A preliminary investigation into a fire that engulfed M1 underground tunnels on the highway in Johannesburg just over a week ago has revealed that it will cost no less than R33-million to repair the bridge and support structures for electrical cables.

The fire on 30 April, resulted from theft and vandalism of the electricity infrastructure.

This cost of the repair was revealed by city officials on Wednesday at a technical media briefing,  a week after the incident which affected 450 metres of electrical cables, leaving several parts of the city in the dark.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Joburg residents still without power while teams assess city underbelly after tunnel fire 

Of the estimated R33-million, R10-million will go towards construction by the Johannesburg Roads Agency (JRA).

“Our principal visual condition inspection, which includes lab testing to assess the bridge structure, with an estimate of R10-million we need to spend in the medium to long term,” City manager, Floyd Brink said.

Meanwhile, City Power’s group executive for service delivery centre operations, Charles Tlouane said damage to the electrical infrastructure would cost the entity around R23-million.

Inside the tunnels beneath the M1 highway bridge, where fire ravaged City Power’s electricity infrastructure, leading to extended power outages in Braamfontein, Newtown, and the Joburg CBD. (Photo: Johannesburg City Power)

“We had 11kv cables, telecommunications cables in that bridge. We had 88 oil-filled cables. So, we are replacing those by their own entirety. That work is going to cost around R23-million.”

City Power is currently being taken to court by Eskom over its escalating debt, sitting at R1.073-billion. In a recent statement the power utility said it had been left with no choice but to apply for a declaratory order to force City Power to pay what is due to Eskom.

“The debt owed by City Power has reached unprecedented levels, exacerbating Eskom’s already strained financial situation. The dire situation not only undermines Eskom’s financial sustainability but also threatens its ability to maintain essential infrastructure.”

Speaking to Daily Maverick, Tlouane would not be drawn into commenting about the debt. He however said, “I can confirm City Power is not in a financial crisis”.

The City of Johannesburg has since indicated it will oppose the Eskom application as it has no basis in facts and law.

In a counter-statement, the City argues that it is in fact owed R3.4-billion in overcharges over the years.

“Following multiple discussions regarding queries that have been lodged in connection with gross inaccurate billing on bulk purchase invoices. Eskom has opted to ignore those issues, and rushed to the courts.”

The fire beneath the M1 highway bridge stemmed from acts of vandalism and cable theft. (Photo: Johannesburg City Power)

Bridge structural damage 

Brink said although the M1 bridge was built between 1971-1972, an inspection and maintenance conducted in 2019, had rated the bridge in good condition and safe for use.

Following the fire incident, structural damage was detected by Johannesburg Roads Agency (JRA).

“Short-term interventions are underway to secure the falling concrete panel pieces of the bridge at Smit Street under the M1 section to prevent any further risks ensuring road user safety.

“This solution will include installation of steel strips along the falling concrete panel parts along the 500m affected span of the structure. Repairs are expected to be completed within two weeks and a contractor has been appointed on an emergency basis,” said Brink.

Financial strain

The City has faced several similar incidents including the July 2023  deadly explosion that killed 34-year-old Joseph Dumisane and injured 48 others. The explosion damaged a 700-metre stretch of Lilian Ngoyi Street, one of the busiest in the city’s CBD. A budget of R178-million was initially estimated for the refurbishment of Lilian Ngoyi Street. The amount later ballooned to R196-million. The road remains closed and is still under construction.

Read more in Daily Maverick: City announces R196m to rebuild Lilian Ngoyi Street in Joburg — six months on

Ratepayers will once again have to foot the bill for the M1 repairs. The city expressed concern at the high level of sabotage of its infrastructure amid tight fiscal pressures.

“It’s unfair towards the city if you look at what is happening because all of these issues are now just bringing financial strain on us as we have to reprioritise within our current constrained budget to be able to address these particular issues,” said Brink.

Power restoration

City officials are working to restore power after the Braamfontein substation was damaged during the cable theft and fire. Several areas including Braamfontein, Newtown, Parktown, and Johannesburg CBD were affected.

As of Thursday, power had been restored in some areas while the City Power was looking at diverting the affected areas to the Fort substation.

“There is a risk of overloading that substation. As such, customers are encouraged to use power sparingly and unplug non-essential appliances such as geysers, pool pumps, and stoves. Failure to do so may force us to embark on load rotation for the duration of the repairs at the M1 bridge.”

Tlouane estimated electricity repairs would be completed by 20 May, 2024 and revealed that a contractor has been appointed on an emergency basis.

Indefinite road closure

A section of the road will remain closed indefinitely, motorists and pedestrians have been urged to avoid Smit Street and the railway yard below the bridge and use alternative routes.

“The City of Johannesburg remains committed to prioritising public safety and minimising disruptions caused by road closures in the affected area. Drivers are therefore advised to use alternative routes to avoid congestion, and the public is urged to steer clear of the area beneath the M1 bridge on Smit Street and the Braamfontein Rail Yard until repairs are completed,” added Brink.

Other key highlights regarding the bridge include:

• “Fordsburg and Braamfontein Substations remained structurally intact;
• “Fordsburg Substation is operational, while Braamfontein Substation remains offline pending repairs;
• “City Power is pursuing two approaches to address the outage: replacing burnt cables (work in progress) and installing new interconnector cables between Fort and Braamfontein Substations; and
• “Insurance assessments have been completed, and the claim has been lodged,” said Brink. DM

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The words of the master

‘They’re afraid that if they stop suffering, they’ll have nothing.” 

If ever there was a sentence that unlocked the secrets of the Jewish genetic code, it occurred to me, this was the one.

Set to paper by Saul Bellow, the great American-Jewish Nobel literature laureate of the late 20th century, the sentence appeared to hold the key to the enigma of my people. Also, there was the timing — while I had once been a fan of Bellow, I hadn’t visited his work in more than a decade. Now, in mid-April of 2024, the words of the master had returned to my field (via a poignant late-night YouTube session) like the lifting of a veil. 

Just as my people were beginning to properly suffer again, just as we were delivering suffering to our enemies in ways suggestive of the Old Testament, Bellow had arrived on the scene with a truism for the ages.

And, like many enduring truisms, his words would spin out into a web of urgent yet impossible questions. 

What would Bellow, who died in 2005, have made of the recent actions of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? As a man who had written extensively on anti-Semitism in America, what would he have made of the alleged Jew-hatred that was then just beginning to erupt on Ivy League college campuses across the length and breadth of the United States? Would he have drawn a new and revelatory correlation between the two, seeing in the Israeli reaction to the Hamas atrocities of 7 October something that the rest of us had missed? 

These questions were essentially unanswerable, not just because Bellow had written in the post-war era, when Jews were still regarded by Gentiles as history’s ultimate victims, but because never in his lifetime had the so-called values of secular Judaism — social consciousness, equality before the law, liberal humanism — been so endangered by the blindness of the culture itself.

And yet, I was thinking, there was a profound clue in the observation that my people were wedded to their suffering. 

Take, for example, the message I received from an old and cherished friend on the morning of 15 April, when Daily Maverick had shut itself down for the day in solidarity with the plight of local journalism.

“DM being very dramatic,” he wrote. “Like a Polish mother.” 

My friend, of course, being Jewish, was sidestepping the common trope — that of the dramatic Jewish mother. More than that, though, since he had left South Africa for Israel almost 10 years before, since his psyche had by now been indelibly marked by the bomb shelters and the hostage traumas and the world’s growing condemnation, it was almost natural that he would take this opportunity to lash out. For the last few months, my friend had been making it increasingly clear that he viewed Daily Maverick’s coverage of the war as pro-Palestinian at best, anti-Semitic at worst. 

Still, while I was sympathetic to his lived experience, while a part of me acknowledged that he was much closer to the heat, there was something about it all that felt wholly unnatural — my friend’s brand-new cloak of rampant Jewish nationalism; his sense that diasporic Jews held an a priori superfluous voice; his inability to feel into the devastation that was being visited on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. 

Accordingly, I was ready with a knee-jerk response.

“Israel may want death to journalism. We don’t.” 

From there, needless to say, it was downhill all the way. My friend pointed out that he had “heard from enough people to warrant attention” that they’d cancelled their Maverick Insider contributions because of the “obvious bias and tone regarding the Middle East”. He added that if we really wanted to survive and thrive, we should get our leading South African-Muslim writer (name withheld) to “proactively hit the Muslim community and get cash from there”. He noted, in brackets, that this was only a “half-joke”. 

My comeback, a “yawn” emoji, opened the floodgates. 

“Kev, in our conversations over the past months, there were a few comments that triggered for me some of the ideas that you’re taking on. You questioned the fact of the existence of rape on 7/10 when Pandor amplified this idea. This was quickly put to bed, and the numbers and facts are staggering, but you seemed to actually consider this at the time — without taking up the offer to view the 47 minutes documenting it, to save you and your DM colleagues from the emotional pain (paraphrasing your response).”

My ears were ringing, I had begun to sweat, my adrenaline was up. 

For one thing, to the best of my memory, I had never questioned the clear and compelling evidence of deliberate and planned sexual violence on the part of Hamas on 7/10. For another, my friend seemed to be implying that I’d been swayed by the extremist and arguably bigoted views of South Africa’s international relations minister, Naledi Pandor. Then there was the famous 47-minute reel of raw footage from the day of the Hamas attack, which he had arranged for me to watch through his Israeli contacts in South Africa. 

It was an offer I had refused, not because of the envisaged “emotional pain”, but because I did not see how subjecting myself to the footage would in any way move the journalistic needle on Israel’s kill ratio of Palestinians — which, at that stage, was hovering somewhere between 10 and 25 for every dead Israeli, depending on the source.

Later, it would dawn on me that those 47 minutes — and, specifically, my friend’s insistence that I watch them — were the clearest exemplar yet of Bellow’s trenchant observation. 

For now, however, my friend had more schooling in store. 

“You call it genocide when I think you know that it’s not,” he continued, “that the Hamas numbers are inflated; that they are themselves complicit in many ways in the reality on the ground; that this is war, as shitty as it is. I’m not washing the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], it’s been chaos, I’m just looking at where you’re holding.” 

The thing was, I had also been looking pretty closely at where I may have been “holding”. Every day, in every conversation with members of my family, in every news report, in every accusation and counter-accusation. 

Was it genocide? Again, there was a gap between what my friend thought he’d heard and what I had actually said. There was indeed a chance, I’d ventured, after the rubble had been cleared, after the last shots had been fired and the last graves dug, that history would judge against us.

It wasn’t something I wanted to happen, I’d added, but if there was no plan to pull the settlers out of the West Bank, if the IDF invaded Rafah, if the famine in Gaza was allowed to continue unabated, our children would be carrying the can for many years to come.

In the entirety of my friend’s WhatsApp assault, however, it was the phrase “I think you know it’s not” that was the giveaway. He was suggesting, subtly yet unmistakably, that our people weren’t capable of such an atrocity. He was suggesting, because of our suffering, that we were somehow exempt.

But my friend wasn’t done. He wanted me to know, as an olive branch perhaps, that he forgave me for getting hoodwinked. 

“These comments, and the general views around this issue, make it feel to me that you’re very taken up by the views of the South African leadership and media. If so, I get it. Not simple to escape the zeitgeist of the zone. It’s just not the big mind Bloom I’ve known in the past. (There, now you can have some guilt from another Polish mother.)”

What sort of Jew are you? 

In 1976, Bellow received the Democratic Legacy Award from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the organisation’s highest honour. Back then, 38 years before it would be bestowed on former US president George W Bush, the award still stood for something — its prestige, which had been rooted in the ADL’s enduring battle to secure equal rights for the US’s Jews, was at the time commensurate with the organisation’s victories since its founding in 1913.

Bellow’s acceptance speech, published in his non-fiction collection There is Simply Too Much to Think About, opened with a meditation on what it meant to have a history that was “neither simple nor brief”, which led to an explanation of why, although he understood the impetus, he had never chosen the path of assimilation: “There are others, like myself, who suspect that if we dismiss the life that is waiting for us at birth, we will find ourselves in a void.” 

Then, before rejecting the assumption that the US — like too many Christian countries to count — was destined one day to turn on its Jews, he spoke about the inherent contradictions of the Jewish State.

“In Israel, I was often and sometimes impatiently asked what sort of Jew I was and how I defined myself and explained my existence. I said that I was an American, a Jew, a writer by trade. I was not insensitive to the Jewish question, I was painfully conscious of the Holocaust, I longed for peace and security in the Jewish State. I added, however, that I had lived in America all my life, that American English was my language, and that (in an oddly universalist way) I was attached to my country and the civilisation of which it was a part.”

I, for one, on first reading these words — and then rereading them in preparation for this essay — knew what was coming. And, I suspected, most diasporic Jews who had ever visited the Holy Land would have known too.

“But my Israeli questioners or examiners were not satisfied,” Bellow told his audience. “They were trying to make me justify myself. It was their conviction that the life of a Jew in what they called the Diaspora must inevitably be ‘inauthentic’. Only as a Jew in Israel, some of them told me, could I enter history again and prove the necessity and authenticity of my existence.” 

Bellow’s answer to his Israeli interlocutors, for me at least, would become the final word on the matter.

“I refused to agree with them that my life had been illusion and dust. I do not accept any interpretation of history that declares the deepest experience of any person to be superfluous. To me that smells of totalitarianism.” 

So there it was, set down in a speech almost 50 years ago, the signifier that would creep up on the Israeli body politic, which had always called itself — and, in April of 2024, still was calling itself — the only democracy in the Middle East. 

Totalitarianism. How could it be that the Jewish people, my people, who had suffered so unforgettably, so extremely, so ineradicably at the hands of the Nazis, would begin to draw the same set of fascist signifiers from the rest of the world? Was it simply anti-Semitism? Or, conceivably, was it time to turn the mirror on ourselves?

In her chapters The Nazi in the Mirror and The Unshakeable Ethnic Double, included in her book Doppelganger — published in September 2023, mere weeks before the Hamas attack — the Canadian-Jewish writer Naomi Klein offered what were perhaps the most thought-provoking and incisive answers to this distressing question. After 7/10 her publishers had agreed to make the chapters available free online, and Klein had agreed to frame them with a short introduction.

“These two chapters also get into the ongoing debates about how the Nazis were influenced by European colonial and racial segregation in the Americas,” she wrote, “and how a failure to reckon with those connections shaped and misshaped Israeli history, and contributed to exiling Palestinians into an unbearable purgatory. Israel-Palestine has been described by many as the ‘open wound’ of the modern world: never healed, never even bandaged. On October 7, 2023, that wound was ripped open in ways we cannot yet begin to comprehend.” 

For Klein, as alluded to above, there was a clear line that ran from the European colonial project in Africa, particularly the impulse of the Belgians to “exterminate all the brutes” in the Congo, to the genocide of the indigenous tribes in North America and then back again to Adolf Hitler in 20th-century Europe.

“Praising European settlers for having ‘gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand’,” she observed, “Hitler claimed it was now Germany’s turn to engage in cleansings and mass relocations on its own frontier.”

This was an analysis, as Klein pointed out, that destabilised “pretty much all of the stories” that she had grown up with as a young Jew in post-war Canada; stories which taught that “the Holocaust was a singular event without precedent, so far outside the bounds of human history that it was essentially impossible to comprehend”. 

As a Jew who had grown up in apartheid-era South Africa, I could easily relate. At my Jewish high school in Johannesburg in the late 1980s, the Holocaust stood elevated and apart — the event that encompassed all of our sufferings, from the Babylonian exile to the Roman sacking of the Second Temple and beyond. It was the event that proved, categorically and without doubt, that the Gentiles wanted us dead, eradicated, erased forever from history; and that they always would. 

Accordingly, there was a specific way that the Holocaust was taught to us, which Klein — quoting a friend and colleague — had forcefully called “retraumatisation, not remembering”.

As she wrote in Doppelganger: “Looking back as the parent of a child older than we were then, I am struck by what wasn’t a part of these strangely mechanical retellings. There was space for the surface-level emotions: horror at the atrocities, rage at the Nazis, a desire for revenge. But not for the more complex and troubling emotions of shame or guilt, or for reflection on what duties the survivors of genocide may have to oppose genocidal logics in all of their forms.” 

If anything would, I was thinking, this would be the insight to earn Doppelganger the epithet of “prophetic” in the years to come. Because, from there, it was a short and obvious jump to the purgatory of the open wound.

“The reason for this frozen quality to our education,” Klein explained, “was that the Holocaust was a plot point in a larger, prewritten story we not only were being told but also were trapped inside: a phoenix-from-the-flames narrative that began in the gas chambers of Nazi-controlled Europe and ended on the hilltops around Jerusalem. Though there were certainly exceptions, for the most part, the goal of this teaching was not to turn us into people who would fight the next genocide wherever it occurred. The goal was to turn us into Zionists.” 

A new story 

In late April 2024, after weeks of wondering whether I had lost my friend for good — whether, as a diasporic Jew, I had got it all hopelessly and unforgivably wrong — I revisited the WhatsApp message exchange between us. Was there anything in there that I had yet to properly account for; anything that I simply could not know because I didn’t live in Israel? 

As it turned out, there was. While I was certain that I had never questioned the raw fact of the sexual violence on 7/10 — as my friend had angrily alleged — I had also not yet fully engaged with what had occurred on that day. This would be starkly reflected back at me by two items of impeccable and essential journalism: a deeply reported piece in the leftist Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, headlined “The New York Times Investigated Hamas’ Sexual Assault on October 7. Then the Trouble Started,” and a documentary directed by former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, titled Screams Before Silence. 

On the professional level, the first item was significant because of what — to the best of my recall — I had actually said to my friend about the rapes. I had suggested that the infamously discredited New York Times investigation, “‘Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponised Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” published in late December 2023, had done irreparable harm not only to all attempts at objective reporting on the war, but also to the evidence of systemic rape as released by the Israeli authorities and United Nations.

For Israelis, as the Ha’aretz report noted, that initial New York Times feature was crucial — it had landed at a moment when the international community was allegedly silent and hypocritical on the issue, and it had reset the narrative on the global stage, fortifying the IDF in its mission of pushing into Gaza and eliminating Hamas. By 28 February 2024, however, when The Intercept delivered what it hoped would be the final death blow to the Times story, all of the gains had been lost. The pro-Palestinian faction had by then flooded social media with the false assertion that no rapes had occurred at all — that it was all just a function of Israeli propaganda.

And so Ha’aretz, with admirable skill, had pulled off an analysis of how the Times had got the story both wrong and right. It was an object lesson in our loss of nuance, which was symbolic of how the war had collapsed our empathy range in general.

The Sandberg documentary, on the other hand, hit me on a personal level. Needless to say, as Mark Zuckerberg’s former second-in-command and a conservative Jew to boot, it was no surprise that Sandberg’s contribution would fail to make a global impact — even though her title was a direct reference to the Times story and another attempt to undo its damage. Still, after refusing my friend’s offer to watch the 47 minutes that had been compiled by the Israeli government, this was the next best (or perhaps worst) thing. 

Interweaving the footage of the Hamas operatives with intimate and harrowing interviews of Israeli survivors of 7/10, the film proved, conclusively, that the rapes weren’t just isolated incidents typical of any armed skirmish; they were rather part of a much broader pattern, demonstrative of the dehumanisation and terror that had always been core to the Hamas ideology. 

The Israeli survivors were not acting — months after the event, they were exhibiting signs of unimaginable trauma, having directly witnessed or overheard scenes that no human being should have to endure. From dismemberment to gang-rape to necrophilia, from hysterical screams for mercy to the silence after the bullet or knife, it was all too shockingly true.

“I don’t have words to explain what we saw,” said a member of the voluntary Israeli clean-up unit Zaka. “You couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman. Everything was ripped.”

Unimaginable trauma, but also the articulation, in the present time, of thousands of years of Jewish suffering. The wound, in Klein’s terms, had indeed been ripped. The suffering on the other side of the fence, where Palestinians had been living for decades in what had long been described as the world’s largest open-air prison, had erupted inside the husk of Israel’s desensitised heart.

And the biggest tragedy of all was that it had been foreseen. 

Not just by Bellow and Klein, who had warned of the fascist tendencies in mature Israeli society, but by peerless Jewish philosophers such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, who had escaped the Nazi apocalypse with lessons on how best to set the infant Jewish State on the most humane and enlightened course.

Then there was Leonard Cohen.

You Want It Darker, the title track from his final album, released in 2016, less than three weeks before his death, said it all. Whatever the other interpretations of the lyrics happened to be, for me, after 7/10 and the ensuing waves of slaughter and destruction that Israel would visit on Gaza and the West Bank, the track was the most prophetic yet.

“There’s a lover in the story/ But the story’s still the same/ There’s a lullaby for suffering/ And a paradox to blame/ But it’s written in the scriptures/ And it’s not some idol claim/ You want it darker/ We kill the flame.”

The same old story, the ancient tale of Jewish suffering, was about to play itself out in an inevitable and monstrous paradox, where the ultimate victims of history would begin to resemble the ultimate perpetrators. The banning of Al Jazeera, which the Israeli government ordered in early May, would soon come to symbolise the snuffing out of the light; the immutable fact, from the perspective of the Israeli establishment, that Jewish suffering was the only story that mattered. 

“They’re lining up the prisoners/ And the guards are taking aim/ I struggled with some demons/ They were middle class and tame/ I didn’t know I had permission/ To murder and to maim/ You want it darker…” 

The invasion of Rafah, which Netanyahu had vowed would go ahead “with or without” a deal on the hostages — and which the US administration had consistently opposed — was now a fait accompli, proof of Zionism’s murderous self-permissiveness, an augury of the endarkened isolation in store for the Jewish State.

And then, to make it clear that he was addressing the Jewish God, Cohen offered up the sacred announcement, in Hebrew, of the supplicant’s humble presence: “Hineni, hineni/ I’m ready, my Lord.”

Without our suffering, to return to Bellow, what did we have? Was there even a choice not to suffer? Would we continue to hand it all over to our God, assuring ourselves that in the face of the world’s condemnation we would be miraculously redeemed, or would we finally decide to interrogate our victimhood, in acknowledgement that it had been implicate all along? 

