commodities, according to news reports. As part of Anglo’s restructuring, its diamonds business will be run by its De Beers subsidiary, its platinum and base metals operations will come under Industrial […]

PRETORIA (Reuters) – A South African court on Tuesday granted bail to paralympian Oscar Pistorius after he was convicted of murder for killing his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day 2013, with the judge saying the athlete did not pose a flight risk. The Supreme Court last Thursday upgraded the 29-year-old athlete’s sentence to murder […]

PARIS – During the climate summit COP21 last week, 10 African countries announced their commitment to a plan to reforest huge tracts of the continent over the next 15 years. The announcement was made during the Global Landscapes Forum at the Conference of Parties (COP21). AFR100, the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, is a pan-African, country-led effort to restore 100 […]

South Africa’s supermarket chain Shoprite has opened its first shopping centre in Tete Junction, Mozambique. The opening, on 3 December, marks the entrance of Africa’s largest food retailer to the Tete province. Since starting out as a small chain of only 8 supermarkets in Cape Town in 1979, Shoprite has grown to more than 450 stores […]

Johannesburg and Cape Town won two of 10 environmental leadership awards during a ceremony that took place at the same time as the COP21 summit in Paris last week for their efforts to tackle climate change. The awards were given by C40 Cities, a network of the world’s megacities committed to addressing climate change. The C40 Cities Climate […]

Everything from unidentified flying objects over Durban’s UFO-like stadium to women taking to the roads of Cape Town – to fix them, no less – to reminiscences about walking the famed “camino” trail across northern Spain, those are a few stories you might not have seen this week. 1. Good grief, green light a UFO? The […]

BLOEMFONTEIN – A full panel of five judges of the Supreme Court of Appeal of South Africa has found Oscar Pistorius guilty of murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, saying that the lower court erred in its decision of culpable homicide. The ruling was read on Thursday by Supreme Court of Appeal Judge Eric Leach. He […]

PRETORIA – During the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to South Africa for the China-Africa summit this week, the two countries signed 26 agreements worth R94 billion ($6.5 billion) on Wednesday, the South African government announced. Xi arrived in South Africa on Wednesday from Zimbabwe, ahead of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit in […]

Almost 60 percent of Africans believe that corruption in their countries has increased over the past year, although in South Africa this figure is 83 percent, according to a new survey released on Tuesday. According to Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer for 2015, done together with Afrobarometer, it spoke to 43,143 respondents across 28 countries […]

South Africa has made incredible strides providing anti-retroviral treatment to millions of people since 2004. HIV has been transformed from a grim and inexorable death to a chronic disease controlled with a cheap, safe tablet-a-day, rendering a person with HIV healthy and non-infectious. Treatment is freely available at primary care clinics, administered largely through nurses. […]

HARARE – The Chinese president, who is on his way to South Africa for an Africa-China summit, is stopping off in Zimbabwe first, making him what media have called the most important foreign leader to visit the country since independence in 1980, according to news reports Tuesday. On Friday and Saturday Xi Jinping will attend the Forum […]

A new book by veteran South African journalist John Matisonn claims that once-beloved (by many readers, at least) editor of the Sunday Times, Tertius Myburgh, was an apartheid spy and that Thabo Mbeki tried to warn US and UK leaders off attacking Iraq. These are two of numerous revelations made in the just-published “Gods, Spies and […]

South African Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba has attempted to clarify the current situation regarding the recently announced concessions to the immigration regulations. In a nutshell, as discovered last weekend by British actor Idris Elba – foreign children are still required to comply with the visa requirements which were implemented on 1 June this year…until such […]

It has been only three weeks since Tanzania elected John Magufuli, the son of a farmer, to take over from Jakaya Kikwete, whose government was scarred by scandals and excesses, and it’s already clear why the can-do, cost-cutting, austere, corruption-hating new leader is known as Iron Fist and the Bulldozer. There might be tongue-in-cheek celebrations on Twitter – […]

A slick new video made by a young German doing a trip around South Africa – great music, thrilling footage from a drone – includes a scene less than halfway through that might throw some viewers into a moral dilemma. He rides an elephant. The scene is jarring because in the rest of the video, titled “For that […]

The traditional huge post-Thanksgiving sale day in the US, Black Friday, had South Africans lining up outside stores early on Friday, with stores packed with shoppers and, in some cases, even battles over cheap Coca-Cola. Checkers, which together with Shoprite is one of the biggest promoters of Black Friday this year, put out an ad beforehand […]

Julius Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Front, addressed the Oxford Union at Oxford University on Wednesday during a trip to the United Kingdom, including in his speech everything from expats to Nelson Mandela. Here are some of his quotes to the “most famous debating society in the world” pulled from the news media. On rich South […]

NEW YORK – South Africa joined 13 other countries including North Korea, Sudan, Syria, China, Russia and Zimbabwe on Wednesday to vote against adopting the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, according to news reports. The declaration recognises the extreme importance and legitimacy of human-rights activity, and those who carry it out. Fourteen countries voted against the bill in […]

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir will not be at a summit in South Africa next week, nearly six months after he left the country during a dispute between the Pretoria government and the judiciary, which had ordered he be detained until it reviewed his indictment for alleged war crimes. News reports on Thursday said South Africa […]