Last week the Competition Tribunal found Media24 guilty of predatory pricing after one of its Free State publications sank a competitor. Yet this is only one example of numerous cynical attempts by the country’s largest print media company to stifle media diversity in its quest for monopoly control, argue Micah Reddy and Carina Conradie.
Micah Reddy and Carina Conradie
Opinion | 16 September 2015
The struggle to ensure access to schools for Dunoon learners illustrates the value of social justice lawyers engaging in work beyond the courtroom.
Sherylle Dass and Demichelle Petherbridge
Opinion | 15 September 2015
The recent volatility on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and in the rand are symptoms of the way ruling classes around the world have tried to deal with the crisis in capitalism that surfaced in the 1970s and has now engulfed China too, writes Shawn Hattingh.
Shawn Hattingh
Opinion | 15 September 2015
South Africa’s R7 billion a year fruit industry is threatened with potentially massive job and financial losses. It is a looming crisis that calls for urgent and comprehensive action at government level before the threat, still restricted to the Western Cape, spreads. It is also something that highlights the integrated nature of the modern economy.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 14 September 2015
Cato Manor has a long history of struggle and repression. Women have often been in the forefront of these struggles. This history is well known in Durban. Many families from KwaMashu have roots in Cato Manor. KwaMashu was created to house some of the people forcibly removed from Cato Manor under the Group Areas Act. They were taken from land in the city where they had some autonomy and moved out of the city to a segregated township under strict control of the apartheid state.
Ndabo Mzimela
Opinion | 8 September 2015
What is work? This question came very much to the fore over the past week after Amnesty International, called for “sex work” to be decriminalised. The international human rights organisation made the call after a two-year investigation into the “sex industry”. It came shortly after two local gender equality and human rights groups also called for law change.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 7 September 2015
The reason for the recent protests by Langa residents is the delay in answers to complaints and demands handed peacefully over to the Mayor’s office on the 26 July 2015.
Vusi Mandindi
Opinion | 4 September 2015
The phrasing of the Refugee Amendment Bill calls into question the commitment of the Department of Home Affairs to uphold its obligations under the UN Refugee Convention, write Aleck Kuhudzai and Deborah Won of the Agency for Refugee Education, Skills Training and Advocacy (ARESTA).
Aleck Kuhudzai and Deborah Won
Opinion | 2 September 2015
As it started, by targeting the legacy of one dead white male, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign claimed morality. As it progresses, by targeting the activity of two living white males, the rump of campaigners cannot claim credibility. Members of a university as distinguished as UCT might have been expected to prefer substance over sloganeering.
Allan Greenblo
Opinion | 1 September 2015
The struggle for a national minimum wage in South Africa has a long history, having been waged, largely by organised worker formations, since the 1930s. These efforts have taken various forms, from open class conflict to more subdued trade union representations to the various governments of the day.
Eddie Cottle
Opinion | 31 August 2015
Oh, when will they ever learn? It’s the last line in every stanza of a famous Pete Seeger anti-war song. And it is wholly appropriate this week as we digest the latest GDP figures against a background of ongoing crises especially in the steel, mining and manufacturing sectors. Along with, of course, the continuing collapse of the rand.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 31 August 2015
The 2016 local government elections will be surely be heavily contested. Already in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Nelson Mandela Bay, the ANC, DA and EFF are gearing up for tough electoral battles. No doubt too, all the political parties will pour large sums of money into these areas. But quite how much political parties will spend on campaigning, no one knows, because of a complete lack of transparency in the funding of political parties.
Judith February
Opinion | 27 August 2015
Every day millions across South Africa do arduous work in jobs that cannot keep them and their dependants out of poverty. These are the “working poor” and according to a new study, there are about five and half million of them.
Gilad Isaacs
Opinion | 25 August 2015
The whole question of colonialism has come to the fore again, courtesy of the SA Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) and its vehement objection to the introduction of the Chinese Mandarin dialect to local schools.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 24 August 2015
This month, international human rights body Amnesty International voted to “pursue a policy to protect the human rights of sex workers.” Its decision has generated much media attention and debate and has been opposed by many well-intentioned people and institutions.
Marlise Richter and Ruvimbo Tenga
Opinion | 21 August 2015
Large scale redundancies in the South African mining sector, running to tens of thousands of jobs, are probably inevitable. But only because of the system in which we have to operate.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 17 August 2015