In short, would we begin to tell ourselves a new story? 

Bellow, for his part, had chosen. In his 1956 novella Seize the Day, in which the great Jewish writer had first grappled with the problem of his culture’s suffering, the protagonist would reach a sublime yet simple conclusion.

“You don’t know what you’ve got within you,” he would say. “A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality.” DM

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Thursday morning update

On Thursday at 6am, the Garden Route District Joint Operational Centre in George announced that more people were trapped in the rubble of the collapsed building than initially estimated. 

“The contractor has now confirmed that the number of workers on site at the time of the collapse was 81 (previously reported as 75),” it said.

“This follows intensive discussions and scrutinisation of the safety records with the responsible contractors.”

As of this morning, the number of workers retrieved from the site stood at 37, with eight of them confirmed to be deceased. Forty-four victims remain unaccounted for. 

Authorities report that of the patients rescued from the site, 16 are in critical condition, six have life-threatening injuries and seven have minor injuries.

See our Photo Essay in Daily Maverick:  Frantic search for dozens missing in George building collapse

The rescue effort has passed the 66-hour mark.

Switch to large machinery

On Wednesday afternoon, a change of strategy was announced in the efforts to rescue people from the rubble of the collapsed building in George, with a shift from the use of rescue equipment to large demolition machinery, including bigger concrete breakers. 

However, Colin Deiner, the chief director of Western Cape disaster management services, said this did not mean they were switching from a rescue operation to a body recovery focus.

Part of the debris after the building under construction collapsed in George. (Photo: Stamhoof Brendon Torob Adams / Facebook)

Between Tuesday afternoon and the early morning of Wednesday, eight people were rescued from the collapsed building, most of whom were alive. This reinforced the determination of rescue workers to continue their life-saving efforts.

Read more in Daily Maverick: ‘I want my boy out of there’ — agonising vigil for families of those trapped in George building rubble

However, by 7pm on Wednesday there had been no further recoveries of living people, although another body was removed from the rubble. Thirty-eight of the initial 75 workers were still missing, with rescue efforts nearing the 55-hour mark.

“This building has provided us with a whole range of challenges from a rescue perspective,” Deiner said.

“Although we went [in] at high risk to save lives over the past two days, what is also important is our own people’s safety. The stage we are in now is a long and difficult one because we have to look for … bodies in a structure of five storeys that [has] collapsed.” 

The building under constrution in George before it collapsed. (Photo: Stamhoof Brendon Torob Adams / Facebook)

On Tuesday, rescuers could communicate with some people beneath the rubble. Deiner said, “The responses we got [on Tuesday], we removed all those people. Most of them were alive right through the night. We had a very successful night in terms of removing people. But we don’t have any responses at the moment.”

Regarding the process of confirming the number of people in the building at the time of its collapse, Deiner explained that they had interviewed the contractor, supervisors and survivors. 

“We have been able to build a picture of who was there and pretty much what they were wearing. We have overlaid that with the engineers … and that was a great help when we were doing the rescues over the last two days.”  

Read more in Daily Maverick: What is known about Erf 15098, Victoria Street in George, the site of the deadly building collapse

Risky operation

Richard Walls, a professor of structural and fire engineering at Stellenbosch University, said the strategies for removing debris were being changed out of concern for the safety of the teams on-site.

“We have more than 3,000 tonnes of concrete there. We’ve got a structure that has collapsed, sitting precariously. You’ve got slabs at many angles being carried — and sometimes hung by the reinforcing steel in it — over to other parts of the structure,” he said.

“We’ve got large amounts of concrete that they’re trying to break through to get access to the voids where people may be trapped. The challenge that we’re having is just the sheer quantity of demolition that they’ve got to go through. With the tools available it’s been a slow process.”

A drone view of the scene where the building collapsed in George, trapping construction workers. (Photo: Reuters / Shafiek Tassiem

Walls said at one point during the day the slabs of concrete began moving again, with a large crack opening up where rescue teams were working.

“The teams are being pulled off that area and alternative strategies are being found to try to give access. The work will continue in various places, trying where we can to get in,” he said.

“This is far beyond just a search and rescue in terms of small equipment to get to people. With thousands of tonnes of concrete, large equipment is being brought in and we’re going to try to work systematically.”

The investigation

Western Cape MEC for Local Government and Environmental Affairs Anton Bredell said it was too early to give any updates about the investigation into the cause of the building collapse.

“We must give the engineers the space to determine the facts. We do have engineers on the site. We want an independent investigation and then the consequences will follow after that,” he said.

Chris Roos, a George advocate specialising in engineering and construction law. (Photo: Tamsin Metelerkamp)

Daily Maverick spoke to Chris Roos, a George advocate specialising in engineering and construction law, about what this type of investigation would entail. While his firm is not involved in investigating the Victoria Street building collapse, it has investigated other construction incidents.

“When these types of buildings collapse, the investigations typically take anything from 18 months to longer. If you take this project, it typically starts from a contract — the traditional contracts that will be used for these types of dwellings are what they call a JBCC [Joint Building Contracts Committee] contract and in that, there are very specific roles and duties and liabilities,” he said.

When conducting this type of investigation, Roos said they usually started with the architectural design, before moving on to the structural design and the functions of the structural engineer.

“From that point, we will then move over into the fabrication and manufacturing space to see what processes were followed — quality control, quality checks, verification, validation. And then, ultimately, we will move into the construction site itself and there, typically, there’s a lot of questions that need to be answered,” Roos said.

“We will look at things like attendance registers, site diaries, general workmanship [and] whether the necessary inspections were performed by the architect.”

Samples of the structure, such as the concrete used in construction, would usually be sent to laboratories for analysis.

Any liability on the part of the architect or engineer would depend on whether they had acted in line with their mandate and code of conduct, Roos said, though he added that these professionals were usually held to a “far higher level of accountability” than others.

He said it was possible that multiple parties involved in the project could be held accountable.

“There will be some form of an insurance claim against the contractor, potentially. There are potential claims that can flow through on to the architect, the engineer,” he said.

“These days, parties in building or engineering contracts can be held criminally liable. It all just depends on … the developer, ultimately the client, and then the families [of the workers] as well. A lot is going to depend on how the contractor conducted himself and whether he actually complied with the law in the execution of the works.” DM

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Walter Sisulu Square in Kliptown, Johannesburg, which memorialises the signing of the Freedom Charter, has been stripped and vandalised.

The entire facility is under siege. Large parts of the roof have been ripped off and lights have been stolen. The paving on the grounds has been dug up and the bricks stolen.

The facility includes an open-air museum which explains how the Freedom Charter was written by South Africans of all races. The explanations have been defaced by vandals.

The museum is closed and the hotel is barely operational. The underground parking is often flooded when it rains.

At the conical brick tower, which contains the full principles of the Freedom Charter engraved in bronze, nothing has been left untouched and metal and cables in the facility have been stolen.

Walter Sisulu Square is where, on 26 June 1955, the Congress of the People drafted the Freedom Charter, proposing an alternative to South Africa’s oppressive apartheid policies with an emphasis on a non-racial society, human rights and civil liberties.

Seth Mazibuko, one of the leaders of the Student Action Committee which led the 1976 Soweto uprising, said, “The destruction of Walter Sisulu Square is just one of the indications of how our government does not put up a maintenance and security plan for anything that is about blacks.

“This also speaks to how black history and heritage is undermined and how it is getting distorted … what is happening in Walter Sisulu Square will never happen to the Voortrekker Monument.”

Kliptown, one of the oldest black residential areas in Soweto, nearly 20km from the Johannesburg CBD, was established in the late 1800s. Lack of electricity, poverty, unemployment, crime and drug abuse are rampant in the area.

Lucky Sindane, a spokesperson for the Johannesburg Property Company (JPC), the custodians of the facility, said the facility was handed over to the Kliptown community and that the public must also take care of the facility as the theft and vandalism occurred in broad daylight and in full view of community members.

“It’s impossible for someone to strip the roof without being seen,” Sindane said.

The JPC said plans were under way to refurbish and restore the facility

“Now we have an open tender. We will soon appoint someone who is going to restore Walter Sisulu Square to what it was,” Sindane said. DM

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On 9 June 2011, South Sudan seceded from Sudan to become the world’s youngest independent state. Just five months earlier, following decades of civil war, a landslide majority of 99% voted in favour of independence in a referendum held pursuant to an agreement between the Sudanese government and the then Sudan People’s Liberation Army. South Sudan is today one of the poorest countries on earth, ranking last in the Human Development Index; Sudan isn’t doing much better.

At the southern tip of Africa, “CapeXit” advocates are calling for a referendum on Western Cape independence, effectively seeking to replace South Sudan as the new kid on the block, albeit a much healthier and more prosperous one. A geographical area first defined in law by the interim Constitution of 1993, which came into force on 27 April 1994, the Province of the Western Cape now owes its existence to the “new” Constitution of 1996, with its territory being defined in Schedule 1A of the Constitution.

Map of the Western Cape. The Referendum Party wants it to be its own country. (Source: Wikimedia Commons (user Htonl, CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed))

One of the loudest voices advocating for a province-wide referendum on secession is the newly-formed Referendum Party (RP), which is on the ballot to contest both the national and the Western Cape provincial elections later this month. Led by Phil Craig, who relocated to South Africa from the UK in the early 2000s, the RP has one aim: to compel the premier of the Western Cape to call a referendum on “Cape Independence”. The “Cape” in question quite obviously excludes both the Northern and Eastern Cape.

Unsurprisingly, the very thought of South Africa being broken up once again raises the collective temperature. What makes matters worse for many is that Craig, an outspoken Western Cape secessionist, was not born in this country, but became a citizen — as an adult — by naturalisation. Instead of engaging with the merits or demerits of the issue, social media responses are often driven by anger, with frequent demands for him to go back home.

It was in this context, of an often acrimonious and unhelpful public screaming match, that Daily Maverick published a piece authored by Rebecca Davis titled Fact check – Is it likely the Western Cape could become an independent state?

In the piece, Davis considered the promise of the Cape Independence Party and RP “that a vote for their parties can lead to a referendum which may ultimately trigger the Western Cape province leaving the rest of the country.”

Davis pulled no punches in her conclusion:

“It is simply impossible to imagine a world in which South African law and politics line up to allow one of the nine provinces to assert itself as a separate country — especially since even parties like the DA do not support the idea. As such, the CapeXit parties appear to be selling voters pipe dreams.”

Aggrieved by the publication, Craig lodged a complaint with the Press Ombud. He alleged multiple breaches of the Press Code: that opinion was presented as fact; that the coverage was not fair and accurate; that RP’s views were not sought before publication; that clause 6 dealing with advocacy was breached; and that the coverage “was influenced by political considerations”. Ruling in favour of Daily Maverick on each alleged breach, the Press Ombud dismissed the complaint.

Read more in Daily Maverick: State of the Media news hub

After setting out the relevant background and grounds of complaint, the ruling first considers the nature of Davis’s piece, finding that it “has the overall nature of an opinion piece”. But having done so, it goes on to caution that such a classification cannot result, on its own, in a publication finding protection in the “safe harbour” of clause 7 of the Code. That clause recognises that comment or criticism may be protected “even if it is extreme, unjust, unbalanced, exaggerated and prejudiced”.

Rather, the Press Ombud explains, “the question is whether a particular statement under scrutiny is a comment or a factual assertion”. And as clause 7.2 makes clear, comment or criticism is only protected “as long as it is without malice, is on a matter of public interest, has taken fair account of all material facts that are either true or reasonably true, and is presented in a manner that it appears clearly to be comment.”

One does not have to say, expressly, that what is being presented is comment.

In dealing with the first complaint, the Press Ombud highlights that certain clauses of the Code on which Craig sought to rely only apply to the gathering and reporting of news. That meant that all that was before him to decide was “whether commentary was presented as fact”. In dismissing the first complaint, the Press Ombud noted that “[w]hat was under scrutiny, was the likelihood of Cape secession”, and that “[t]he concluding opinion was that it is unlikely in the extreme”.

Statement accuracy and right of reply complaint

Central to the second complaint was Craig’s unhappiness with the accuracy of two statements: first, that referendums are not binding in any way, and can simply be ignored; and second, that only the national executive and Parliament may legally bring about secession, primarily by way of a constitutional amendment. The second statement was not considered in any meaningful way, because it was correctly characterised as the expert opinion of a legal academic.

Central to the Press Ombud’s consideration of the first statement, which was also recognised as constituting expert legal opinion, was his refusal even to consider the soundness of Craig’s legal submissions on whether a referendum, if held, would be binding. According to the Press Ombud, RP “itself cannot state as fact that secession is possible or likely”. For as long as the issues remain untested in our courts, the “facts” will remain as “opinions and untested legal hypotheses”.

The third complaint, which concerned RP’s alleged right of reply, was dismissed on three bases: first, that clause 1.8, which requires the subject of critical reportage to be given the opportunity to be heard (where practicable), does not apply to commentary; second, that there was no critical reportage of RP; and third, that it would ordinarily not be practicable in the context of a fact-check feature “to include the subjective views of the entity or person whose claims are under scrutiny”.

The final complaints, dealing with advocacy and undue political interference, were dismissed easily. In noting that clause 6 allows the media to advocate their views strongly, the Press Ombud nevertheless found that Davis’s piece did not amount to advocacy by Daily Maverick. As to the allegation that the piece was influenced by political considerations — put simply — no evidence was put up to support this allegation.

Read more in Daily Maverick: 2024 elections hub

In a more recent Daily Maverick piece, Stephen Grootes looks at “a growing list of groups pushing for secession”, including RP, the KZN-based Abantu Batho Congress of businessman-turned-politician (and royal adviser) Philani Mavundla, and the “Joint Afrikaner Declaration” signed by groups such as Solidarity and AfriForum.

Grootes sees “a real risk that by the time of our next elections in 2029, these [separatist] groups will hold sway over some of the parties desperate for power.”

Only time will tell. DM

First published by GroundUp.

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If you are involved in soccer at any level, the chances are high that you have a dream of one day taking part in the Uefa Champions League. In whatever capacity. It is one of the most prestigious competitions in the sporting realm.

So, the fact that Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti has not only managed numerous games in the competition but is entering a record sixth Champions League final is a testament to his tactical brilliance.

‘Don Carlo’ (as Ancelotti is affectionately referred to) and his Madrid charges fought back from one goal down to grab a late 2-1 win against German heavyweights Bayern Munich in the second leg of their continental bout.

Antonio Rudiger of Real Madrid celebrates with team-mate Vinicius Junior and coach Carlo Ancelotti at Estadio Santiago Bernabeu. 8 May 2024. (Photo: Chris Brunskill/Fantasista/Getty Images)

Sporadically-used Spanish striker Joselu helped Los Blancos seal a tight 4-3 aggregate win in the two-legged clash after he netted a brace as the game seemed to be coming to a conclusion in Bayern’s favour.

In the 1 June decider, which will be played at London’s Wembley Stadium, 14-time European champions, Madrid will be taking part in an 18th final in the Champions League. From the ones they have played previously, they have only lost thrice, with their last final defeat in the competition coming in 1981 versus Liverpool.

Joselu of Real Madrid celebrates scoring his team’s first goal against Bayern Munich. (Photo: Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

Determined Dortmund

Los Blancos’ opponents on the night will be Borussia Dortmund. The Germans upset Kylian Mbappe and his Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) teammates with a 2-0 aggregate victory in the other semifinal.

While Madrid have played and won more finals than any other side in the history of the European club contest, Dortmund will be playing in just their third decider. Of the two preceding the upcoming final, they won one and lost the other. They beat Juventus to the title in 1997.

At Wembley in just under a month, it will be a story of David versus Goliath. This will be true in the dugout as well.

Whereas Ancelotti is ‘Mr Champions League’, with a record four titles and six finals in the competition, Dortmund’s manager Edin Terzić will be appearing in just his second major final as a manager.

In 2021, as an interim manager, the 41-year-old guided Dortmund to German Cup glory. Three years later he is in his first European final.

Coach Carlo Ancelotti of Real Madrid, Joel Matip of Liverpool FC and Vinicius Junior of Real Madrid during their 2023 Champions League clash. (Photo: David S Bustamante / Soccrates / Getty Images)

Don Carlo

Ancelotti, 64, has won almost every trophy available while coaching in countries such as his homeland Italy, as well as in England, France, Germany and now Spain. Throughout these years he has remained relevant and competitive, especially in the Champions League.

If the European competition is the equivalent of WrestleMania, Ancelotti is the Undertaker. This latest final will add more weight to his already incredible legacy.

Madrid midfield maestro Jude Bellingham, who has been in exceptional form since joining the Spanish giants from Dortmund before the beginning of this season, highlighted Ancelotti’s managerial qualities recently.

Vinicius Junior of Real Madrid (right) in action against Joshua Kimmich of FC Bayern Munchen at Estadio Santiago Bernabeu. 8 May 8 2024. (Photo: Alberto Gardin/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images)

“The sign of a good manager is when he makes you believe you are a bit better. He gives me the freedom to roam,” Bellingham said. “He’s a top person. He makes me feel comfortable.”

Last season, after Madrid lost La Liga to bitter rivals Barcelona and were humbled 5-1 on aggregate in the semifinals of the Champions League by eventual champions Manchester City, Ancelotti’s relevance was questioned.

This season, after continued trust and support from Madrid’s hierarchy, he has responded to his critics by recapturing the Spanish league title, and now reaching the Champions League final.

“It’s happened again (thanks to) fans that push (us), a stadium that helps, a fantastic atmosphere and players who never stop believing that they can do it. It’s something magical, there’s no explanation for it,” said the Italian manager after reaching his sixth Champions League final.

One more night of magic awaits at Wembley. Dortmund won’t be easy though. They showed their class and resilience against PSG, despite being underdogs in that tie as well. DM

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To view an image of our flag burning, no matter how it is depicted, inspires intense emotions. It hurts. Deeply, even if the burning process is reversed and the flag is seen as untouched at the end.

It provokes important questions, as in, why would someone want to do this, and could someone who would conceive of using such an advert for political gain really respect the idea, the concept, the aim, of South Africa at all?

President Cyril Ramaphosa suggested that it was “treasonous” to do this, while Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture Zizi Kodwa said he would take action because he had a duty to protect South Africa’s national flags and symbols.

There is some evidence that a majority agrees with him. But not everyone.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Elections 2024

Over the past few days, callers into SAfm have gone in many directions – this has not been a debate where you can guess the view from the name of the person speaking.

Qobi in Polokwane suggested the flag in flames represented the problems causing our country to burn, and that, “Who doesn’t know that all the things the DA says (are wrong with the country) are true?”

Teksio in Maluti-a-Phofung asked an important question, “Imagine if the EFF is the one who burnt the flag”.

Many others agreed with Kodwa that the flag should be protected.

Kodwa chose his words carefully, suggesting the action he would take would be to ask the Electoral Commission if this advert did cross the line. But he also appeared to advocate for some kind of legal protection for the flag.

Many countries in Europe, such as Spain, France and Germany all have laws punishing people for desecrating their flags. Britain does not, while in the US the issue of whether there should be a ban on burning that country’s flag has energised the right-wing since the Vietnam War.

Unfortunately, no matter the intentions of those who want legal protection for a flag, down this road lies absurdity.

Where does the offence to the flag start? With the burning of it? With burning an image of it? With using it in a satirical film? Using it in an advert? With Faf de Klerk’s underwear?

In Zimbabwe, when an activist took to displaying the flag as a sign of protest, displaying the flag was briefly made illegal.

And if burning our flag as a form of protest is wrong, would it be wrong for an American to burn their flag in protest against Donald Trump’s possible re-election?

All of this may spark hope in the DA that its advert provokes a series of debates that puts the ANC on the wrong side of the argument, that the party somehow oversteps.

No accident

The history of DA campaigns during previous elections shows that this advert is no accident.

As long ago as 2016, the leading opposition party released an advert that used the voice of Nelson Mandela. This caused outrage at the time, led by the ANC MP, Madiba’s grandson Mandla Madiba.

In 2021, just months after the violence that claimed at least 342 lives in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, the party again courted controversy.

It put up posters in Phoenix, the centre of the violence, that told residents “The ANC calls you racists. The DA calls you heroes”.

As Daily Maverick pointed out at the time, the intention of the DA was to stoke controversy. And the way to do this was through increasing divisions, not reducing them.

Unfortunately, this is often the point of modern politics.

Perhaps the best public description of politics as it is practised in strategic terms by the DA has come from the former DA strategist, Gareth van Onselen.

As he put in Business Live while responding to the launch of Rise Mzansi, “A good sign of an impactful political party, in terms of current affairs, is when other parties are forced to respond to you. That is how you lead debate”.

In other words, an election can be won or lost not by what is actually said on the campaign trail, but by what the election is about.

Our elections in the past have often been dominated by racial identity. Given that our society is defined by racialised inequality, this should be expected.

If the DA believes this election, too, will be dominated by race, then it may well have wanted to start that debate on its terms. And this advert may be part of that.

It should not be forgotten how often politicians have deliberately tried to change the story in the past.

In 2011 then ANC Youth League Leader Julius Malema led a march from Johannesburg to the city then known as Pretoria. In the process, he almost forced our society to debate what he called “Economic Justice”.

It was an inspired move (even as he bailed in Midrand and re-appeared in Pretoria, and then left the country the next morning) in that it changed the story at a stroke. – and without anyone claiming to be offended.

But, much of his career has been defined by comments deemed offensive to many people. This was all deliberate, he stirred up debates. He was taken to court, to the SA Human Rights Commission, to other authorities. And this is one of the roots of his success.

Chair of the DA’s Federal Council Helen Zille has now confirmed this is the DA strategy, writing: “We want to go to war against those who are destroying the dream that once united our nation. We want to save our Flag. Controversy helps drive our message.”

This then is the major point, the aim of this is surely to drive turnout.

Tight election

And, as offensive as this advert may be, the situation ahead of this election could be so tight in some places that just a small percentage one way or another could make a difference.

Consider, for example, the situation in KwaZulu-Natal.

Polling there suggests that four parties could each get around 20% of the vote (the ANC, the IFP, MK and the DA). At the same time, in the suburbs of Ethekwini, residents have displayed intense anger at the quality of services they are receiving.

Whether these people turn out to vote for the DA could literally tip the balance between whether or not that party is in government in KZN after the elections.

This is designed to remind them that their country is burning. And, crucially, that it can be fixed.

The obvious message is that “only the DA” can fix it.

None of this means the DA’s actions here are moral. It is surely offensive and immoral to depict our flag as burning. And to be deliberately offensive, to deliberately cause people emotional pain is always going to be difficult to justify.

However, other parties too have indulged in immoral behaviour.

The EFF has continually baited people with racial divisions, PA leader Gayton McKenzie regularly professes his hatred for foreigners, others support an uninterrupted gusher of lies.

Even Ramaphosa has some history here.

In 2013 he was reported to have said, “If all South Africans don’t vote, we will regress. The Boers will come back to control us.”

More recently, he has suggested that people should vote for the ANC to protect their social grants. This is simply untrue as several other parties, including the EFF,  Action SA, the DA and others all propose protecting, or even increasing, social grants.

Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande said in 2015 that the media is a “continuation of the apartheid regime” while “The DA will bring back apartheid”.

All of this shows that while the DA’s advert is offensive, it is also part of a particular type of politics. A politics that thrives on deliberate division and offence, and never more so than during an election.

Or, as Van Onselen put it in his description, “Nice guys tend to finish last … SA is a street fight”. DM

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Sevens – or SVNS, as World Rugby renamed it – was revamped in 2023, introducing exciting changes like men’s and women’s teams competing on the same tour, at the same venues throughout the series.

Both teams also received equal participation fees and the series was cut from 11 locations to eight and the number of men’s core teams from 15 to 12. 

While the changes introduced a highly competitive overall series, New Zealand and Australia women entered the final leg in Singapore tied on points, as Argentina men scraped past Ireland men by two points, following seven rounds of action, to finish top of the standings.

There are, however, some growing pains.

Jorja Miller of New Zealand is tackled by Madison Ashby of Australia on day three of the HSBC SVNS Singapore on 5 May 2024. (Photo: Yong Teck Lim / Getty Images)

The eighth and final leg of the series in Madrid, to be held from 31 May to 2 June, is set to be the “winner-takes-all” Grand Final, as announced by World Rugby in 2023:

“Under the new HSBC SVNS 2024 model, seven regular-season events take place – in Dubai, Cape Town, Perth, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Hong Kong – resulting in regular season League Winners being crowned in Singapore before a ‘winner-takes-all’ Grand Final in Madrid on 31 May to 2 June that will determine the HSBC SVNS champions.”

The top eight teams will compete for overall glory in the Grand Final while the teams that finished ninth to 12th will compete for core status in next year’s world series against four other Challenger series teams.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Stumbling Blitzboks still suffering from pandemic budget blow

This means that the Blitzboks, who finished seventh overall for a second consecutive year, will still have a chance at overall glory.

For context, the Springbok Sevens failed to reach the semifinals in all but one leg of the world series – the first one in Dubai in December, which they won.

It would be almost an embarrassment for the Blitzboks to win a one-off tournament and be the overall champions.

Tobias Wade of Argentina is tackled by Gavin Mullin of Ireland in their quarterfinal at the HSBC SVNS Singapore on 4 May 2024. (Photo: Yong Teck Lim / Getty Images)

Tomas Elizalde of Argentina runs with the ball against Kitiona Vai (left) and Dylan Collier of New Zealand in a pool match during the HSBC SVNS Singapore on 3 May 2024. (Photo: Yong Teck Lim / Getty Images)

Winner-takes-some

World Rugby though has seemingly, although belatedly, realised the absurdity of it.

Despite no formal announcement of the introduction of a “league winners title”, one was handed out to and duly celebrated by Argentina men and New Zealand women.

That does, however, take away some of the meaning from the “winner-takes-all” title to be contested in Madrid. The winner of that tournament will at least take some, but the respective men’s and women’s teams that have been strongest throughout the season will deservedly take most.

SVNS League winners Argentina and New Zealand celebrate with their respective trophies at the HSBC SVNS Singapore on 5 May 2024. (Photo: Yong Teck Lim / Getty Images)

Springbok women

The Springbok women, who competed in the world series for the first time in nine seasons, had a tough reintroduction to the circuit – they were the benefactors of the series increasing from 11 teams to 12.

They had a commendable highest-place finish of fifth in Los Angeles, but their inconsistency meant they finished last on three occasions.

Their final league position of 11th means they will be one of the sides competing in the promotion and relegation section at the “Grand Final” in Madrid. DM

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Does low-cost carrier FlySafair have an unfair advantage over its competitors, which might have paved the way for it to capture 60% of the South African aviation market?

The answer — from the vantage point of FlySafair’s competitors — is a resounding yes.

FlySafair has managed to run a slick business over the past decade, operating in an aviation market in which margins and profits are shrinking like economy-class legroom.

Even investment doyen Warren Buffett is not prepared to pour money into airline stocks because the travel industry remains in a precarious position, guzzles capital and is intensely regulated and competitive (airfare price wars have been seen in South Africa).

However, market forces have also led to FlySafair morphing into a big airline. At least 11 airlines have been permanently grounded in South Africa since FlySafair started flying in October 2014. More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic was the final nail in the coffin for SA Express, Mango Airlines, Kulula and British Airways in southern Africa. South African Airways emerged as a smaller airline after its operations were rehabilitated under business rescue.

Read more in Daily Maverick: SAA clings to hope that its private sector investment plan will fly

As these market changes unfolded, FlySafair has mopped up the flight capacity left open by the collapse of its competitors, allowing it to increase its market share. However, its competitors believe that FlySafair’s growth is also attributable to an unfair market advantage, which has made it difficult for them to compete with the airline on an equal footing.

Now, FlySafair is under investigation for being predominantly owned (allegedly) by foreign players, which could be in breach of licensing conditions and SA aviation laws. 

Aviation companies Airlink and Global Airways (which co-owns the domestic airline Lift) have approached the International Air Services Council and the Air Services Licensing Council, urging the local aviation authority to probe FlySafair’s ownership structure and determine whether it complies with legislation. A company called Safair Operations is believed to be the parent company of FlySafair.

Competitors’ arguments

The central complaint by Airlink and Global Airways, set for hearing on 10 May, is that foreign investors/shareholders predominantly own Safair, thus breaching the Air Services Licensing Act and the International Air Services Act.

The Air Services Licensing Act requires that holders of aviation licences in South Africa have a minimum of 75% local shareholding. In other words, airlines that fly locally are required to be owned by individuals who are “residents” of the country. The 75% requirement also extends to voting rights over how airlines are managed. 

The Act was passed by the government to ensure that SA shareholders and investors become custodians of airlines and interests in the aviation industry. The International Air Services Act requires airlines based in the country and flying overseas to have a “substantial” local shareholding. The airline industry has interpreted this to be a minimum of 51%.

Airlink and Global Airways argue that Safair no longer complies with the Air Services Licensing Act because the airline’s voting rights (and by extension, its shareholding structure) are not held by individuals based in South Africa. 

Daily Maverick understands that Airlink and Global Airways have detailed the shareholding and voting rights structure of Safair Operations to the International Air Services Council, which they say is as follows: 25% is held by a company called Safair Holdings, 25.14% is held by B4i Safair, and 49.86% is held by a trust. 

Daily Maverick also understands that Safair Operations has admitted that 25% of the voting rights held by Safair Holdings are not held by residents of South Africa. Airlink and Global Airways believe that the 49.86% that is held by a trust is opaque. They told SA authorities that the voting rights and economic interests in the trust were not clear, and directors/associated parties of FlySafair are also trustees in the trust, which does not ensure independence. 

Airlink and Global Airways believe that the only applicable local ownership of Safair Operations is the 25.14% held by B4i Safair, which falls below the 75% local ownership requirement. 

The storm over the ownership of FlySafair/Safair goes back to 2013 when competitors Comair and Skywise dragged it to court. At the time, Safair applied for a licence to run a commercial passenger airline. Comair and Skywise argued that Safair’s Ireland-based owner, ASL Aviation Holdings, did not comply with South African laws about the need to have a local shareholding.

Safair was then forced to change its ownership structure to have local ownership. In doing so, ASL Aviation Holdings created the South Africa-based Safair Investment Trust in which a large shareholding in Safair was controlled by South Africans, including its employees, who were awarded 25% of the company’s shares. This paved the way for Safair’s aviation licence to be granted and for it to be allowed to operate. 

In March 2019, the trust was cancelled when ASL Aviation Holdings bought it and acquired its shares. In its financial statements, ASL made the following disclosure: 

“Through the acquisition of Safair Investment Trust, ASL acquired additional share capital in Safair Operations and increased its shareholding from 25% to 74.86%. On this date, the group gained control of Safair Operations, ceased accounting for it as an associate, and commenced accounting for Safair Operations as a subsidiary.”

The requested remedy 

Airlink and Global Airways have asked the local authority to intervene to force Safair Operations to remedy its shareholding structure to reflect more local owners/shareholders. 

The local authority could cancel or suspend Safair’s aviation licence (effectively grounding flights operated by FlySafair) until its shareholding structure is fixed, impose fines or penalties against FlySafair, or give FlySafair more grace (no sanctions) and time to fix its shareholding structure by possibly selling shares in the company to locals. 

Airlink and Global Airways want the playing field to be levelled and for the law to equitably apply to all aviation players. They believe that being majority-owned by foreign shareholders gives FlySafair access to international capital that is used by the airline to fund its operations and growth, allowing it to remain competitive. 

An industry source told Daily Maverick that other SA airlines should also be allowed to open up their shareholding structure, considering that “international aviation giants such as Emirates and Qatar are keen to invest in local airlines. 

“Global investors are prepared to unleash capital into local airlines. However, laws currently prohibit them from doing so. Then the laws should be changed to allow us to attract foreign investors,” the source said. 

Kirby Gordon, the chief marketing officer at Safair, said the company believed it was compliant with all ownership-related laws and had been transparent about its ownership structure.

“How our company is constituted is transparent, and the details lie before all parties at the moment. The challenge at hand is for the councils to reaffirm that the structure complies with the regulations that they have before them. I say ‘reaffirm’ because our structure has always, by regulation, been disclosed,” said Gordon, without disclosing Safair’s actual ownership structure or its submissions to the International Air Services Council in response to the complaint by Airlink and Global Airways.

“For the last 10 years, we’ve built an airline doing good, honest business and offering the best possible value to our customers. We want to continue to do so. While we believe that we are compliant with all requirements, we’re also happy to make any adjustments needed to bring all parties comfort so that we can get back to the business of offering a world-class air travel solution,” he said. DM

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In a country where the Springboks are feted and revered because they are world champions again, there is little patience and context with any other rugby failure in the system.

By being the best in the world at Test level, the understandable expectation is that the rest of South Africa’s rugby teams must also rule the world at the varying levels of the sport – sevens, under-20s and schoolboys.

The reality is that it’s not that straightforward and at the vital under-20 level, the gap between the northern and southern hemisphere has been growing for close to a decade.

In the last decade, England and France have won six of the eight U20 World Championships (two years were cancelled due to Covid) that were staged.  The north has been improving and dominating while the south recedes.

It’s partly economic, as rugby’s financial clout still resides mostly in France, Britain and Ireland, but it’s also systemic.

South Africa and New Zealand in particular, have excellent schools that play high-quality rugby, but without regular international competition at under-20 level, the cracks are developing.

Wake-up call

Last year, the Junior Boks finished third despite suffering a sensational defeat against Italy in a Paarl mud bath in the Pool stages. The reality was though, that eventual winners France (who claimed their third U20 title in succession) and runners-up Ireland, were far ahead of the chasing pack.

France and Ireland were too fast, too organised and skilful and too battle-hardened after the U20 Six Nations, for South Africa, Australia, New Zealand or Argentina to realistically compete.

Read more in Daily Maverick: France dominated while Junior Springboks end Under-20 Championship on a high

Evidence of the growing gulf between the northern and southern hemispheres was easy to see — from performances and big match temperament to the actual scores.

New Zealand, for so long the dominant team at U20 level, finished seventh at the World Championships last year.

France battered New Zealand by 35-14 in Pool play while Ireland thumped Australia 30-10. The Junior Boks lost 34-26 to Italy. New Zealand only beat Wales by a point in a thrilling 27-26 win and Australia and England drew 22-22.

Outside of France and Ireland, the contests were tight, but the reality is that the southern hemisphere teams are falling further and further behind. This is why the establishment of an age group Rugby Championship was vital to bridge the growing divide.

Junior Springboks coach Bafana Nhleko. (Photo: Sydney Seshibedi/Gallo Images)

After last year’s loss to Italy, Junior Bok coach Bafana Nhleko, highlighted the need for more age group competition. He said what many were thinking, but few, if any, had the courage to express openly.

“If you look at all the Six Nations teams they start playing the Six Nations comp from under-16 onwards and by the time they get to under-20 — in junior terms — they’ve got 50 international caps,” Nhleko pointed out.

“It’s not something that we have, neither do we have the privilege of playing against them and testing ourselves.

“We’ve got a great product which is our schoolboy [rugby] and we must never go away from that because it’s a bedrock of our system, but where we probably can get better as to understanding what that product needs to do to support the under-20 programme.”

After the 2023 debacle, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Argentina Rugby (Sanzaar) moved quickly after last year’s U20 World Championships staged in the Western Cape, to establish an annual Rugby Championship tournament at U20 level.

It was a recognition of the widening divide and the potential knock-on effect of that into senior rugby.

Sure, the Boks and All Blacks contested the final of Rugby World Cup 2023, but outside of that tournament, France and Ireland in particular, but also England and Wales, have been regularly winning matches against Sanzaar opponents

Trial and error

The inaugural U20 Rugby Championships, planned at fairly short notice and in a tough economic climate for Sanzaar, has been localised in Queensland to cut travel time and costs.

Unfortunately, it has coincided with horrendous weather, not unusual in Queensland at this time of year, which has impacted on the quality of the rugby.

The Junior Boks suffered a surprise 24-19 defeat to Australia in the second round of matches, following an opening day 13-13 draw against New Zealand.

Angus Staniforth of Australia (left) is tackled by Junior Boks players. (Photo: Albert Perez/Getty Images)

Read more in Daily Maverick: Junior Boks slump to defeat against Australia in U20 Rugby Championship

Both matches were played in torrential rain and gale force gusts, reducing the contests to a lottery with handling almost impossible and luck playing a bigger part than usual.

But the Junior Boks were also architects of their own downfall against Australia with loosehead prop Mbasa Maqubela dangerously clashing heads with an opponent, which earned him a red card.

Although the competition rules allow for a replacement following a 20-minute punishment with 14 men, the damage was done in that period. A later yellow card for lock Bathobele Hlekani, who collapsed an Aussie maul heading to the Bok line made the job impossible as it also resulted in the decisive penalty try.

The clash against Australia was a catastrophic outing, ending any realistic chance South Africa had of winning the U20 Rugby Championships after New Zealand thrashed Argentina 43-20 in the other match in round two.

Frank Vaenuku of New Zealand offloads against Argentina at Sunshine Coast Stadium. 7 May 2024. (Photo: Albert Perez/Getty Images)

The young Pumas thumped Australia 25-6 in round one, which means the Junior Boks are bottom of the log going into the third and final round on 12 June.

Secondary mission

While the result against Australia and the fact that New Zealand are almost guaranteed to take the inaugural title will sting, this was not the primary mission for Nhleko and the team.

Many people don’t want to hear that, but the reality is that these matches are an extended trial — a fact-finding mission if you prefer — with an eye on the World Rugby U20 Championships in June.

South Africa is hosting the tournament in the Western Cape, as it did in 2023, and the mission is to win it on home soil.

After the draw with New Zealand, Nhleko made nine changes for Australia. With three high-level matches crammed into 12 days, as well as the need to expose all players to the intensity needed with an eye on the World Championships, it had to be done.

“Three competitive games in 12 days means that load management will play an important part in our team processes and player management,” said Nhleko.

“Also, this tour is very much about us continuing to grow as a team and part of the planning was to give the whole group playing minutes and experience in a very competitive series.”

The difficult conditions the teams are enduring might also be beneficial in the long run because last year’s U20 World Championships were played in driving rain and muddy fields, particularly in Paarl.

“It was a great opportunity to gain experience in different conditions and learn going forward,” Nhleko said after the draw against New Zealand. DM

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The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) anti-money laundering watchdog has placed Kenya on its grey list for the second time. Listed countries face increased monitoring due to deficiencies in meeting international standards on combating money laundering and terrorism financing.

Kenya’s listing on 23 February is specifically tied to weaknesses in regulation and oversight of the real estate sector and financial transactions made through legal firms. Added to this, on 11 March, the United States (US) Department of the Treasury sanctioned 16 entities in Kenya for their links to terror financing. These included several Kenyan and Somali citizens targeted for raising and laundering funds on behalf of al-Shabaab, and Crown Bus Services for supporting al-Shabaab operations and logistics.

FATF’s greylisting means Kenya risks reduced investor confidence and difficulties conducting cross-border financial transactions and accessing financial services, among others, due to stricter compliance requirements. Countries with this classification are also more vulnerable to criminal groups who exploit jurisdictions with inadequate regulations against money laundering and terrorist financing.

Kenya’s adherence to international standards should be boosted by its Proceeds of Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Act (2009) and membership of the Eastern and Southern Africa Anti-Money Laundering Group. However, recurring problems in meeting financial safeguard standards signify loopholes in government responses. Weak financial oversight facilitates money laundering through various sectors including transport, real estate, legal, non-governmental organisations and gold.

In 2021, The Sentry, an investigative and policy organisation, shed light on the country’s susceptibility to financial risks. The report highlights how corrupt foreign figures use the purchase of luxury real estate to commit financial fraud. The investigation pinpoints prominent South Sudanese individuals as key players in Kenya’s money laundering networks.

Efforts to promote transparency and accountability in the real estate sector have done little to help. These include regulations requiring transactions exceeding $7,582 to be conducted through banks and other financial institutions.

An analysis by the Eastern and Southern Africa Anti-Money Laundering Group revealed that between 2021 and 2023, a total of $544,905,660 in cash entered Kenya illegally through Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. According to the report, this indicates inadequate oversight by the Banking Fraud Investigation Unit based at the airport. The assessment team also criticised Kenya’s Financial Reporting Centre for inadequacies in detecting patterns in cash transactions that could signal money laundering and terrorist financing activities.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Criminal syndicates launder hundreds of millions from stolen US Covid-19 funds in Kenya

Despite passing anti-money laundering legislation, attempts to commit the crime are frequent in Kenya. In February 2022, a Kenyan man travelling from Burundi was arrested at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport with $2-million in foreign currency that had not been declared. In November 2021, authorities recovered $28,000 concealed in a jacket shipped into the country from the US. And in December 2020, a Nigerian national destined for Dubai was arrested by the Assets Recovery Agency with over $754,717 in his hand luggage.

The risk of money laundering in Kenya could be heightened by the Cabinet’s recent approval of the Anti-Money Laundering and Combating of Terrorism Financing Laws (Amendment) Bill 2023. If passed by Parliament, the bill will increase the cash reporting threshold by 50%, from the current $10,000 to $15,000, creating more opportunities for illicit financial activities.

Jaindi Kisero, a leading economic analyst, says the bill should be rejected and that its enactment would reverse ongoing efforts to track and trace the movement of proceeds of corruption and crime.

While on the FATF grey list, Kenya’s financial redemption requires better regulatory enforcement by government, the financial sector, international partners, the private sector, civil society and the general public. This would enhance compliance and reinforce oversight.

Increased international cooperation is also needed. Kenya should leverage its position as a member of the Eastern and Southern Africa Anti-Money Laundering Group to gather intelligence and share information among member states. Stronger partnerships would increase its credibility in the global financial community. Last, Kenya must enhance its tracing and recovery of the proceeds of crime, and prosecute suspects. This will boost investor confidence in its financial regulatory systems.

Given the legal complexities, insufficient coordination and a lack of expertise, Kenya faces an uphill struggle. Good starting points are harmonising laws and strengthening global enforcement and partnerships. DM

Valtino Omolo, Intern, East Africa Peace, Security and Governance, Willis Okumu, Senior Researcher and Halkano Wario, Enact East Africa Organised Crime Observatory Coordinator, Institute for Security Studies (ISS) Nairobi.

Enact is funded by the European Union and implemented by the Institute for Security Studies in partnership with Interpol and the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.

First published by ISS Today.

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Thebe Investment Corporation (Thebe) confirmed in a statement on Wednesday weekend media reports that it was at loggerheads with Shell over the value of its Shell Downstream South Africa (SDSA) shareholding.

“A dispute has arisen between Thebe and Shell as to how Thebe’s shares should be valued.

“Thebe believes firmly that its approach is the correct one, and that it is consistent with the agreed valuation formula,” says the statement, sent in response to Daily Maverick queries days ago.

“Since April 2023, Thebe and Shell have held several meetings to try and resolve their valuation differences. These meetings have not been fruitful, and to resolve the impasse Thebe has referred this matter to arbitration in terms of the provisions of the shareholders agreement. This process is underway.”

The Sunday Times reported that Thebe values its stake at $200-million, but Thebe made no mention of the figures that are being contested. 

Shell confirmed earlier this week its intention to divest its downstream South African operations – effectively its more than 700 forecourts – after a comprehensive global review of such assets which it flagged in March.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Shell confirms intention to divest from South African downstream operations

“During the divestment process, we will work to preserve Shell Downstream South Africa’s operating capabilities, maintain the Shell brand presence, and secure the best possible outcome for our people and customers in South Africa under new ownership,” Shell said.

It made no mention of its exploration or production activities in South Africa, which have drawn the ire of conservationists. 

Thebe is tied to the ANC and its relationship as a BEE partner with Shell has been seen by critics as a way for the oil company to score points with the ruling party.

Read more in Daily Maverick: After the Bell: The case in favour of Shell leaving SA 

Shell said in its statement on Monday that its decision to exit from SDSA was not “taken lightly” – with that kind of political baggage, that is probably the case. But it also makes business sense as Shell pivots to EV charging offerings and the pickings on that front in South Africa are slim. 

Read more in Daily Maverick: After the Bell: Does SA’s slow embrace of EVs explain Shell’s departure? 

Thebe for its part denied implications in the local press that the divestment stemmed from a “strained relationship” between itself and Shell. 

In its statement on Wednesday, Thebe said its SDSA stake “was acquired through a combination of debt funding and use of Thebe’s own cash resources. As is typical in transactions of this nature, Thebe had a put option, exercisable at its election, to exit its investment by selling its shares back to Shell at a predetermined valuation formula.”

It went on to say that its board decided to exit that stake two years ago but “… Shell delayed the conclusion of the sale transaction”. 

This, it seems, has given rise to the punch-up over the value of the stake, a matter that Shell has yet to comment on.

It all provides some illuminating background for any company interested in buying Shell’s downstream assets in South Africa, which may prove to be an upstream paddle. DM

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As geopolitical tensions across the world continue to rise, South Africa’s logistics sector is faced with an increasingly challenging environment in which to operate, both locally and globally.

Internationally, trade and supply chains are being disrupted in many ways by numerous wars and political stresses. From the ongoing trade challenges created by the war in Ukraine, to the recent problems arising from the conflict in Gaza, global logistics has suffered significantly.

A good example here is of the recent missile strikes on ships in the Red Sea. These have resulted in sea freight cargo either being delayed in transit, or being forced to divert around the Cape of Good Hope. Both scenarios result in increased transit times, as well as raised costs, while at the same time reducing the availability of products and equipment in the markets for which these cargoes are destined. 

It has been suggested that diverting a tanker from Asia to North-West Europe, via the Cape of Good Hope, doubles transit time and thus adds nearly $1 million in additional costs to the journey. Similarly, a study by the GAIN Group intimated that Transnet’s collapse – both ports and rail – cost SA in the region of R1 billion a day (R353 billion for the year) in economic output in 2023, and some R411 billion in 2022.

The climate crisis is also negatively impacting this space, as weather patterns become increasingly volatile and extreme, creating additional challenges around both global capacity and trade routes.

Local challenges

These global crises create even greater problems for South Africa (SA), which has other logistical concerns to deal with. The country’s ability to compete in global markets at all depends on the efficiency of its ports and rail network, and neither of these are currently in the best shape. 

As the operator of both the nation’s ports and railways, Transnet is facing numerous challenges. State capture has damaged the organisation’s effectiveness, while additional issues, like the impact of the pandemic and rising levels of theft and vandalism of its rail infrastructure, have created something of a perfect storm of problems. 

In addition, equipment shortages and maintenance backlogs further impede Transnet’s ability to deliver the services required by the logistics industry. 

The ongoing infrastructure challenges have resulted in a massive decrease in the volume of goods transported on the rail network, resulting in a shift to road transport, with all the attendant congestion, emissions and road damage this creates, along with a concomitant increase in costs.

From the perspective of the ports, huge delays are being incurred in ports, leading to shipping lines struggling to balance capacity demand, as vessels are delayed, some by upwards of three weeks. Exporters, including South Africa’s mines, suggest that they have lost millions of dollars as a result, all of which creates knock-on effects within the SA economy. In fact, according to SA Revenue Services Commissioner, Edward Kieswetter, the estimated economic impact of the poorly performing freight rail system is R100-billion.

What is encouraging in this otherwise bleak scenario is the appetite demonstrated by Transnet to leverage public-private partnerships (PPPs) as a way to overcome many of the challenges outlined above. Such PPPs will potentially include upgrades to the Port of Durban, a proposed KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) Logistics Hub development, as well as investments in the ports in Cape Town, Coega, East London and Saldhana Bay.

In fact, PPPs to upgrade port infrastructure could hold the key to solving port congestion, along with stimulating high levels of investment in logistics infrastructure locally. 

Similarly, plans are afoot to separate Transnet Freight Rail (TFR) from the Transnet Group, thus creating a new independent rail entity that will need to compete with private entities, something that is planned for April 2025.

The South African National Rail Policy has opened up a space for the private sector to invest in equitable access to both the primary and secondary rail network, opening it up to other operators to compete and improve operational efficiency. With private actors involved and investing in the network, this should help eliminate many of the bottlenecks facing rail. 

A brighter future

There is no doubt that Transnet has a great opportunity to access and leverage best practices and skills from the private sector, while such an approach will also enable the industry to showcase its innovation in creating world class ports and rail infrastructure.

These PPPs should also benefit the broader economy in numerous ways, including: the opportunity to build confidence for future PPPs; the transfer of skills to employees; significantly improving competitiveness and the reputation of South Africa’s exporters and importers; job creation; and installing confidence for future investments from both local and international companies.

Looking ahead to a brighter, PPP-driven future, businesses will not only be presented with greater opportunity to enable and upskill employees, but will potentially even be able to consider alternative sourcing options that will allow them to gain competitive advantages. 

Moreover, with logistics costs reduced and efficiencies improved through such an approach, businesses will be able to channel these additional funds into: digital platforms to push and pull information in real time; technologies to drive efficiencies and; big data solutions to deliver effective analyses.

However, while the future appears brighter, there remain many complications and challenges, not to mention other cost issues and exchange rates that can negatively impact businesses. One should never underestimate the importance of having the right partner to help guide you through these potentially choppy waters.

Taking into account the challenges outlined above, and the digital investments required to take your business to the next level, you will need a strong financial partner to have your back. An institution that can provide relevant advice in relation to dealing with the many and varied risks inherent to business, and that consistently keeps an eye on the broader geopolitical situation, while at the same time fully understanding the interconnectedness of the supply chain.

Funding – which is vital if you wish to grow your business – is an absolutely critical part of the supply chain, and is why you need a lending partner that understands both the industry and your specific business, and is invested in its ultimate success. DM/BM

By: Denys Hobson, Head of Logistics at Investec

About Investec

Investec partners with private, institutional, and corporate clients, offering international banking, investments, and wealth management services in two principal markets, South Africa, and the UK, as well as certain other countries. The Group was established in 1974 and currently has 7,400+ employees.

Investec has a dual listed company structure with primary listings on the London and Johannesburg Stock Exchanges.

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For a pudding so beloved by almost every small-town resident I have met, I always find it strange when I have to explain to big city people what Japie se Gunsteling is. I suppose I could just say “orange pudding” but there’s more to it than that. I can’t say I’ve seen signs that its English name, Japie’s Delight, ever caught on.

For a recipe that is at least 63 years old, to still be around in 2024 says something about its desirability. Oom Japie de Villiers loved it, his wife Ina loved it and wrote about it, and here we are. Who? If you haven’t figured that out, there’s more about that further down.

But I see signs that this gloriously satisfying pudding is slipping out of relative obscurity into the mainstream. With luck, this story will help it find a wider audience in the kitchens of the land. Shall we start with yours?

Is Japie se Gunsteling in your repertoire, have you heard of it, or do you perhaps know it as Japie’s Delight? If not, are you going to give it a try? Let me know.

Japie se Gunsteling is a baked pudding in the way that malva pudding is a baked pudding, only in a different way. There’s a bit of a soufflé element to it, and it has a warm and gooey puddle of lovely citrusy sauce that collects at the bottom while the soufflé part of it sets at the top, forming a slight crust.

Having said that, strictly speaking it is not a soufflé; there’s only a small element of that in its finish. It sits in its own space in the world of puddings, and I also like to call it by the name it is known and loved by in the Afrikaans community. “Gunsteling” is a beauty of a word, and there are many dishes in the world that we call by their original names even if it’s in another language. For the record, for those who do not have Afrikaans, and for Charlize Theron, it means Japie’s Favourite (pudding, which is not spoken, simply understood).

Japie is believed to be Japie de Villiers, the husband of the legendary South African recipe book creator SJA (or Ina) de Villiers, whose classic tome Kook en Geniet (later translated and republished as Cook&Enjoy) is still on the bookshelves after more than 60 years. Ina de Villiers liked to call it Japie se Gunsteling.

In both the 1972 English edition and the 1992 reprint and massive design update, the citrus pudding is called Japie’s Delight, which doesn’t come close to matching the simple charm of Japie se Gunsteling, and I think they should revert to that, even in their English edition. It has stood out against so many other puddings in the same book, and it deserves its place in the sun.

Sometimes availability of ingredients alters even a classic dish slightly. Instead of lemon zest, I used the finely grated zest of a lime as well as the requisite orange zest (and juice). But swap it out for lemon zest by all means, and you’ll have a more traditional version.

My version is for individual puddings baked in standard ramekins, but you can choose to bake it in one larger dish if you prefer, as you would usually make a malva pudding.

The key to this pudding, other than the citrus of course, is the separation of the eggs.

(Makes about 8 ramekins)

Ingredients

3 eggs, separated

250 g caster sugar

375 ml full-cream milk

100 ml sifted cake flour

Juice of 1 lemon

Zest of 1 orange

Zest of 1 lime (or lemon)

300 ml orange juice

3 Tbsp melted butter

Butter for the ramekins

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C. 

Separate the eggs.

Whisk the yolks and caster sugar until creamy.

Add half of the milk and whisk thoroughly.

Sift in the flour, then stir in the remaining milk.

Pour in the orange juice slowly while whisking constantly. Squeeze the lemon and lime through a fine sieve into a bowl, making sure no pips slip through. Pour this slowly into the sloppy mixture while beating constantly with a wooden spoon, until well combined. Stir in the zest and then the melted butter.

Beat the egg whites until stiff, then fold into the mixture using a wooden spoon.

Butter the insides of the ramekins.

Pour the mixture evenly into ramekins until it’s about 0.5cm from the top. My mixture filled nine. Place them carefully in a suitable oven dish.

Boil a kettle. 

Pour water around the ramekins until halfway up.

Bake in a 180°C oven for about 45 minutes or until you can see a beautiful crust on top. 

That’s it, no custard required. The sauce will have already collected at the bottom. DM

Tony Jackman is Galliova Food Writer 2023, jointly with TGIFood columnist Anna Trapido. Order his book, foodSTUFF, here

Follow Tony Jackman on Instagram @tony_jackman_cooks.

This dish is photographed on a brown plate by Mervyn Gers Ceramics.

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UPDATE: The doors were opened for undeclared, potentially hundreds of millions of rands of political donations just ahead of the elections when the National Assembly on Thursday morning stood over an urgently required resolution “for further consultation” until next week.

This resolution was needed for President Cyril Ramaphosa to make the regulations on the political funding declaration thresholds and the annual cap on such donations urgently required after the president operationalised the Electoral Matters Amendment Act on Wednesday evening.

Because this Act is now in force, it requires the president to make these political funding-related regulations – but he can only do so after a resolution by the House.

Until this parliamentary resolution is approved – likely on 16 May – the previous R100,000 declaration threshold and R15-million political funding annual cap no longer are in force. And this means the doors are open for anyone to donate any amount without disclosure. (Update ends)

It’s an all-in legislative package. If one step falls, the whole sequence falls and the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) will be left dangling just ahead of the general election.  

The Electoral Matters Amendment Bill, a cover-all law of various consequential legislative amendments, brings independent candidates into the political funding disclosure regimen. The IEC is on public record saying this law must be in effect before the general election on 29 May. Without it, electoral and political donations declaration systems are at risk.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Elections 2024

Parliament passed the Electoral Matters Amendment Bill in March. On Tuesday, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed off on it, and on Wednesday took the next step to proclaim its commencement date for 8 May.

This has messed up the sequencing and introduced risk to the accountability and transparency of the party political funding declaration regime.

Because the Electoral Matters Amendment Act is now in force, no longer applicable are the political funding disclosure threshold of R100,000 and the annual R15-million donation cap for an individual or entity. That’s because the Act requires the President to gazette regulations on those thresholds and caps — but Ramaphosa can’t do so without a resolution of the House.

And that resolution was on the Order Paper only on Thursday.

So, strictly speaking, if anyone would want to fudge political party donations and hand over millions of rands without having to declare it, Wednesday night — before the National Assembly passes the resolution on Thursday — would be the time.

None of this risk would have arisen had Ramaphosa waited until after the House resolution was adopted on Thursday to proclaim the commencement of the Electoral Matters Amendment Act — say, that evening or maybe a day or two later. And preferably issuing the presidential regulations on political funding then, too.

Tightly choreographed

As always, the devil is in the detail. And in this case, it’s about sequencing — and getting the tightly choreographed lawmaking two-step by Parliament and Presidency dead right.

However, once the President gazettes the updated donation cap and declaration threshold regulations following the National Assembly resolution to enable him to do so, the IEC can pick up the ball to ensure independents are part of a functioning political funding declaration system. 

On Thursday, given the seriousness of the situation, the governing ANC is expected to ensure its numbers are in the House to guarantee the resolution passes. Opposition parties are concerned about the Electoral Matters Amendment Act, not only because it — controversially — also changed the funding formula from state coffers for political parties to one that rewards greater representation in legislatures. 

The Electoral Matters Amendment Act funding formula stipulates 90% proportional funding, according to numbers in legislatures, and 10% equitable funding, more detrimental to smaller parties than the long-standing two-thirds proportional, one-third equitable split.

Opposition parties are getting legal advice on their next steps, including litigation, it emerged on Wednesday.

The possibility that the controversial funding formula would not be put into effect — section 46 of the Act allowed different commencement dates for different provisions — fell off the table on Wednesday evening. Ramaphosa’s gazetted commencement proclamation stipulated the whole law would commence on 8 May.

Messy outcome

Work was under way to complete the task “as soon as possible, hopefully by the end of the week”, the Presidency indicated earlier on Wednesday.

All this is high-pressure, risk-exposed lawmaking, and many would say unnecessarily so. 

It’s the messy outcome of the ANC pushing for the minimum legislative amendments, rather than — as recommended by a ministerial task team — the inclusion of directly elected constituency MPs, after the Constitutional Court in June 2022 ruled independents could contest elections. 

It’s also the messy outcome of the Ramaphosa administration’s grappling to coordinate the signing and the commencement of laws in what’s become a bottleneck of legislation in the Presidency. 

In early April, a Presidency statement indicated Ramaphosa had signed two of 23 Bills in his in-tray. While he has since signed a couple more, Parliament has submitted more laws. A back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates some 30 laws waiting in the presidential in-tray.

The Electoral Matters Amendment Act is not an isolated case.

In December 2023, Parliament passed the Regulation of Interception of Communications (Rica) and Provision of Communication-related Information Act amendment legislation to strengthen the independence of interception authorisation judges and for surveillance notification to journalists and lawyers as the 2021 landmark Constitutional Court judgment stipulated.

But five months later, this Bill is still sitting in the presidential in-tray.

And the controversial General Intelligence Laws Amendment Bill, currently before the National Council of Provinces, incorrectly references the 2002 Rica law.  

Another example is the 2019 Critical Infrastructure Protection Act, which was meant to replace the apartheid National Key Point Act. However, it remains largely inoperative, aside from the provisions for the police minister to establish the statutory council to advise him on critical infrastructure declarations.

For Parliament, serious questions must arise over its oversight rigour to ensure legislation it passes is implemented. If it’s not, reasons for such implementation failure must become publicly known.

Right now, the focus is on Thursday’s resolution in the House as a key step to avoid disruption to the political funding declaration regimen that brought a large measure of transparency and accountability to South African politics.

The IEC is counting on this. DM

This article was updated on Thursday before lunch time to include the morning’s development  in parliament that the planned resolution had been stood over.

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Establishing a human resource contingent within top academic structures that features balanced gender representation and adequately reflects the demographics of the country, remains a multifaceted challenge for South African universities. Most public universities do not have sufficient female representation among their top academics, and there is considerable competition to attract and retain African, coloured, and Indian South African academic staff. 

Stringent Demands of Academia

Reaching the top echelons of academia is a long and arduous journey. To attain the most senior academic grade, that of professor, candidates must obtain bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees – which inevitably take several years to complete – and must also have an excellent record of publications, postgraduate supervision, academic leadership, service, and recognition in their field. For many top-achieving young black academics in our country, the private sector is often a quicker and more lucrative career option than the stringent demands of academia.

Bloemfontein Campus

Transformation of the Professoriate Mentoring Programme

The University of the Free State’s commitment to academic excellence, impact, and transformation has resulted in a set of deliberate, comprehensive mentorship interventions to rectify racial and gender imbalances in a responsible and effective way. 

The UFS launched its Transformation of the Professoriate Mentoring Programme five years ago with the aim of developing and supporting emerging scholars on the cusp of promotion to professorial positions. It focuses on the holistic development of the skills and attributes of emerging scholars in the core functions of teaching and learning, research, community engagement, and academic leadership in preparation for their roles as future professors and academic leaders.

The programme has evolved into different branches, each with a distinct focus area: 

• Future Professoriate Group

This a tailor-made development programme characterised by individual mentoring discussions with multiple mentors, writing retreats, monthly writing spaces, as well as a variety of training and support activities aimed at strengthening scholarly and leadership competencies. Academics who have completed their three-year fellowship in this group proceed to serve as alumni mentors for new candidates in the programme.

• Emerging Scholars Accelerator Group (ESAP)

This programme targets promising young academics at an earlier stage in their careers, preparing them for entry into the Future Professoriate Group. Some of the activities of the two programmes are integrated to provide opportunities for colleagues from different departments and faculties to interact and benefit from the experience and competencies of the cohort. Individual career plans are drafted to monitor the progress of candidates towards different milestones, such as National Research Foundation (NRF) rating, receiving prestigious international fellowships, graduating PhD candidates, and being recognised for excellence in engaged teaching and scholarship.

• Women Academic Advancement Programme 

This programme recognises that, despite existing policies, a disconnect often exists between stated goals and actual practices, leading to women being sidelined or overlooked in promotion processes. It provides support specifically relevant to women’s academic career progression, simultaneously addressing structural barriers, attitudinal issues, and behavioural impediments to the advancement of women academics.

• REAP Programme 

Building on the success of the ESAP programme, the university initiated the Researcher Excellence Accelerator Programme (REAP) – a new programme in 2024 targeting future scholars completing their PhD qualifications.

Qwaqwa Campus: Eastern Free State

Promising Results After First Five Years 

Half a decade of structured, intensive mentorship has yielded positive results. The 110 candidates who have benefited from the Future Professoriate and ESAP programmes over the past five years are performing extremely well, with the success rate of the first Future Professoriate group (measured by promotions to professoriate level) standing at 73%. 

Around 70% of the selected candidates in these programmes are black South African and African foreign-born candidates, going a long way towards addressing historic imbalances in racial equity. 

Candidates published a total of 315 academic articles, as well as 30 books. They also report increased international collaboration, advances in NRF ratings, and have been recipients of a total of 22 prestigious research grants. 

Participants’ feedback bears evidence of not only scholarly development, but also an increased sense of engagement with the university community, and a strengthening of collaboration between junior and senior colleagues. 

South Campus: Bloemfontein

An Even Brighter Future 

As candidates who have successfully completed mentorship and development programmes in turn become mentors to new entrants, these successes promise to grow exponentially over the coming years. The Transformation of the Professoriate Mentoring Programme aims to further strengthen its mentoring and capacity-building programmes, while simultaneously entrenching broader institutional mentoring practices to lure and retain excellent academics in all faculties and departments. 

Improving the equity profile of the professoriate, increasing the intellectual diversity of staff, and aspiring for gender parity in all its leadership positions form an integral part of Vision 130 – the UFS’ bold, comprehensive strategy to renew and reimagine itself for 2034, when it celebrates its 130th year of existence. These mentorship successes form an important milestone in the university’s continuous quest to inspire excellence and transform lives through quality, impact, and care. DM

Contact Us:

Bloemfontein Campus: +27 51 401 9111

Qwaqwa Campus: +27 58 718 5000

South Campus: +27 51 401 9111

[email protected]     

https://www.ufs.ac.za/ 

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ActionSA

ActionSA’s Herman Mashaba and Michael Beaumont at the official launch of ActionSA’s slogan posters for the 2024 elections at the Carlton Centre Hotel on 23 February 2024 in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Photo: Gallo Images / Luba Lesolle)

ActionSA is pinning a lot here on the popularity of its leader Herman “Fix It” Mashaba, who absolutely nobody in real life refers to by that flattering nickname outside of his own party strategists. 

Lovely use of the artfully draped South African flag backdrop, since the last 72 hours strongly suggest that large chunks of the country are fanatically attached to our national symbols. Extra points for Mashaba’s dimples and a facial expression that’s friendly but not a simpering grin.

Rating: 4/5

One can understand the temptation of using the main bit of your party name in a punny slogan, but this line is failing to launch due to a certain obviousness behind the sentiment. Is anyone suggesting that SA could be fixed through inaction? 

Does anyone think the nation could come right if we all had a little lie-down instead? Well done to ActionSA, however, for having so firmly taken possession of that particular shade of green (would we call it chartreuse?) in the aesthetic landscape of our politics.

Rating: 2/5

EFF

An election poster of Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters in Pretoria, South Africa, 30 April 2024. (Photo: Waldo Swiegers / Bloomberg)

EFF is keeping things exceptionally simple with this one. It’s a great photo of leader Julius Malema, who looks boyish and wholesome; kinda like he might happily stop to help an old lady with directions, rather than promise to “cut the throat of whiteness” and nationalise everyone’s pocket money. 

Credit to the EFF for specifying the election date. This is probably more necessary than you might realise; an IEC contract worker in the Northern Cape recently told us confidently that the elections were in June.

Rating: 4/5

An Economic Freedom Fighters election poster in Pretoria, South Africa, 30 April 2024. (Photo: Waldo Swiegers / Bloomberg)

The exclamation marks here give the message an extra revolutionary urgency; they’re not asking, they’re demanding! NOW! It feels a bit like a kidnapper’s ransom note, but there’s no denying that it’s punchy.

Rating: 3/5

DA

A DA poster in Worcester, April 2024. (Photo: Shelley Christians)

There’s a lot that could be said about this, but the DA’s most fanatical supporters are still recovering from the aneurysms brought on by ye olde flag ad critique, so let’s keep it to this. 

To accompany a picture of a smug-looking Caucasian guy with the words “Rescue SA” prompts one question: Has nobody at DA HQ ever heard of white saviour complex?

Rating: 1/5

ANC

A man holds an ANC election poster as he came to celebrate 30 years of freedom at the Union Buildings on 27 April 2024, Pretoria, South Africa. (Photo: Per-Anders Pettersson / Getty Images)

The ANC is clinging to the slogan they first trotted out in 1994: “A Better Life For All”. To be fair, it’s a brilliant one; a classic in the pantheon of political slogans, even if the past 30 years have also revealed it to be patently untrue. 

This election season, the party is supplementing it with a real dud: “Let’s do more, together.” For swathes of the country lacking access to the most basic of services, a reasonable retort would be: “No, you do more, or, in fact, anything”. But it’s a stony heart that wouldn’t be even slightly melted by that Ramaphosa smile.

Rating: 2/5

MK

A campaign poster for the uMkhonto Wesizwe Party outside the homestead of former South African president Jacob Zuma in Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, 25 April 2024. (Photo: Leon Sadiki / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Boy oh boy, it’s a feeble mind that would fail to be even slightly triggered by JZ’s face back on our nation’s lampposts. Zuma is presumably supposed to be beaming in an avuncular fashion in this picture, but instead looks like he was photographed while rubbing his hands together after counting the Gaddafi gold.

Rating: 1/5

Rise Mzansi

An election poster for the Rise Mzansi party in Johannesburg, South Africa, 30 April 2024. (Photo: Waldo Swiegers / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Some might say this poster is keeping things a little too simple for a political newcomer: Who dat? What dat? 

Leader Songezo Zibi has the strained expression of someone being forced to launch an OnlyFans account at gunpoint. And there’s something off about the printing of these posters; within a few days of being exposed to the elements, poor Zibi’s face takes on a weird, multihued aspect. Or is that some kind of intentional visual metaphor for the Rainbow Nation?

Rating: 2/5

Songezo Zibi of Rise Mzansi during the launch of the party’s first election posters on 27 February 2024 in Soweto, South Africa. (Photo: Fani Mahuntsi / Gallo Images)

Now we’re cookin’ with gas, Rise Mzansi. This is a great slogan. Who could possibly disagree?

Rating: 4/5

Build One South Africa (Bosa) 

An election poster for the Build One South Africa party in Johannesburg, South Africa, 30 April 2024. (Photo: Waldo Swiegers / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Not to keep objectifying our dignified and hardworking male politicians, but Mmusi Maimane wins the photogenic contest among party leaders by a mile. 

He looks particularly splendid here, in dramatic lighting, rocking a white dress shirt which gives him a slightly priestly air – appropriate for a pastor, albeit one who was accused by the EFF of forging the signatures necessary to register his new party (Bosa strenuously denies the allegations). 

The slogan “A Job in Every Home” is a brilliant nod to a famous political slogan wrongly attributed to US presidential candidate Herbert Hoover in the 1920s: “A chicken in every pot”. Some would say that for Bosa to promise just one job per household is depressingly unambitious, but the truth is that it’s probably depressingly optimistic.

Rating: 4/5

Freedom Front Plus

Election posters for the Freedom Front Plus party in Pretoria, South Africa, 30 April 2024. (Photo: Waldo Swiegers / Bloomberg)

It’s amazing how much more appealing this poster is than the DA version, even though it’s playing on a similar sentiment. It’s got a hopeful energy reinforced by its jaunty exclamation marks, which helps to offset the FF+’s unfortunate attachment to a colour palette somewhat reminiscent of the apartheid flag.

Rating: 3/5

Inkatha Freedom Party

IFP poster. (Photo: Rebecca Davis)

This is a disaster. “Trust us” is giving desperate, as the Gen Zs would say. 

And at the risk of being crass – rest in power, Mangosuthu Buthelezi – it features a dead man’s face. Is this a tacit acknowledgement that too few people would be able to pick current IFP leader Velenkosini Hlabisa out of a police line-up? 

Either way, it’s got to be a bit hurtful for Hlabisa to be so conclusively overshadowed by Buthelezi, even months after he departed this mortal plane.

Rating: 1/5

Good

Good party poster. (Photo: Rebecca Davis)

There’s something weirdly effective about the slogan “Stop the Suffering”, despite its vagueness. Aren’t we all suffering, whether financially or spiritually? 

It’s also a call commonly applied to the bombardment of Gaza, which may well be intentional, given Good’s power base in the Western Cape. 

Patricia de Lille is radiating Earth Mother, and the slogan “switch to GOOD” candidly acknowledges how few previously existing Good voters there are.

Rating 4/5

Patriotic Alliance

Patriotic Alliance poster. (Photo: Rebecca Davis)

Here’s Patriotic Alliance leader Gayton McKenzie and his soul patch, making seductive eye contact like a man who’s about to suggest a threesome to you at Cubana. (Periodic reminder that McKenzie wrote a self-help book for women about how to win male attention. This is real. I own a copy.) 

This poster cannot be awarded any points at all because of its repugnant slogan “Abahambe”, which means “let them go”, and is a reference to foreigners in South Africa. 

Lowest of the low xenophobic politicking. DM

Rating: 0/5

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The State intends to use evidence gathered through the interception of cellphone communications — “pinging” — to prove that former debt collector Zane Kilian and alleged underworld figure Nafiz Modack conspired to carry out an array of crimes.

The issue became a bone of contention on Tuesday when Hawks Captain Edward du Plessis was prevented from testifying about pinging by advocate Bash Sibda, appearing for Modack. Sibda said Du Plessis was not an expert on pinging. The matter was set down for argument on Wednesday. But before the proceedings began in the Western Cape High Court on Wednesday, the prosecution and legal representatives for Modack and his 14 co-accused met Judge Robert Henney in his chambers.

The State’s case is that the pinging that co-accused Zane Kilian allegedly carried out on Modack’s orders resulted in the assassination of the Anti-Gang Unit’s Lieutenant Colonel Charl Kinnear on 18 September 2020 and the attempted murder of lawyer William Booth on 9 April 2020.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Nafiz Modack conspired with Zane Kilian to murder prominent Cape lawyer, claims State amid slew of charges 

The 15 accused collectively face 124 charges including murder, attempted murder, corruption, gangsterism, extortion, the illegal interception of communications, money laundering and contravening the Prevention of Organised Crime Act.

Accused along with Modack and Kilian are Ziyaad Poole, Moegamat Brown, Riyaat Gesant, Fagmeed Kelly, Mario Petersen, Jacque Cronje, Petrus Visser, Janick Adonis, Amaal Jantjies, former Anti-Gang Unit sergeant Ashley Tabisher, Yaseen Modack, Mogamat Mukudam and Ricardo Morgan.

Pivotal to Judge Henney’s ruling paving the way for Du Plessis to lead pinging evidence for the State, was Kilian’s affidavit at his third bail application where he admitted that he carried out pinging as part of his business as a debt collector; that he obtained the software and user code to carry out pinging from Bradley Goldblatt; and that he pinged certain people on the instructions of Modack.

“The pinging system connects a person’s cellphone to the nearest tower. It did not provide the addresses of those being tracked. The fact that Kilian intended to ping Modack is undisputed,” Judge Henney said.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Zane Kilian admits to tracking Charl Kinnear’s phone but denies being part of murder plot

Judge Henney said the State still needed to prove that Modack and Kilian used cellphone tracking to locate individuals to commit the crimes outlined in the indictment.

Prosecutor Greg Wolmarans told the court that in light of the new developments, the State would hold Du Plessis’ evidence in abeyance. He is expected to give evidence about pinging on Monday, 13 May.

The trial continues. DM

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Pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and AI drivers

The healthcare sector, particularly the biopharma sub-sector, has seen budget cuts post-COVID-19 due to the decline in pandemic-related sales. However, we remain confident that the sector is experiencing a resurgence in investor confidence thanks to the digital revolution. 

The sector is being revolutionised by AI, medical imaging, telemedicine, and wearable monitoring devices.

Pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, with substantial R&D budgets, are expected to be significant drivers of growth in the sector. Investors who strategically position themselves in certain companies are poised for a good year. In addition, healthcare businesses with high barriers to entry and sustainable competitive advantages, such as Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, are positioned to thrive, particularly in areas such as diabetes and obesity medication.

We also anticipate some continuation of the stellar performance seen in 2023 by the global technology sectors, including the renowned ‘Magnificent Seven’, with Meta and Alphabet being our preferred choices within this elite group.

The strategic positions held in these sectors by the Old Mutual Global Islamic Equity fund, which takes a Shariah-compliant investment approach, yielded an impressive 31.3% return over the 12 months ending December 2023, sharply contrasting with the MSCI ACWI Index, which returned 22.8%.

An edge amid interest rate uncertainty

Currently, however, market volatility continues to persist due to uncertainty regarding anticipated interest rate cuts. 

Nonetheless, regardless of whether the Fed begins cutting rates before the end of the year or only in 2025, Shariah-compliant investing offers an attractive alternative for all investors due to its overall indifference to interest rates, given that it does not invest in credit-based instruments. This unique feature enhances attractiveness as a compelling investment option, especially in times like these when interest rates significantly influence market dynamics.

Contrary to common belief, Shariah-compliant portfolios are not only limited to faith-conscious investors, adding that approximately one in five investors in the asset manager’s Shariah-compliant retail portfolios are non-Muslim.

This highlights the offering’s broad appeal as a diversified investment option that addresses ethical, faith-based, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations.

The fund’s position has also been reinforced by recent market trends, where risk assets have rebounded following adjustments to US Federal Reserve policy. However, at this volatile time we are cognisant that the market could turn at any time; we therefore ensure that we continue to build a portfolio that can take market shocks should they arise.

For investors seeking ethical and diversified exposure to global equity markets, Old Mutual Investment Group’s global Islamic equity investment option offers investors a compelling opportunity for superior investment returns. With a focus on high-quality, attractively valued companies with favorable long-term growth prospects, the offering is suitable for investors with moderate to high-risk appetites. DM/BM

By Maahir Jakoet, Portfolio Manager, Old Mutual Investment Group

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In this author’s opinion, Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver is a better film than its predecessor. There are two ginormous caveats that go with that assessment though.

First, it’s all relative. The Scargiver is better than Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire in the same way that a punch in the teeth is better than a kick in the nether regions. One is definitely preferable, but they both still hurt. Second, The Scargiver is not a film. Not a whole one anyway. Following on from all the waffling team building of the first Rebel Moon, The Scargiver is nothing more than an extended Act 3 of a collective four-hour story that could easily have been told in two. Its entire plot can be summed up in just eight words: “Farmers fight against an evil empire over grain.” (Just why said empire, possessed of advanced enough technology to travel between galaxies, has to have this specific grain, is never even explained).

Lead Sofia Boutella tries to breathe some badass life into Kora, her former Imperium soldier and titular “Scargiver” turned reluctant rebel leader, while Ed Skrein’s toothy sadism at least makes his returning Imperium Admiral Atticus Noble (he was dead, he got better) a bit of a fun villain, but they and the rest of the cast have threadbare fare to work from. In an unexpected upside though, it’s precisely because there’s so much less going on that there’s less that can go wrong.

Elise Duffy as Milius and Staz Nair as Tarak in Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver. (Photo: Netflix © 2023)

Doona Bae as Nemesis in Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver. (Photo: Netflix © 2023)

As a Child of Fire zip-zapped from one end of this same-same-but-different-but-still-same universe to the other, it tried and failed abysmally to build a new sci-fi mythology around the evil Motherworld empire and get the audience to care about the papier-mâché characters fighting against it, all of which were stolen without shame or guile from far superior works. The Scargiver, on the other hand, narrows its scope considerably, ending up as nothing more than a straightforward skop, skiet en donder action film, set exclusively in/above a village on the dusty planet Veldt.

Half of its two-hour runtime is a single noisy battle. Said battle is the film’s entire raison d’être, and here Snyder’s eye for splash-page action comes to the fore, even if his trademark slow-motion is so overused that it borders on the sexually deviant. 

One particularly fiery throwdown between Kora and Noble aboard a rapidly descending spaceship is a thrilling highlight. It’s also on the ship that the Rebel Moon universe’s admittedly intriguing production design shines: an intergalactic ship engine that is a living stone head which still needs manually fed coal ovens, humans brought back from the dead by techno-priests with slimy chrysalises and neon light cables plugged into their gaping skulls.

Ed Skrein as Atticus Noble in Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver. (Photo: Netflix © 2023)

Rhian Rees as The Queen, Cary Elwes as The King, Sofia Boutella as Kora and Stella Grace Fitzgerald as Princess Issa in Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver. (Photo: Clay Enos / Netflix © 2023)

Of course, the audience does not get to know more about much of anything, really. Outside of one particularly clumsy scene in which General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) has Kora’s other assembled would-be rebels take turns in explaining their rote backstories, the rest of the film’s non-battle runtime is instead mostly spent on farming montages. If you’ve ever wanted to watch musclebound warriors harvest and mill grain in slow motion, this movie is for you. Meanwhile, the characters are narratively still so gaunt and derivative that they’re nothing more than a collection of visual cues: the terminally bare-chested one with axes, the mopey cybernetic one with totally-not-lightsabers, the hunky but lame farmer… 

At least Jimmy, the Imperium robot knight defector inexplicably voiced by Anthony Hopkins, and who is by far the most interesting character in this entire cosmic kerfuffle, actually gets to do more than just run away, unlike last time.

Not that it matters what Jimmy or any of these characters did in the previous film. There’s so little to parse here that one could watch Rebel Moon – Part Two without having seen Part One and not have an issue following everything. That simplicity can be regarded as a plus. But at the same time, given that with Part One, Snyder and co-writers Shay Hatten, and Kurt Johnstad took a fragment of narrative that other films normally relegate to a few montages and then stretched it into more than two hours of setup for a resolution that was pushed back to a whole other movie, that’s rather annoying.

Staz Nair as Tarak and Djimon Hounsou as General Titus in Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver. (Photo: Clay Enos / Netflix © 2023)

Even worse, when The Scargiver finally and much too briefly digs into Kora’s past and her involvement in the death of the mysteriously divine Motherworld princess she was assigned to protect, the viewer is instead given even more setup for a potential third film – the resolution does not actually resolve. This is on top of the R-rated “Snyder Cuts” of both existing films that have already been promised. These upcoming releases are advertised as extended versions containing better worldbuilding and more violence, strongly indicating that even the filmmakers consider the films we’ve already got to be inferior products.

Given all that, it’s hard to recommend Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver to anybody concerned with anything so pretentious as characters or plots. But viewed as nothing more than a trashy B-grade action movie with shiny A-grade visuals, The Scargiver works. Or at least it works well enough not to leave this reviewer scarred. DM

Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver is on Netflix.

This story was first published on PFangirl.

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Knife is Salman Rushdie’s account of how he narrowly survived an attempt on his life in August 2022, in which he lost his right eye and partial use of his left hand. The attack ironically came when Rushdie was delivering a lecture on “the creation in America of safe spaces for writers from elsewhere”, at Chautauqua, in upstate New York.

A man named Hadi Matar has been charged with second-degree attempted murder. He is an American-born resident of New Jersey in his early twenties, whose parents emigrated from Lebanon. Prosecutors allege the assault was a belated response to the fatwa, a legal ruling under Sharia law, issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The Iranian leader called for Rushdie’s assassination after the publication of the author’s novel The Satanic Verses, which allegedly contained a blasphemous representation of the prophet Muhammad. Matar has pleaded not guilty to the charge, and his trial is still pending.

Knife is very good at recalling Rushdie’s grim memories of the attack. (His assailant appears in this book merely under the sobriquet of “the A”.) It also articulates with typically dry, self-deprecating humour the dismal prognoses of his various doctors. These are balanced against his own incorrigible sense of “optimism” and ardent will to live, along with the staunch love and support of his new wife, the writer and artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Read in Daily Maverick: How Salman Rushdie has been a scapegoat for complex historical differences

This is a book where you can feel the author wincing with pain. “Let me offer this piece of advice to you, gentle reader,” he says: “if you can avoid having your eyelid sewn shut … avoid it. It really, really hurts.”

But at the same time, it is a story of courage and resilience, with Rushdie cheered by the unequivocal support he receives from political leaders in the United States and France, as well as writers around the world. He cites as a parallel to his own experience the Charlie Hebdo attacks in France, in which 12 people were murdered in the Paris offices of a satirical magazine that had supposedly defamed the Islamic Prophet.

While the author’s personal recollections of this traumatic event are powerful, the declared aim of Knife is to “try to understand” the wider context of this event. Here, for a number of reasons, Rushdie is not on such secure ground.

One of his great strengths as a novelist is the way he presents “worlds in collision […] quarrelling realities fighting for the same segment of space-time”. This phrase comes from his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton, the pseudonym he used during his years of protection by British security services in the immediate aftermath of the fatwa.

Protesters chant slogans to condemn Britain’s knighting of the Indian-born author Salman Rushdie June 22, 2007 in Islamabad, Pakistan. Protests erupted in many cities in Pakistan after Rushdie received the honour from Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.  (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

Rushdie, who studied history at Cambridge University, described himself in Joseph Anton as “a historian by training”. He said “the point of his fiction” is to show how lives are “shaped by great forces”, while still retaining “the ability to change the direction of those forces” through positive choices.

Read in Daily Maverick: Attack on Salman Rushdie makes it imperative to defend the right to write freely

The second part of Knife is focused around Rushdie’s unwavering commitment to the principles of free speech in his work for PEN and other literary organisations. Indeed, a speech he gave at PEN America in 2022 is reprinted in the book verbatim.

“Art challenges orthodoxy,” declares Rushdie. He associates himself with a legacy of Enlightenment thinkers going back to Thomas Paine, whose work influenced both the American and French Revolutions. For these intellectuals, principles of secular reason and personal liberty should always supersede blind conformity to social or religious authority.

Old-fashioned liberal principles

In Knife, though, Rushdie the protagonist confronts a world where such liberal principles now appear old-fashioned. He claims “the groupthink of radical Islam” has been shaped by “the groupthink-manufacturing giants, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter”.

But for many non-religious younger people, any notion of free choice also appears illusory, the anachronistic residue of an earlier age. Millennials and Generation Z are concerned primarily with issues of environmental catastrophe and social justice, and they tend to regard liberal individualism as both ineffective and self-indulgent.

As a perceptive social historian, Rushdie notes how “new definitions of the social good” have arisen, in which “protecting the rights and sensibilities of groups perceived as vulnerable […] take precedence over freedom of speech.”

Knife itself is understandably reductive, even dismissive, in its treatment of the assailant. The author contemplates the prospect of a meeting with him, but decides that is “impossible” and so tries to “imagine my way into his head” by inventing an “imagined conversation”. But this is not entirely convincing.

Rushdie’s point about how the Quran itself is immersed in the worlds of “interpretation” and “translation” might work well in a seminar on world literature, but it is hardly the kind of argument likely to persuade a jihadist who, on his own admission, has read only two pages of The Satanic Verses.

Rushdie’s stylistic tendency to dehumanise his characters is characteristically humorous and perhaps therapeutic. He renames his ear, nose and throat doctor “Dr. ENT, as if he were an ancient tree-creature from The Lord of the Rings”. But it also carries the risk of diminishing his characters to puppets being manipulated by the author.

This is the kind of power relation interrogated self-consciously in Fury (2001) and other fictional works that explore the limitations of authority. Rushdie is a great novelist because of his openness to questions about the scope of authority and authorship, but he is a less effective polemicist. The structural ambiguities and inconsistencies that enhance the multidimensional reach of his fiction tend to be lost when he takes on the mantle of a political controversialist.

Knife hovers generically in between these two positions. One of the book’s most interesting aspects is its probing of the weird and supernatural. Two nights before his attack, the author dreams of being assaulted by a man with a spear in a Roman amphitheatre. Citing Walt Whitman on the uses of self-contradiction, he records: “It felt like a premonition (even though premonitions are things in which I don’t believe).”

Similarly, he describes his survival, with the knife landing only a millimetre from his brain, as “the irruption of the miraculous into the life of someone who didn’t believe that the miraculous existed”. Later, he observes: “No, I don’t believe in miracles, but, yes, my books do.”

This speaks to a paradoxical disjunction between the relative narrowness of authorial vision and the much wider scope of imagined worlds that Rushdie’s best fiction evokes.

The Satanic Verses itself is suffused in the culture of Islam as much as James Joyce’s Ulysses is suffused in the culture of Catholicism. In both cases, the question of specific religious “belief” becomes a secondary consideration.

In their hypothetical conversation, the author of Knife tries to convince his assailant of the value of such ambivalence. He protests how his notorious novel revolves around “an East London Indian family running a café-restaurant, portrayed with real love”.

But of course such subtleties are hopelessly wasted on an activist who has no interest in literary nuances and who desires only to execute the instructions of a religious leader. Given the prevalence of what Rushdie calls the contemporary “offence industry,” it is sobering to think that Ulysses, if published today, could be more liable to censorship for blasphemy rather than, as in 1922, obscenity.

People hold up signs as they gather at the steps of the New York Public Library to show support for Salman Rushdie on August 19, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

In many ways, then, Knife is a book about cultural cross-purposes. Though Rushdie is understandably vituperative on a personal level, his work’s conceptual undercurrents turn on the fate of the liberal imagination in an increasingly post-liberal world.

There are moving tributes here to the writers Martin Amis and Milan Kundera, friends who died recently. There are also melancholy acknowledgements of illnesses suffered by the late Paul Auster and by Hanif Kureishi, whom Rushdie regards as his “younger-brother-in literature”.

This generation of writers saw the multifaceted nature of fiction, with its inclinations towards magical realism, as a way to resist what Joseph Anton calls the potentially “flattening effect” of political slogans. Amis believed one of the reasons for the general decline of interest in reading literature was a new preference for the security of ready-made solutions rather than experiential challenges.

Attachment to past traditions

But in the era of Facebook and Twitter, brevity and simplicity have become more compelling than complexity. This categorical shift has been shaped not only by the explosion of information technology, but also the de-centring of Europe and North America as undisputed leaders of intellectual and political culture.

Rushdie discusses in Knife how, besides the Hindu legends of his youth, he has also been “more influenced by the Christian world than I realized”. He cites the music of Handel and the art of Michelangelo as particular influences. Yet this again highlights Rushdie’s attachments to traditions firmly rooted in the past.

Read in Daily Maverick: Review – Salman Rushdie’s Victory City reveals a storyteller at the height of his powers

Whereas the dark comedy of Michel Houellebecq depicts an environment in which advances in biogenetics, information technology and political authoritarianism have rendered individual choice of little or no consequence, Rushdie gallantly flies the flag for privacy and personal freedom.

But he is also describing a world where such forms of liberty seem to be passing away. In that sense, Knife feels like an elegy for the passing of a historical era.

The memoir recalls how Rushdie’s “first thought” when his assailant approached was the likely imminence of death. He cites the reported last words of Henry James: “So it has come at last, the distinguished thing.”

James, like Rushdie, was a writer who lived through profound historical changes, from the Victorian manners represented in his early stories to new worlds of mass immigration and skyscrapers portrayed in The American Scene (1907).

Part of James’s greatness lay in the way he was able to accommodate these radical shifts within his writing. Rushdie is equally brave and brilliant as a novelist, and he may well ultimately succeed in capturing such seismic shifts, but Knife is not a work in which his artistic antennae appear to their best advantage.

Though Rushdie specifically says he “doesn’t like to think of writing as therapy”, he admits sessions with his own therapist “helped me more than I am able to put into words”. The writing of this book clearly operates in part as a form of catharsis, with Rushdie admitting his fear that “until I dealt with the attack I wouldn’t be able to write anything else”.

‘A curiously one-eyed book’

There are many valuable things in Knife. Particularly striking are the immediacy with which he recalls the shocking assault, the black humour with which he relates medical procedures and the sense of “exhilaration” at finally returning home with his wife to Manhattan.

Yet there are also many loose ends, and the book’s conclusion, that the assailant has in the end become “simply irrelevant” to him, is implausible. Rushdie presents his survival as an “act of will” and is adamant he does not wish henceforth to retreat into the security cocoon that protected him during the 1990s. He insists he does not want to write “frightened” or “revenge” books. In truth, however, Knife contains elements of both these traits.

As a congenital optimist, Rushdie says he takes “inspiration” from the Nawab of Pataudi (given name Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi), an Indian cricketer whose illustrious career began after he had been “involved in a car accident and had lost the sight of one eye”.

This story was first published in The Conversation. Paul Giles is a Professor of English at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, ACU, Australian Catholic University.

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By the end of the century, much of the Serengeti, the Masai Mara, Kruger Park’s open plains, the US prairies, the Asian steppe, Brazil’s Pantanal and the creatures who depend on them could be nothing but a memory. 

In their place may be impenetrable scrubland. 

The reason is that leafy plants love carbon and our lifestyle is dishing it out in megatons every day. 

World’s major grasslands. (Graphic: Wiki Commons)

Grasslands, on the other hand, are not so carbon-aggressive and – in the ancient war between trees and grass – the balance has increasingly tipped. That’s bad news for huge areas of the planet being overrun by scrub bush as well as for the plains animals who depend on grass. 

This is deeply concerning to the University of Cape Town’s Prof William Bond, who says there’s a looming crisis that governments and even many scientists are unwilling to address. What alarms him is that we’re aiding the march of trees by planting them in an attempt to offset the build-up of CO2.

“Our fetish for trees is biological vandalism,” he says. 

“They get planted on grasslands which sequester more carbon below-ground than forests. If grasslands vanish, it could catalyse an avalanche of extinctions.”

Woody thickening over the past century near Queenstown, Eastern Cape. Acacia karoo is the most common tree species in this mesic savanna. (Photos: IP Pole Evans, Timm Hoffman and James Puttick reproduced courtesy of rePhotoSA)

Concern has been bouncing around among a number of academic botanists for some time, but with little effect on environmental policy. 

Environmental activists aren’t running with it. This might be because, like global warming, the tramp of trees is a complex set of moving parts hard to get to grips with in lay terms. Also, many of the studies are behind costly academic paywalls for accessing publications.

Grass thrives on fire – some trees in certain areas resist it and others succumb to it. Savanna trees are more tolerant of competition with grasses while forest trees block out light and suppress grass which needs plenty of sunlight. In human settlements, trees are cut down for wood. 

The forest edge. (Photo: Wiki Commons)

In Africa, elephants and antelope are grassland allies, the former pushing over trees, the latter nibbling new tree shoots, all helping to reduce woody cover. The declining number of elephants across the continent and the suppression of natural fires are flagged as significant causes of bush encroachment.

Leaves love carbon

Here’s the problem. With growing intensity, CO2 is favouring leaves over grass, increasing the ability of trees to retain water, deepening their roots and increasing their ability to resist fire. This has to do with how trees “breathe”.

Leaves are covered with stomata – essentially mouths that open to admit CO2 and, at the same time, exhale water vapour. As CO2 increases, they don’t need to open their stomata as wide. This reduces water loss and retains it for tree use in their roots below the depth where grass can access it.

According to Bond and Stellenbosch researcher Guy Midgley, an increase in water efficiency is likely to be a key mechanism favouring woody plant thickening in semi-arid savannahs, increasing soil moisture supply and favouring tree seedling and subsequent growth in competition with grasses.

In a paper on the uneasy interactions between trees and savanna grass, they say that during the past century, increasing CO2 levels have fuelled changes in savannah tree growth, helping to create “super-seedlings”.

“Relative to a century ago, young trees have faster growth, massive root systems with larger starch reserves and a greatly enhanced capacity for resprouting after injury.”

Because trees have abundant carbon, says Bond, they recover and resprout easily after fires, which are no longer the ally of grasses.

Pantanal in Brazil under threat from scrub invasion. (Photo: Wiki Commons)

In a research paper on 94 studies covering 110 global savanna sites, which appeared in Global Change Biology, its authors found woody encroachment in 84% of them. This intrusion was apparent in the 1970s but has accelerated and is occurring right across the world’s savannas.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have varied greatly over the past 65 million years and resulted in widespread changes in vegetation. It rose to greater than 1,000 parts per million in the Eocene (50 million years ago) and forests spread to their greatest extent.

In the Oligocene, around 25 million years ago, CO2 dipped and grasses thrived. By about eight million years ago, they were a major biome.

During the Pleistocene (from 2.5 million years ago) they expanded and contracted in rhythm with ice ages with lower CO2 in glacial periods. 

Boom time

Bond and Midgley suggest that the savannah biome may now be heading for an abrupt decline owing to human impacts on the carbon cycle. 

Within the next 100 years, savannah plant species are likely to experience CO2 levels outside their entire evolutionary history.

Old-growth grasslands are unique in their underground structures and biodiversity. They store carbon and reallocate resources above ground after disturbances and drought. Once destroyed, they cannot easily bounce back.

Research in the journal Science warns it’s unlikely that restored grasslands will ever completely recover to resemble old-growth grasslands. 

Bush-encroached land at the Waterberg Plateau Park in Otjozondjupa Region, Namibia. (Photo: Wiki Commons)

Agriculture, mining and afforestation destroy their below-ground structure and may require millennia to recover their former species’ richness.

“Once these below-ground structures are gone, we have little understanding of how to reintroduce this component of the vegetation. Tree planting in grasslands and conversion to agriculture are irreversible actions.”

Forest fetish

In the rush to provide nature-based solutions to tackle climate change, tree planting in grasslands has become synonymous with restoration. 

The core of global reforestation projects, says Bond, is the misconception that grasslands were once forests and were created and maintained by human-lit fires. In fact, grasslands are fire-dependent and predate humans by millions of years.

“Fire has been a natural part of the Earth’s system for 400 million years… long before people.

“So the whole conception of forest being the natural vegetation of the tropics and grasslands being caused by humans burning trees is nonsense.”

A paper in Science by Catherine Parr, Mariska te Beest and Nicola Stevens warns of the dangers of this misclassification. They say this could cause degradation and warn against greenwashing. 

Trees on the march across savanna grassland. (Photo: Wiki Commons)

“We must act to avoid a situation where we cannot see the savanna for the trees and these precious grassy systems are lost irrevocably.”

“The urgency of implementing large-scale tree planting,” says Stevens, “is prompting funding of inadequately assessed projects that will most likely have negligible sequestration benefits and cause potential social and ecological harm.”

This is echoed by another research project reported in Science: 

“Much of the emphasis has been on the restoration of forests,” the authors write. “Ironically, this emphasis presents an additional threat to grasslands – careless or poorly planned tree-planting efforts in the name of restoration can establish forests in natural grassland.

“Almost a million square kilometres of Africa’s grassy biomes have been targeted for tree planting by 2030. This practice ignores the value of protecting and restoring grasslands.”

The assumed primacy of forest systems and the drive to sequester carbon to offset climate change are powerful enough ideas to deflect researchers from exploring the diversity of grasslands, says Bond. 

Instead, more than a billion dollars has been pledged by governments, the United Nations and non-government organisations to “reforest”.

“Across Africa, a total of 133.6 million hectares have been pledged towards (the tree-planting and seeding project) AFR100 in 35 countries.” Nearly half of that – about the size of France – is in non-forest ecosystems, mainly savannas and grasslands.

Major research organisations working in reforestation seem unaware of the threat to grasslands.

In a 164-page global assessment report on the state of forests by the International Union of Forest Research Organisations released this week on 6 May, there was not a single mention of grasslands or savanna.

“Tree planting is just a sop to the public who have this forest fetish,” says Bond.

“I don’t believe that sequestering carbon is going to make a quick enough difference through nature. The only way to really solve the carbon problem is to shut down fossil fuel use.”

In savannas, most of the carbon is being taken up by grasses and grass roots. When you plant trees, the grasses are suppressed, he says, and that source of carbon sequestering is lost.

“You need to harvest trees and stash away that carbon and grow some more trees and stash away their carbon. So the carbon sequestration people are in it for rapid-growing trees that can soak up a lot of carbon quickly. That means growing eucalyptus and pines.

“I have no problem with well-planned commercial plantations. But to argue that this is going to solve the world’s global warming problems is fraudulent, it’s nonsense. But, of course, there are people who are going to make money out of it.”

How long will grasslands survive? 

“I think that the closing over, at least to the point where plains animals can no longer exist, could happen very quickly and it’s moving more rapidly than people realise. And we don’t really know what to do about it.

“I think we’re facing a big war of trees. What we need are more elephants, impala and goats. And to stop using fossil fuels.” DM

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Twenty-four hours after a multi-storey, partially built block of flats collapsed on Monday, 48 people remained unaccounted for while six are confirmed dead.

The building was due for completion and occupation on 1 August before the tragedy occurred on 6 May 2024 around 2.30pm. Seventy-five people were employed on the site.

Emergency teams and various services were at the scene in Victoria Street on Tuesday in a frantic attempt to recover the artisans who remained entombed. At least 23 workers have been rescued so far.

The South African Police Services (SAPS) cordoned off the precinct and declared it a crime scene, while engineers, forensics and other experts attempted to piece together what led to the shocking implosion.

Rescuers carry a person on a stretcher as they race to save construction workers trapped under a building that collapsed in George. (Photo: Reuters / Esa Alexander)

History of Erf 15098

While many are seeking answers as to who might be responsible for the tragedy, it will take months to determine what exactly went wrong and who will be held to account.

What we do know or what is in the public realm is the history of the development of what was to be simply called “75 Victoria”, as records were filed with the George Municipality. These are part of municipal records accessible to the public.

The erf as attached to proposals submitted to the George Municipality in November 2020. (Image: Supplied)

The January 2021 plan from the rezoning application as approved by the municipality. (Image: Supplied)

In August 2020, the owner of a 1,228m²plot of land, Erf 15098, located on Victoria Street, sold the property for R2.07-million in a private sale to a company, Pacific Breeze Trading 91, registered with the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission as being in the business of “general trading in all aspects”.

The deal was finalised on 4 November 2020, according to the Deeds Office. Directors of the company are Anton Booysen, Carel Swanepoel and Annette Swanepoel. Pacific Breeze was registered in 2005.

In November 2020, the George Municipality held a “pre-consultation” meeting with an official, Ilane Huyser, and town planner Jan Vrolijk, as the “pre-applicant” for rezoning and deviations for the planned development.

Records show that applications were made by the owner, through Vrolijk, who was given power of attorney by Swanepoel, for changes to the original plans. These included an extra level, turning an original three-storey plan into a four-storey block, as well as adding basement parking.

Earlier, in September 2020, a Land Use Planning Pre-Application Consultation Form had been completed and was re-submitted at the November meeting with the municipality.

Discussions then were about rezoning as well as various deviations, including building line relaxations, height, coverage, floor space and parking requirements.

Pacific Breeze proposed including basement parking, that the building be increased from four to five storeys to include ground-floor parking, over and above the basement parking.

The building would be 14.45m tall and a roof garden (2.72m high) was proposed, which would raise the height to 17.17m.

The proposal also contained 66 parking bays with a ratio of 1.25 per unit and 0.25 per visitor, which would be housed in the basement. There were also proposals for the adjustment of building lines.

Approval

On 1 January 2021, Vrolijk was informed by Clinton Petersen, senior manager of town planning in the George Municipality, that the application for various changes had been approved.

Reasons included that “the subject properties are located within walking distance from public transport facilities (“bus stops”) and supports the efficiency of public transport systems and transport-orientated developments”.

In addition, the development “would provide for much-needed housing opportunities”, it “supports densification in strategic areas” and it would not have an adverse impact on adjacent neighbours.

“The development can thus be deemed compatible with the spatial planning policies and guidelines for the area.”

Petersen then set out the conditions of his directorate and stated that because of the changes, “development charges” totalling R1,533,848.06 would have to be paid to the municipality by the developer. The plans, Petersen added, would still have to be submitted for approval.

In March 2021, Vrolijk, on behalf of Pacific Breeze, applied for the development’s number of floors to be increased from “four to five”.

The same month, a local conveyancer certified that the title deeds contained “no conditions restricting the contemplated land use in terms of the Land Development Application”.

Apartments were originally pre-advertised for R 1.7-million for a two-bedroomed unit by one agent in the area, with the beginning of construction earmarked for 1 April 2023, completion on 31 March, with 1 May 2024 as the occupation date.

The development, it was later announced, would be completed by July 2024 with occupation in August.

Legal contractor

George Mayor Leon van Wyk told the George Herald on Tuesday that the developer on the project was the Neo Trend Group Ice Project, which had submitted plans in December 2022, which had been approved in July 2023.

Theuns Kruger, director of the contracting firm, Liatel Developments, said the company would offer full cooperation with SAPS and was assisting with ongoing rescue efforts.

On the website for the Mussel Creek development, Kruger describes himself as a “practising attorney with vast experience in commercial and construction law”.

He adds that he has practised for his own trust account for the past 14 years and that his company was formed in 2009 “with the purpose to be a vehicle to assist and consult on various property and commercial developments”.

This included “various legal aspects associated with management, but also includes assistance with the administration and financial associated with construction and developments”.

The Western Cape government has since appointed an engineering firm V3 to investigate what led to the collapse of the building. DM

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International  Relations and Cooperation Minister Naledi Pandor has called for greater university and student activism and boycotts against Israel for what she called its “scholasticide” in Gaza — “the systemic obliteration of education”.

She was delivering the second annual Shireen Abu Akleh Memorial Lecture at the University of Johannesburg on Wednesday. Abu Akleh was an Al Jazeera journalist who was shot dead by Israeli soldiers while reporting in the West Bank two years ago. Most Palestinians and their supporters believe it was an assassination, though Israel says it was an accident.

Naledi Pandor addresses the second annual Shireen Abu Akleh Memorial Lecture at the University of Johannesburg on Wednesday. (Photo: Dirco)

“If Shireen were alive today, she would have been in the trenches in Gaza, reporting day and night on the atrocities taking place in the hopes that the world would take notice and show their solidarity with the Palestinian people,” Pandor said.

The theme of her lecture was “The Responsibility of the Academy in a Time of Genocide”, and Pandor said the UN Human Rights Office had on 18 April raised serious alarm about the systematic destruction of the Palestinian education system.

“The report states that ‘with more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed, it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’ — the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure’.”

Pandor said after six months of Israel’s military assault, more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors had been killed in Gaza, and more than 7,819 students and 756 teachers had been injured.

“At least 60% of educational facilities, including 13 public libraries, have been damaged or destroyed and at least 625,000 primary and secondary school students and over 100,000 college and university students in Gaza have no access to education.

“The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] has damaged or destroyed nine out of every 10 schools… Between October 2023 and January this year, the IDF bombed all the universities in Gaza,” Pandor said. 

“Consequently, Gaza’s treasured intellectual landmarks, including the Islamic University of Gaza, the North Gaza and Tubas branches of Al-Quds Open University, and Palestine Technical University have all been destroyed.

“Another 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed, including the Central Archives of Gaza, containing 150 years of history. Israa University, the last remaining university in Gaza was demolished by the Israeli military on January 17th this year.”

A clear message

Pandor said, “The international academic community should have sent a clear message that those who target schools and universities in other states will be held responsible. And that accountability for these violations will include an end to collaboration, an end to donations, an end to financial support. 

“My expectation is after our talk you will become activists,” she added. “As educators, advocates, activists, civil society and state structures, we should all play a role in the global struggle in search of truth and justice.

“It is our collective responsibility to raise our voices in solidarity with the people of Palestine who are fighting for their survival in the midst of the genocidal campaign being waged against them.”

Pandor said South Africa’s institutions of higher learning had a special responsibility to show solidarity with Palestine because of this country’s history.

She noted that in November last year, more than 1,000 individuals connected to higher education in South Africa had signed an open letter of solidarity with Palestine and had called on Universities South Africa and the Academy of Science of South Africa to do the same.

The University of Cape Town (UCT) and the University of the Western Cape had made official statements calling for a ceasefire and immediate humanitarian aid to Gaza. 

“The UCT Senate has resolved that no UCT academic should collaborate with any academic on any research project if they are identified with the Israel Defense Forces.

“The majority in the Senate voted in favour of supporting Palestinian academics and the right to have debates on Zionism without being accused of anti-Semitism. Stellenbosch University Senate members have called for an end to the brutal and barbaric destruction of Gaza saying that, ‘no crimes can justify genocidal actions in retaliation’.

“Unfortunately the Senate did not pass a resolution on the Israel-Palestine crisis on the ‘Genocide and Destruction of Scholarship and Education in Gaza’, as it was not agreed to by the majority of Senate members.”

Pandor applauded Fort Hare for taking one of the strongest stands, including a commitment not to pursue any institutional links with Israeli institutions complicit in “supporting settler colonial oppression and apartheid and in grave violations of human rights, including developing weaponry, military doctrines and legal justification for the indiscriminate mass targeting of Palestinians”.

Pandor said Fort Hare needed to be joined by other more powerful SA universities in taking such a strong stand. 

Greater activism

“We are also buoyed by the growing mobilisation on college campuses across the world in support of the just cause for freedom and justice of the people of Palestine.” 

She noted that New York’s Columbia University had been the locus of these protests and had also been the first US university to divest from apartheid South Africa. 

“We hope that this unprecedented activism by students in the US will also spur greater activism among student movements here in South Africa, and spur more vocal support from our university administrators, some of whom have remained silent,” Pandor said.

 Former Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils at the second annual Shireen Abu Akleh Memorial Lecture at the University of Johannesburg on Wednesday. (Photo: Dirco)

Former Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils praised the University of Johannesburg for what it was doing for Palestine.

Palestinian-Canadian lawyer, activist and former peace negotiator Diana Buttu, participating in the event by video, praised the SA government for taking Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on genocide charges earlier this year.

She said Shireen Abu Akleh had been an “excellent reporter” and a “beloved friend to me and hundreds of others”.

“Shireen’s assassination was not done in a vacuum. It was the result of years of Israel targeting journalists, and in particular, targeting Al Jazeera journalists.” She said Israel had bombed the offices of the AP news agency and Al Jazeera in the Gaza Strip.  

Since the current conflict began on 7 October 2023 following a Hamas attack on Israel that left about 1200 people dead, “Israel has killed over 140 Palestinian journalists. “So they’ve done this for a deliberate reason, which is that Israel wants to make sure that you don’t see what’s happening, because I firmly believe that once you see, you cannot unsee.”

If Abu Akleh were alive she would have exposed many stories about the war which the Western media had got wrong, in part because “they have been complicit in this genocide”. DM

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‘I will wait here until my son comes out,” said Deon Safers, the father of Delvin Safers, one of the dozens of workers missing in the rubble of a building that collapsed in George on Monday. 

Read more in Daily Maverick: Six dead and 48 missing in devastating George building collapse

“I’m not going home, I’m going nowhere. I don’t even want to eat. I want my boy out of there and I must pray for him and I must hope he will get out of there,” Safers said on Tuesday as he sat outside the George Civic Centre, opposite the remains of the building.  

Deon Safers’ 29-year-old son, Delvin, was working as an electrician at 75 Victoria Street, George, when the building collapsed. Safers had been waiting for more than 24 hours for his son’s rescue. (Photo: Velani Ludidi)

Evening was falling on the second day of rescue efforts for those trapped in the rubble. All around Safers, members of the families of those missing in the rubble waited, wrapped in donated blankets. Many had been there since the early hours of the morning.

Delvin Safers (29) had been working as an electrician at the construction site when the building collapsed.  

“Since yesterday [Monday], from 5.30pm, we communicated with him because he had his cellphone with him. He communicated every hour, every second hour with us to save his battery. Now and then he switched his phone off,” his father said.

“Last night at about 2.15am, his phone went to 10% and he switched his phone off, and this morning at 5.30am he sent a message to his cousin. He said he’s okay, he’s positive but he’s tired and his back is sore and his legs are sore.”

The last message Delvin Safers sent was received by his girlfriend at 3.05pm on Tuesday. He told her he was in a lot of pain.

Recovery efforts will continue throughout the night in George following the collapse of a building that was under construction on Monday. 47 people are still unaccounted for pic.twitter.com/NaQtYOr5yp

— Veve (@LudidiVelani) May 7, 2024

“But we as his family [and] I as his father are very positive. My son will get out there alive. We pray with him and I know he prays with us there inside. I believe he’s a strong boy and I believe he’s a hero because of the fight from yesterday. He can’t use his one arm where he is, he can’t use his legs but he is strong mentally. So, I salute my boy there where he is and I believe he will get out of that rubble,” Safers said.

Rescue personnel clear debris to rescue trapped workers at the collapsed building on Victoria Street in George. (Photo: Tamsin Metelerkamp)

“It doesn’t matter when he gets out there — I will wait here until my son comes out. And I will thank each and every member here in disaster management for every effort they put in to rescue my son and all his colleagues.”

‘Very devastated’

Earlier on Tuesday, Daily Maverick spoke with Bright Kayuni, who was at the George Civic Centre seeking news of his nephew’s wife, Tiwonge Mhango. She had only started working at the building site the previous Thursday, as a cleaner. She and two friends of Kayuni’s family who were also working there have not been heard from since the collapse.

“At the moment, we are very devastated with the news because we can’t think straight. My nephew is also trying to help there on the side, just trying to find his wife… We don’t know what to do,” Kayuni said.

“[My nephew is] trying to take away the rubble and call the name of his wife so that he can be able to locate her… He has been there since last night.”

Kayuni said it has been challenging to get information about who had been rescued and where they could be found. The family visited the local hospital but were told that they needed to approach the municipality for updates.

Rescue personnel work to clear debris and rescue trapped workers at the collapsed building on Victoria Street in George. (Photo: Tamsin Metelerkamp)

“We came to the municipality. They also said they can’t give us the full report at the moment because they are just busy rescuing the people and they are also busy trying to treat the people that have been rescued. That’s the only information that we got,” he said.

“We need to know where our family [members] are… We need their names. If they’re in the hospitals … show us so that we can identify them. But it has been very difficult for us.”

48 people still missing

More than 200 emergency services personnel were continuing rescue efforts at the site as of 7.40pm on Tuesday as the operation neared the 30-hour mark. Seven of the 39 people removed from the rubble were dead and 48 were still missing.

Gift of the Givers spokesperson Mario Ferreira told Daily Maverick that the rescue efforts would not be affected by darkness. “We will be on-site as long as it takes. At this stage, I think the three-day time period is optimistic, especially if you look at the wreckage. But we’re aiming for the three days,” Ferreira said.

Earlier on Tuesday, the Western Cape’s chief director of disaster management services, Colin Deiner, said that the international standard for the length of this type of rescue effort was three days.

Gift of the Givers members have been providing support for family members of those caught in the collapse. 

“We felt there was a lack of interaction with the families so we personally went and spoke to the families over there, just to get them to keep their hopes up. We’ve supplied them with some sanitary parcels, some toiletries, some blankets,” Ferreira said.

Company named

The executive mayor of George, Leon van Wyk, named the developer of the collapsed five-storey building as the Neo Trend Group. However, on the company’s website, it is named Neo Victoria and Neo Trend Group is listed as part of the marketing team. 

A drone view of the scene of a building collapse where several construction workers are thought to be trapped in George. Photo: Reuters / Shafiek Tassiem

Previously, Daily Maverick reported that the mayor said he was unaware of the developers, engineers and contractors responsible for the site, even though his municipality had approved their plans.

“The plans [for the building] were submitted on 22 December 2022 … and were approved by the municipality on 6 July 2023,” Van Wyk said. He added that the developer had hired a professional team, which included contractors, surveyors and engineers. 

“The municipality would then come back when the building is completed and issue an occupancy certificate for the building to be occupied.” 

Theuns Kruger, the director of Liatel Developments, the contracted builder of the collapsed building, told the George Herald that they were committed to cooperating with authorities to determine the cause of the disaster.

“We are coordinating closely with emergency responders and authorities to provide support and resources for the rescue operations. We are fully committed to cooperating with the authorities to determine the cause of this incident. We will ensure that a thorough investigation is conducted to understand what led to the collapse.

“We at Liatel are deeply saddened by the events that have unfolded in George. Our hearts go out to all those impacted by this tragedy, and we extend our sincerest sympathy to the victims and their families.” DM

This  article was updated on Wednesday at 07.55am.

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Earlier on Tuesday night ActionSA Chairperson Michael Beaumont confirmed that both Ngobeni and Gafane had been victims of hijacking and that they were missing.

Chairperson of ActionSA’s Youth Forum Hluphi Gafane (Photo: ActionSA)

“ActionSA Leadership is working closely with the families, vehicle tracking company and law enforcement agencies. Everything that can be done to expedite the safe return of our leaders is being done,” Beaumont said in an internal letter addressed to “Colleagues”. Beaumont on Tuesday night confirmed to Daily Maverick the validity of the letter.

Any information or sightings of the vehicle can be sent to Bafana at 069 945 3353

We are working closely with Funzi and Hluphi's families, the vehicle tracking company, and law enforcement agencies.

Please hold Funzi and Hluphi and their families in your thoughts and pray for… pic.twitter.com/ydx9MDGzpE

— ActionSA Gauteng (@ActionSA_GP) May 7, 2024

However, on Tuesday around 11pm Beaumont updated colleagues that both leaders had been found.

“I have been informed by SAPS that Funzi and Hluphi have been found in Benoni. They are being recovered now. We are also so grateful to learn that they are unharmed,” he said.

It is believed the Ngobeni and Gafane were travelling in a Toyota Hilux registration number LC-06TC GP when they were hijacked in Olievenhoutbosch in Centurion. Beaumont said the vehicle was still missing.

The hijacked vehicle that Ngobeni and Gafane were travelling in. (Photo: ActionSA)

“I ask that you hold Funzi and Hluphi, and their families, in your thoughts and pray for their safe return,” Beaumont appealed before they were found.

In a statement released before midnight, Beaumont confirmed that the two leaders were found at about 10.45pm after being hijacked at 7pm. The statement said the pair had been “held” by hijackers, “eventually being located in the Benoni area”.

Beaumont said they were unharmed but “undoubtedly shaken”.

He expressed his “profound gratitude to members of the SAPS who were incredibly responsive”.

He requested that Ngobeni and Gafane be given space to recover with their families before a more substantive briefing is provided on Wednesday. DM

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A Tel Aviv-based startup that supplies a drone operating system to the US Defense Department and the Israeli army has raised $40-million to expand its civilian business after its technology was deployed on the battlefield in the Gaza Strip.

Iran has just weeks to comply with monitoring demands issued by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog or risk being slapped with a new round of diplomatic censure.  

US pauses arms shipment to Israel on Rafah invasion concerns

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Wednesday that the US had paused a shipment of “high-payload” munitions to Israel for review over concerns about a potential military offensive on the Gazan city of Rafah.

The paused delivery was supposed to contain 3,500 bombs, split roughly evenly between 2,000-pound (907kg) and 500-pound explosives, according to a senior administration official. Austin said no final decision had been made on the shipment.

Israel needed to account for the protection of civilians in Rafah, where the US would like to see “no major conflict take place”, Austin told a Senate Appropriations panel. The US is worried about the damage the large bombs could inflict on dense urban areas like Rafah, where about 1.4 million Palestinians are sheltering from Israel’s war with Hamas. Austin said a 2,000-pound bomb could do a lot of “collateral damage”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on the weapons delay, and it’s unclear if it will have much impact on the military’s operations in Gaza. Still, this indicates growing tensions between Netanyahu and President Joe Biden, who’s voiced opposition to an attack on Rafah and reaffirmed that message in a call between the leaders on Monday.

Privately, Israeli officials have expressed deep frustration at the weapons shipment delay and warned their US counterparts recently that it could jeopardise ceasefire and hostage negotiations at a crucial moment, according to a person briefed on the discussions.

Biden’s decision on the arms delay marks one of the most significant moments of discord between Israel and its most important ally since Hamas’s 7 October assault, which started the war. Hamas, designated a terrorist organisation by the US, killed 1,200 people and abducted roughly 250 when its fighters stormed into southern Israel from Gaza.

Israel’s retaliatory bombardment and ground offensive on the Mediterranean enclave have killed almost 35,000 people, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

The US has urged Israel not to attack Rafah unless it can move out civilians first. US officials have serious doubts that can be done quickly and safely.

This week, Israel told residents in some parts of eastern Rafah to move out immediately in a possible prelude to an assault. It urged them to travel north to a “humanitarian area” near the Gazan city of Khan Younis, much of which has been destroyed. Israel said it was working to ensure there would be enough tents, food and medicine for the civilians.

Israel’s military also took control of and closed the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt on Tuesday. It’s the main entry point for aid going into Gaza and the United Nations said it should be reopened quickly.

On Wednesday, Israeli officials did reopen the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing and said trucks with humanitarian supplies were moving into Gaza. It was shut on Sunday after rocket fire from Hamas killed four Israeli soldiers. 

For now, Israeli officials are saying their operations in Rafah are limited and are downplaying the notion that a full-on offensive has begun. 

Since the war started in October, the US has shipped more than 200 planeloads of weapons and ammunition to help Israel. The US is the biggest supplier of arms to Israel, and Biden has said there are no circumstances under which he would stop sending ammunition for Israel’s defence, including those used for the Iron Dome system, which intercepts rockets and missiles fired at the Jewish state.

As Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza has grown increasingly controversial, arms suppliers including Italy, Spain and Canada have all halted sales. Yet that mattered little while the US persisted with shipments.

About 70% of Israel’s military imports come from the US, which has made more than 200 deliveries since the conflict started in October. 

Netanyahu has refrained from public comment on the US shipment delay. Yet the leader has been warning for some time of the inherent risk of relying too much on others for its growing military needs.  

Three months ago, he instructed the country’s defence and finance ministers to produce a plan to “strengthen Israel’s defence industries for decades to come”. That would require “huge investment to ensure our security independence and freedom of action”, he said.

Developing an arms industry that includes local production lines for aerial munitions now supplied by the US is likely to be a big task, especially in the short term. So far, little has happened, with Finance Ministry officials saying teams had been set up but with no framework or deadline.  

Israeli drone startup used by military in Hamas war raises $40m

A Tel Aviv-based startup that supplies a drone operating system to the US Defense Department and the Israeli army has raised $40-million to expand its civilian business after its technology was deployed on the battlefield in the Gaza Strip.

The funding round for Xtend was led by Chartered Group and included existing investors NFX, TAU Ventures and strategic investors like Clal-Tech, according to the company. 

Israel’s larger defence contractors have benefited from increased spending since the beginning of the war with Hamas, and Xtend’s fundraising signals opportunities during the conflict for smaller, dual-use players. The company’s platform — which has human operators control small drones with a portable virtual reality headset and handheld controller — has been used by the Israel Defense Forces in the war with Hamas to scout buildings for enemy fighters or explosives. 

The company said it had released new products since the war began and improved drones’ abilities to fly without access to Global Positioning System satellites, a feature it said would be adapted for its civilian applications.

Gaza is China’s new wedge issue to split US from Global South

Last week, a top Chinese diplomat took to the microphones at the United Nations to harangue the US for blocking a resolution that would have backed Palestinians’ bid for membership, saying it had “shattered the decades-long dream of the Palestinian people”.

The broadside by Ambassador Fu Cong may have just looked like more anti-US rhetoric. But US officials and experts say it fits into a pattern with greater significance — an increasingly active Chinese effort to turn opinion in developing countries against the US since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, using the Gaza war as a wedge.

US officials and experts argue that China is seizing on global outrage over the rising death toll in the Gaza Strip and the dire humanitarian situation as a new tactic in its longtime push to score points against Washington at the UN and online.

One senior US official, who asked not to be identified discussing the US assessment, said China had used Gaza as a means to try to paint the US as a major contributor to global insecurity, while simultaneously promoting itself as a force for peace.

The effort extends to stoking dissent at home. In April, the UK-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue said a network of pro-Chinese Communist Party operators known as Spamouflage was using accounts posing as right-wing Americans and targeting the Gaza war to flame internal US divisions. 

The institute’s assessment was, “Chinese and Russian actors are capitalising on the perceived unpopularity of Western policy towards Gaza”, said Melanie Smith, director of research for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Their aim was “to push the idea of an alternate global power structure with themselves at the helm.”

That conflict has also become a point of tension between Washington and some Global South nations. Countries including Brazil, Indonesia, India and Turkey have rebuffed US efforts to enlist their help to back Ukraine, a position now echoed in their unwillingness to side with Israel in the wake of the Hamas attack. 

China also has peppered its state media with messaging on how officials are facilitating countries’ efforts to break into the Western-led international system. Two such China Daily headlines in March read “China a true diplomatic power for Global South” and “Multipolarisation gaining traction across globe”. 

In a report last October, the Atlantic Council argued there was “clear evidence that Beijing’s tireless efforts” to portray itself as a defender of the Global South were paying off. It cited support at the UN to defend its human rights record and a growing influence in the Middle East, as well as China becoming a “major source of emergency funds” for Argentina.  

UN nuclear watchdog puts Iran on notice ahead of key report

Iran has just weeks to comply with monitoring demands issued by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, or risk being slapped with a new round of diplomatic censure. 

During a two-day visit by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA’s) top official, Iran was told to improve monitoring measures and resolve a years-old probe into the provenance of uranium traces discovered at undeclared locations.

“There is a need to deliver very soon,” IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi said late Tuesday at a press briefing in Vienna. “For the international community, there is a sense of needing to move and having results sooner rather than later.”

IAEA inspectors are preparing to draft their quarterly safeguards report, informing diplomats on the state of their investigation and updating data on Iran’s growing nuclear stockpile. Their assessment will be circulated before the agency’s board of governors convenes on 3 June. 

The US issued an ultimatum to Iran at the IAEA’s last meeting: cooperate or face censure which could lead to a referral to the UN Security Council, where sanctions on the Islamic Republic may be renewed. Some European countries already wanted to dial up the pressure in March.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian assured the IAEA delegation that “concrete measures” would now be taken to address those international concerns, Grossi said. His visit came just weeks after an Israeli air attack struck not far from one of Iran’s largest nuclear facilities in Isfahan. DM

Read more in Daily Maverick: Middle East crisis news hub

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The UK expelled a top Russian envoy and imposed new restrictions on the country’s diplomats, in one of the most high-profile responses yet to what allied officials described as a coordinated espionage campaign to weaken support for Ukraine. 

European Union member states have tentatively approved a plan to use the profits generated by Russian sovereign assets frozen in the bloc to support Ukraine’s recovery and military defence. 

Russia resumes ‘massive’ attacks on Ukraine’s power network

Russia resumed attacks on Ukraine’s electricity production and distribution network after a two-week pause, targeting facilities across the nation including the capital and Lviv in the west near the border with Poland.

Ukrainian air defence systems intercepted 39 out of 55 missiles and 20 out of 21 Shahed drones, Air Force chief Mykola Oleshchuk said on Telegram. Russia used cruise and ballistic weapons including the Kinzhal hypersonic missile.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the attacks “massive” in a post on X that pointed out that they came as countries mark the anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany at the end of World War 2. They were launched the day after Russian President Vladimir Putin was inaugurated for another term. 

Two people were injured in the Kyiv region, and a child was hurt in the Kirovohrad region, the national police said on Telegram. Seven others, including five children, were also wounded in another Russian attack around noon local time in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, according to local authorities.

Power generation and transmission facilities in six regions including Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk in the west were struck, Energy Minister German Galushchenko said on Facebook.

“The enemy wants to take away from us the capacity to produce and transmit sufficient electricity,” Galushchenko said. 

Ukraine’s largest power producer DTEK said that three of its thermal power plants were attacked, causing “serious damage to equipment”. This was the fifth drone and missile barrage aimed at DTEK facilities in the past month and a half, it said. 

Ukrainian railways also suffered during the barrage, for the first time this month after several attacks in April. The train from Kyiv to Kherson was stopped in Mykolayiv due to damage at the main station in Kherson.

Russian forces continued small territorial gains in eastern Luhansk and the Donetsk region and continued assaults near the strategically important town of Chasiv Yar, according to the Institute for the Study of War and Ukrainian military bloggers. 

UK expels Russian envoy in pushback against spying surge

The UK expelled a top Russian envoy and imposed new restrictions on the country’s diplomats, in one of the most high-profile responses yet to what allied officials described as a coordinated espionage campaign to weaken support for Ukraine. 

Home Secretary James Cleverly announced the actions in Parliament on Wednesday, saying the UK would deport Russia’s defence attaché on the grounds that he was an undeclared spy. He said it would also limit the amount of time the country’s diplomats can spend in the UK, as well as strip some Russian-owned properties — including its defence section in London’s Highgate area and a 19th-century country house south of the capital — of diplomatic protections.  

The actions come in response to a suspected arson attack against Ukrainian-linked properties in East London and other espionage activities in Britain and Europe, Cleverly said. 

“Over a number of years, we have witnessed Russia and its intelligence services engage in yet more open and more brazen attempts to undermine our security, harm our people and interfere in our democracies,” Cleverly told the House of Commons. “These activities bear all the hallmarks of a deliberate campaign by Russia designed to bring the war home across Europe and undermine our collective resolve to support Ukraine in its fight. It will not work.”

The Russian Embassy in London issued a statement saying the UK’s reasons for the new restrictions were “baseless and even ridiculous”, and pledged an appropriate response. 

EU backs plan to tap profits from Russian assets to aid Ukraine

European Union member states have tentatively approved a plan to use the profits generated by Russian sovereign assets frozen in the bloc to support Ukraine’s recovery and military defence.

Under the plan agreed to by EU ambassadors on Wednesday, most of the proceeds generated from 15 February onwards would be transferred to the European Peace Facility, a mechanism that reimburses weapons supplied to Kyiv, and to the EU budget’s Ukraine facility. 

The agreement comes after months of haggling between member states amid worries about possible legal challenges, retaliation from Russia and risk to the stability of the euro. It now needs to be formally adopted by member states.  

About $280-billion in assets have been immobilised by the Group of Seven nations since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with more than two-thirds of those held in the EU. The vast majority of the funds has been held through the Belgium-based settlement giant Euroclear, where they have generated about €3.9-billion in net profit since last year.

Some €159-billion of frozen Russian assets have generated a net profit of €557-million from that date, according to Euroclear’s first-quarter financial results.

Profits generated before 15 February will be retained by the clearing house to manage any risks such as those stemming from court cases. The plans include an emergency mechanism to release more funds should the costs of those risks balloon. 

Putin wants Russians to live longer as demographic crisis grows

Putin set a goal for Russians to live longer even as the country’s population is set to shrink in a deepening demographic crisis that’s been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and his war in Ukraine.

Putin ordered the government to develop policies for raising life expectancy to 81 years in Russia by 2036, up from 73.4 years last year, in a new decree on national development goals.

The decree updates a goal Putin set in 2020 for life expectancy to rise to 78 years by 2030. The 71-year-old president was inaugurated on Tuesday for his fifth term to 2030 and can potentially rule until 2036.

Putin’s targets were “unrealistic without stopping the war and sharply tightening the screws on strong alcohol and cigarettes, as well as doubling healthcare spending”, independent demographer Alexei Raksha said on his Telegram channel. The number of births in Russia last year was the lowest this century, according to his estimates.  

Putin has warned for years that Russia’s shrinking population threatens its political and economic future. Fertility rates in the world’s largest country by area plunged in the 1990s during the economic shock that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union.

The government has poured billions into programmes aiming to boost the birth rate by offering payments to women who have more children. Still, it’s had little effect in reversing the demographic decline. 

Ukraine energy trader plans European expansion to boost supplies

The trading arm of Ukrainian energy company DTEK plans to hire more staff and enter the liquefied natural gas (LNG) market in a bid to forge closer ties with the rest of Europe. 

D.Trading seeks to add as many as 12 people to buy and sell power, gas and fuels by the end of the year, Chief Executive Officer Ivan Geliukh said in an interview. The firm currently employs about 60 traders in four offices from Kyiv to Amsterdam. Longer term, an LNG desk will also be established. 

Expanding its activity on the continent will help deepen Ukraine’s links to the wider energy market and boost supply security of both electricity and gas in the war-torn country. At the same time, the high volatility in those markets offers the chance of big profits from trading. 

“Our plan is to contribute to energy security in Europe,” Geliukh said. “At the moment we have a big portfolio of customers in Ukraine, so the next step for us is building the team and developing our capabilities across the region.”

One of the tasks of his expanded team will be to improve links between energy infrastructure in Ukraine and the main grid on the continent. The nation has more storage capacity than any other country on the continent west of Russia, but continuous attacks by its neighbour are increasing the possibility that fuel will get stranded there.

A move into the LNG market would also replicate efforts by some of the world’s biggest commodity merchants. Traders including Vitol Group are expanding in the market for the super-chilled fuel as Europe replaces Russian pipeline gas supplies and transitions away from dirtier fossil fuels. DM

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On a sunny autumn day, pupils are immersed in their laptops while others enjoy meals at the Raymond Mhlaba School of Specialisation (SoS), in the dusty Tshepisong township, about 46km from the Johannesburg CBD.

The school, which specialises in mining-related subjects, is among 35 such schools launched by the Gauteng Department of Education (GDE) since 2016. They form part of a flagship programme offering science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics to prepare pupils for 21st-century job opportunities.

Gauteng has more than 2,220 public schools, while there are 24,894 nationally. According to the GDE’s 2022-23 annual report, 71,494 laptops were distributed to pupils while 215 of these were handed over to teachers, while 215 smartboards went to schools across the province.

Raymond Mhlaba is a no-fee school and falls in quintile two, which are schools classified as “poor”. There are 1,557,452 pupils in 1,407 such schools in Gauteng benefiting from the National School Nutrition Programme. Despite this status, the school is well-resourced and has 24-hour Wi-Fi, seven days a week, which was installed by the GDE five years ago.

Digital transformation

Daily Maverick visited the school after education stakeholders at the 2024 Basic Education Sector Lekgotla – held from 14 to 16 March in Boksburg – discussed digital transformation in schools through the use of information and communications technology (ICT) after Covid.

According to a document circulated to a commission dealing with the subject, South Africa developed a white paper on e-education in 2004 with the vision of revolutionising learning and teaching through ICT. It recognised the potential of ICTs to overcome barriers to quality education in developing countries like South Africa, citing their capacity to address fiscal constraints, spatial barriers and capacity-related limitations.

“Despite the ambitious vision outlined in the White Paper, progress in implementing ICTs in Basic Education has been slow and uneven across provinces,” the document reads.

Affluent provinces like the Western Cape and Gauteng, the report states, have made significant strides in providing schools with ICT infrastructure, while others lag behind due to competing priorities and resource constraints.

However, the document says partnerships between the government, the private sector, social partners and NGOs have played a crucial role in leveraging ICT resources for teaching, learning and administration in the education sector.

There were concerns about pupils in multigrade classrooms, those with special education needs and those in hard-to-reach communities far from major ICT developments.

“It is crucial to ensure that planning prioritises these learners, ensuring inclusivity and preventing them from being overlooked as the country embraces technological advances,” the document reads.

Addressing the cost of data, devices and basic technologies was essential to guaranteeing access and inclusion for all.

Raymond Mhlaba Grade 10B pupils Basetsana Shuping, Thandeka Longoza, Sbahle Mokoena and Nkosinathi Mbanjwa use a laptop during a lesson. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)

‘Overachievers’

Seated inside a well-furnished wooden shed, Raymond Mhlaba principal Angie Mokiti, who was flanked by school governing body chairperson Irene Molefe, ICT coordinator Mothekoa Kekana and life sciences teacher Zandile Nkawule, said the GDE had selected the school to be a SoS due to outstanding results over the years.

“We are a top township school in Gauteng,” Mokiti said, adding that the Department Basic Education (DBE) recognised them as top school in their category in 2018.

Mokiti has been at the helm since the school was founded in 2009. It was the first school built in the area and she was appointed in June of that year.

“We started with Grade 8 and 9,” she said. In 2012, some of this cohort made it to matric.

“From 2012, our results have been excellent. We had 41 learners. We put them on an extended teaching programme where we had morning and afternoon classes. We extended our day.”

The class of 2012 achieved a 100% pass rate. This, Mokiti said, continued in 2013, and over the years the school has not dropped below 95%. It was only in 2020 and 2021, at the height of Covid-19 pandemic, that the school managed to achieve just above 96%.

Covid presented challenges. Mokiti said they had to deal with parents who were reluctant to send their children to school for an extended time to learn.

“Learners didn’t attend school and parents were not supportive when we fetched them. They will say that our children will get sick or die. It was a very frustrating time,” she said.

Like any other Gauteng township school, said Molefe, who has been chairperson for six years, said they had to deal with disciplinary issues in the past.

She said teachers continue to do their best amid challenges including, at times, pupils’ bad behaviour.

“The department is supportive,” Molefe said. 

In the past, parents had not been supported, but the parent structure had disciplined pupils found smoking or drinking on school premises. “We also assist teachers to ensure learners wear their uniform. If there is a case, we act on it.”

Raymond Mhlaba School of Specialisation pupils receive their meals. The schools is among Gauteng’s smart schools, which use ICT in teaching and learning. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)

‘Not fully fledged’

Although the GDE launched the school as a SoS in 2023, Mokiti said they were not yet fully fledged and were waiting for the government to publish a gazette to confirm their new status.

The 2022-23 annual report confirms that not all of these schools have been officially declared SoS. Gauteng education MEC Matome Chiloane says in the report that only 21 have been gazetted since 2016.

Mokiti said the GDE informed them about the SoS status in January 2023, and they had to source funds for the launch.

The GDE failed to respond to questions relating to this – and why such schools were launched without processes and resources having been put in place first.

After being gazetted, Mokiti said entrance exams, which usually are provided by universities for Grade 8s, will be written to select qualifying pupils.

“So for now, the specialisation [is] from Grade 10 where we have commerce, general and science streams.” Computer applications technology (CAT) was also offered.

“When we’re a (fully fledged) SoS we expect to have coding and robotics and IT. We’re called a SoS but we are not fully fledged in specialising in maths, science and ICT.”

They had smartboards and the GDE had given pupils 1,601 laptops. However, only two teachers had received the gadgets.

The SA Medical and Education Foundation had donated smart classrooms used by Grade 12s and also revamped two laboratories and a computer centre in 2020.

Raymond Mhlaba School of Specialisation principal Angie Mokiti. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)

Curriculum changes

Mokiti said they want to train pupils in computer literacy to help them to easily assimilate at university. The school also needs robotics and coding materials.

“We want, in the long run, to do away with creative arts and put in coding and robotics.”

In the general education and training phase (grades 8 to 9) the school currently offers four home languages: Setswana, IsiZulu, Xitsonga and IsiXhosa. English is a first additional language. Other subjects include life orientation, creative arts, technology, maths and natural sciences.

In the further education and training phase there is a science stream comprising maths and physical science, geography or CAT as options. The general stream entails maths literacy, life sciences, geography and tourism. The commerce stream offers accounting, economics, business studies, maths or maths literacy. These include languages.

“What is going to happen when we are a fully fledged SoS, we [will] go full force into science stream, which means learners will do maths and science, either ICT or IT, but also we might keep geography and life sciences. Obviously, if it’s life sciences they can go into medicine – with geography they can go to whatever field related to geography,” Mokiti said. “But commerce we do away with. General stream we do away with.”

A Raymond Mhlaba School of Specialisation pupil at lunchtime on 2 May 2024. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)

Implications

Asked whether they are not concerned that these changes might affect their matric outcomes, Mokiti said they are confident that their work ethic will sustain the results.

“It won’t be a problem. So, if I see trouble I’m just about to go yho I can’t drop the results,” she laughed.

Her staff were equipped but they would need to upskill. “We are told that there is a certain type of teacher that must work in SoS.”

An entry-level teacher needed a BTech and honours, while school management team (SMT) members required a master’s degree (including the SMT head of department and deputy) and the principal must have a PhD.

“You see why I must run away,” Mokiti laughed. “I told them they need to upskill,” she said, adding that teachers will receive bursaries.

‘Overcoming odds’

The school, Mokiti said, would make it – as it had in the past – with its pupils, who come from disadvantaged communities such as Mnandini where there are RDP houses and informal settlements nearby.

In fact, two teachers at the school were alumni who lived under such conditions. 

One of them is Zandile Nkawule. The last born of three children, Nkawule said she was raised in a child-headed household, and had experienced difficulties during her schooling days.

“At some point, in most cases I’d only eat during lunchtime, when I go back home I will have nothing. There won’t be food,” she said.

Nkawule said there was a point when she had to open up to a teacher at the school, who doubled as a social worker, although not officially designated for the job.

“She informed the principal that I’m experiencing challenges at home because I couldn’t study properly. I was not free enough to share with other people, especially other teachers, but she was our social worker and I was able to open up to her.

“From there, I studied very hard. The principal believed in us. In a way, for instance, I was the only one who was able to go to university at home. I’ve other siblings but they could not succeed in life. So, she inspired us.”

Nkawule said she did not want to study teaching but was persuaded by Mokiti.

“I wanted to do tourism management. It was more like I was taking chances because I didn’t know much about it. So, when I spoke to her, she said, ‘no, you can’t do that. How many people do you know in the tourism sector?’ It was a wake-up call, to say ‘can we choose the right path for you’. So the right path was teaching. I also specialise in life sciences, which I was taught by her,” she said.

Nkawule, who graduated from the University of Johannesburg, said she relates well to her pupils because of her background.

“My background was very bad. So I can relate to them. Even if I’m teaching them on certain days I have to take them back. I tell them, ‘you are going to be okay’ because I walked the same route that you are on currently’.”

Molefe said teachers were doing their best to help pupils find accommodation, which helps them to study so they don’t drop out.

She has also taken in two boys, who are currently studying matric.

“They find them accommodation, food and toiletries so that they pass and get bursaries to study at varsities,” she said.

Mokiti said the difficulty they face is that they cannot do this for pupils in other grades.

Raymond Mhlaba School of Specialisation ICT coordinator Mothekoa Kekana. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)

Protecting gadgets

Molefe said they have patrollers from the community looking after the school.

“We have not heard a report of any smartboards being stolen. We live around here. The community is here. We have day and night patrollers from the community.”

But, Molefe said power outages disrupt learning. The school uses its three generators as back-up, but parents have to pay for the petrol. She said it would be great to have a solar system.

Mokiti said outages, which have become the norm, disrupt their Wi-Fi connection.

Kekana said the school is fortunate to have a committed governing body.

“They are hands-on. Even the community. We are safe. This area is dangerous but when we walk out of the area, we feel safe. The community protects the school and that is why I think we don’t experience break-ins.”

‘Gadgets help us’

Grade 12 pupil Hlamulo Chauke (17) said he was issued a laptop when he enrolled at the school. It was his first exposure to the gadget.

“It was very difficult to adapt when I was exposed to it. I was still young,” he said. But he got better with practice.

Laptops, he said, help pupils to do research and easily understand visual concepts.

“We are more motivated to learn. Even the interaction in class increases. It is beneficial. Marks are improving and learners are engaging. We can have meetings online. Sometimes a teacher can send a meeting link after school.”

Raymond Mhlaba School of Specialisation school governing body chairperson Irene Molefe. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)

What the experts say

University of the Witwatersrand education leadership and policy studies division lecturer Dr Douglas Andrews said that, as a former school principal who had to navigate or pivot to blended learning and the exponential use of ICT to facilitate distance learning, ICT is an essential tool in schools.

“Many people will try to criticise the use of ICT in teaching, however, the opportunities to enhance learning are boundless,” he said.

ICT needed to be introduced in such a way that considered how it could enhance teachers’ pedagogical responses to teaching pupils with different learning needs.

There needed to be thinking about what opportunities existed, including access to the internet, smartphones, cameras to record lessons, computers and projectors. Each school would have different needs and structural resources available.

“The school ICT pedagogical response team should consider how to effectively translate the available technology into learning experiences,” he said.

For example, if only smartphones were available, why not record the lesson on a phone and put the video on WhatsApp? If this lesson dealt with a difficult concept, for instance, the video could be watched repeatedly, and children who struggled with concentration, for instance, could watch and pause the video.

This could serve as a study aid for exams.

“This most basic use of technology can aid learning. Why would we want to deny this to anyone? Maybe only the teacher has a smartphone with a camera; the lesson can be video-recorded and the children can watch this over again before an exam.”

Fast-tracking provisioning of ICT in schools, he said, must first be driven by national policy and then funding must be made available for the most vulnerable schools so they have equitable access.

“Schools that are better resourced with ICT hardware and with trained staff who are ‘champions’ of ICT integration into the classroom should network with those schools in need to ‘bridge the ICT gap’. However, the state should incentivise this so that it actually happens and there should be accountability measures built into the incentivisation.”

University of Fort Hare senior researcher Dr Siyabulela Fobosi said the education discourse has been profoundly reshaped in the wake of Covid-19. Schools worldwide had scrambled to adapt to remote learning and the limitations of traditional pedagogical methods had become glaringly apparent.

Zandile Nkawule is a life sciences teacher at the Raymond Mhlaba School of Specialisation. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)

“In South Africa, a country marked by stark socioeconomic disparities, the pandemic laid bare the gaping digital divide within its education system. Now, more than ever, integrating ICT in schools is desirable and imperative for ensuring equitable access to quality education,” Fobosi said.

The pandemic had underscored the urgency of incorporating ICT into educational practices.

“Schools already embracing digital learning platforms were better equipped to transition seamlessly to remote learning. Conversely, those without access to ICT infrastructure faced significant challenges in ensuring continuity of learning.”

The introduction of ICT after the pandemic was crucial for levelling the playing field and giving all pupils an equal opportunity to thrive academically.  

Education activist Hendrick Makaneta said the introduction of ICT is crucial, especially after Covid-19.

“Covid-19 has improved learning and teaching in the sense that some learners and teachers could still have lessons via teams or Zoom, in the comfort of their homes,” he said.

The Basic Education Department, he said, should move swiftly to modernise the education system to ensure pupils gain access to digital devices that can enable them to create a future for themselves.

ICT positives

These steps, Andrews said, include:

• Use of visual materials that can make lessons more stimulating;
• Tests that can be electronic and support pupils with reading barriers because they can increase the font size;
• Pupils and teachers can use quizzes to give feedback on lesson productivity. There is a link between classroom activity and the real-world experiences all pupils will have to cope with one day;
• Lessons that can be recorded for reinforcement purposes;
• Lessen paperwork to free up more time for teaching;
• Teaching can be enhanced using internet resources and other lessons given by teachers from around the world; and
• A child at home or away from school can access the lesson in real time, which reduces absenteeism.

Fobosi said concerted efforts are needed at both governmental and organisational levels to expedite the introduction of ICT in schools.

This included allocating sufficient resources for procuring ICT equipment, comprehensive training for teachers on digital teaching methodologies, and fostering partnerships with technology companies to bridge the digital divide.

“Additionally, leveraging existing infrastructure and implementing innovative financing models can help overcome financial barriers to ICT integration.”

ICT, he said, has the potential to revolutionise teaching and learning by offering interactive and personalised educational experiences. For example, digital platforms can access a wealth of educational resources, facilitate collaborative learning through virtual classrooms, and enable adaptive learning technologies that cater to individual pupil needs.

Moreover, ICT empowered teachers to employ innovative teaching methods, such as gamification and multimedia presentations, to enhance pupil engagement and comprehension.  

Makaneta said the government should ensure every school has internet connectivity and make it compulsory for every child in the country to learn robotics and coding.

“We have noted that the government alone may not be able to roll out the much-needed infrastructure required to introduce ICT in all the schools in the country. It is for this reason that we are also calling upon the private sector to lend a hand of support,” Makaneta said.

He said ICT will certainly improve learning and teaching because teachers and pupils will be exposed to additional resources such as online educational resources. 

“Even the use of video clips can be easily accessed, especially where the teacher wants to make use of alternative examples to explain certain concepts. Even e-books can be easily downloaded and learners can submit work online instead of using paper all the time.”

Pupils arrive for class at the Raymond Mhlaba School of Specialisation on 2 May 2024. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)

ICT disadvantages

Andrews said many teachers are concerned that ICT will serve as a distraction from what the lesson is about.

“However, just like a calculator enhances maths, so can ICT enhance teaching. It must never be seen as a replacement to teaching, but rather as a tool that can provide additional pedagogical responses.

For example, if you are teaching the human heart in a biology lesson, for example, and you have a virtual image of a heart beating that you can annotate and display on the projector where students can use their phones to fill in the answers and participate in an online quiz, this can only improve the experience when the alternative is a static black-and-white picture of a heart in a textbook.”

The danger, he said, is not in the use of ICT in the classroom, but in how it is used and whether it has a pedagogical basis for its use.   

While ICT offers numerous benefits, Fobosi said, it is not without drawbacks.

“One concern is the risk of exacerbating existing inequalities if access to technology is not equitably distributed.”

Reliance on digital platforms might marginalise pupils who lacked digital literacy skills or a stable internet connection.

“Additionally, there is a need to safeguard against the potential distractions and cyber risks associated with online learning environments.”

Makaneta said the use of ICT could lead to unintended consequences as some pupils may use their gadgets to access sites that are not meant for educational purposes. 

“Some parents have already taken gadgets away from their children after discovering that the child used the device for no educational purposes.” 

Covid-19 lessons

Andrews said Covid-19 showed that South Africans have the ability to find solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems under stressful circumstances.

“The challenge now is to sustain and further develop these solutions. Now that there is a large pool of people in education, at all levels and across all schools, who have learned to varying degrees, how to use and apply ICT in the classroom in pedagogically effective ways, we should harness this potential,” he said.

Just like workshops and cluster committees to develop maths teaching or early grade reading, he said, the same effort can be put into community training for ICT enhancement schools.

However, South Africa needed to be aware of the danger that some schools that were better resourced would continue to develop their ICT teaching programmes while other schools that were less equipped in terms of human and physical resources would abandon the drive to use ICT.

“We need to become more institutionally inclusive, where schools partner with each other to share expertise and focus on the opportunities and resources that are contextually and situationally available so that training and support are relevant and applicable,” Andrews said.

Fobosi said the pandemic served as a stark reminder of the inequalities in South Africa’s education system.

While some schools seamlessly transitioned to online learning, he said, others struggled to provide basic teaching materials to their pupils.

“This experience underscores the urgent need to address the digital divide and ensure that all learners have access to ICT infrastructure and resources, regardless of their socioeconomic background,” Fobosi said.

The pandemic had underscored the urgent need to bridge the digital divide in South African education by integrating ICT in schools.

“While ICT offers immense potential to enhance teaching and learning, its successful implementation requires concerted efforts to address infrastructure gaps, provide comprehensive training for educators, and ensure equitable access for all students.”

Only by prioritising ICT integration could South Africa realise its vision of an inclusive and transformative education system that empowered all pupils to succeed in the digital age.

Makaneta said Covid-19 exposed the gap between those who could afford to buy gadgets such as laptops and smartphones and those who could not. Some of the former were able to learn despite school closures, while pupils from poor communities could not get education, which meant their right to education was taken away by the pandemic. 

“Although there was rotational learning at a much later stage, the children from poor areas were the hardest hit because they could not complete the syllabus. Even some of the topics were removed from the annual teaching plan because of the rotational timetable.”

ICT in provinces

In all provinces, Andrews said, there are pockets of excellence and individual pursuits to drive change and innovation.

However, the integration of ICT in classrooms mirrored the economic status and urbanisation of each province.

“Where there is more opportunity, better internet connectivity, more capital and more experts you will see more provision of ICT use in schools. 

The challenge was to “level the playing field” and ensure all children in our country had access to quality and equitable education provision.

Fobosi said some provinces have made significant strides in integrating ICT into their education systems.

“For instance, schools in Gauteng have implemented various ICT initiatives, such as providing tablets to students and equipping classrooms with interactive whiteboards. However, these efforts have predominantly concentrated in urban areas, leaving deep rural regions, such as the Eastern Cape, underserved in ICT infrastructure,” he said.

Makaneta said Gauteng is a leading province that has managed to install smartboards in its schools, although some were vandalised or stolen during break-ins.

“Be that as it may, we wish to encourage other provinces to follow suit by buying ICT equipment for their schools. Doing so should not be seen as an additional burden on the coffers of the state, but rather as an investment in the future of our children.”

Views of teacher unions

South African Democratic Teachers’ Union spokesperson Nomusa Cembi said they are looking at the bigger picture in terms of transforming the education system, which encourages pupils to progressively take greater responsibility for their learning and in which higher-order thinking is promoted.

During the pandemic teachers had been able to adapt their strategies to communicate with pupils and enable learning.

“Teachers set up communication systems with learners and parents so that they were able to maintain control over the learning process. It is in this context that we need to see the digital transformation process,” Cembi said.

The real challenge was ensuring teachers and pupils used ICT to advance classroom learning. 

The Basic Education Department needed to resolve the thinking around the use of ICT in schools and the relationship between teacher, pupil and content. 

“ICT is a glorified chalkboard of information that can be used to support teaching and learning and it’s important that both teachers and learners use it to advance learning. It has functionality that can promote learning, but using it on its own will not promote high-quality teaching and learning.” 

Only schools and teachers could improve the quality of teaching and learning, but they could use technology as one of the many tools to bring different dimensions of quality into the school.   

She said the pandemic and emergency measures created conditions of isolation that were damaging to all stakeholders, while teachers adopted measures to communicate with parents and pupils. 

“We in no way advocate replicating these conditions and don’t think we need to design an education system for isolation. It will be detrimental to the country,” she said. 

All provinces, she said, are promoting the use of ICT but there seems to be inconsistency in the thinking around its use that is hampering progress. 

“We did unplugged coding and robotics training for 15,000 teachers to promote the use of technology in classrooms and at this point conflicting perspectives hinders the upscaling of technology in schools.” 

Suid-Afrikaanse Onderwyserunie (South African Teachers’ Union) said that while the pandemic was a major catalyst for the reappraisal of schools as sources of teaching and learning, it was not the only one.  

“Prior to the advent of Covid-19 there was a worldwide trend in the direction of schooling and education which made use of ICT. The reason for introducing ICT in schools goes wider and deeper than the ever-present possibility of disruption in a pandemic situation.” 

The reality now was that it was almost impossible for teachers and pupils to keep abreast of developments in all the fields of education and learning without access to the world ICT could embrace. 

“There are very wide differences between schools in South Africa, and it is very evident in the world of ICT where issues of provisioning, connectivity, service and availability often affect rural areas more comprehensively than they affect urban or major metropolitan areas,” the union said. 

Education authorities, it said, have made major strides over the past few years in efforts to make ICT more available in schools, and have been materially assisted by major service providers that are sensitive to the needs of rural schools and educational institutions.  

“The implementation of ICT requires partnerships between schools, communities, the education authorities and service providers, and there are sometimes bottlenecks which form in instances where not all parties can be involved at the same pace.” 

Within the framework of their mandate and resources, the union said, education authorities are seeking to redress imbalances and to develop equitable systems in each of the education districts.