Tabla de contenidos para 2021-11-11 en Mercury

Siphelele Dludla siphelele.dludla@inl.co.za THE NATIONAL Treasury has noted, but rejected a number of industry stakeholder comments on the proposal to increase excise duties for tobacco and alcohol to a rate of 8 percent in a bid to raise R1.8 billion revenue for the fiscus. Briefing parliament yesterday, Treasury said it had received written comments from 76 contributors on the 2021 Draft Tax Bills which, among others, give effect to increases of the excise duties on alcohol and tobacco products as proposed in the February Budget. The excise hike has placed the excise incidence on the cigarette’s most popular price category (MPPC) at 45 percent compared to the Treasury's targeted excise burden of 40 percent of the retail price of the most popular brand. Treasury uses Peter…

Sibusiso Mboto sibusiso.mboto@inl.co.za POLITICAL analysts, economists, civil and social activists have questioned Eskom chief executive André de Ruyter’s capacity to rescue the energy supplier from its current crisis, which has seen South Africans plunged into rolling blackouts. This is after De Ruyter told a media briefing on Tuesday that Eskom was a “dead horse”, and forcing him out would not solve the entity’s problems. Advocacy body Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group (PMBEJD) said De Ruyter’s comment amounted to an admission that he was out of his depth when it came to leading the energy supplier. The group’s Julie Smith said power supply was one of the key pillars in the economic system that should not be allowed to be ruined. “When a person in a position like his makes…

A couple sued a California fertility clinic for switching their embryo with another couple’s during in vitro fertilisation treatment, resulting in each couple giving birth to and raising the other’s baby for months before discovering the mistake. In a complaint filed in the Los Angeles Superior Court, Daphna and Alexander Cardinale accused the California Center for Reproductive Health of breach of contract, medical malpractice and negligent infliction of emotional distress, seeking an unspecified amount of money in damages. The clinic did not immediately respond to a message for comment. Daphna gave birth to a girl in 2019, but her husband suspected something was wrong because the baby did not resemble either parent, according to the lawsuit. Two months later, the couple obtained a DNA test confirming the child was not…

JUSTIN MOODLEY | Phoenix I have a simple question for Cricket South Africa (CSA) and expect a simple answer. Why was Durban’s Kingsmead cricket stadium excluded from hosting any matches involving the long-awaited India and Proteas tussle in January next year? It’s a known fact that KwaZulu- Natal, and more particularly Durban, is the home of the Indian community and therefore it would make sense to feature a match between India and the Proteas in Durban. But, according to CSA, this will not happen. It has not given any reasons for this decision. Strange but true. The India-Proteas matches will all be played in Centurion, Wanderers and Newlands. None in Durban. The series includes Test matches, 50-overs ODI and T20 matches. Surely one or two matches could have…

THYAGARAJ MARKANDAN | Kloof Eskom chief executive Andre de Ruyter is not only a white man but an Afrikaner, the group that oppressed black people. He now heads the biggest company in South Africa. You might envy him, but frankly he couldn’t have taken up the Eskom post at a worse time than now. He was made CE of Eskom in the hope that he would turn the ailing power giant around, but it is proving to be a herculean task. He just cannot keep it in the black. Despite a revenue of R200 billion, it made losses of R20bn for the financial year ending March 31. He is being made into a scapegoat for Eskom’s failure to keep the lights on. The knives are out for him.…

A KwaZulu-Natal family have been reunited with their toddler who was found on Tuesday night after being missing for three days. According to Paul Herbst, of IPSS Medical Rescue, the toddler was dehydrated. “IPSS’s Medical Rescue Unit with SAPS K9 Search and Rescue responded to Sundumbili after reports of a missing 2-year-old on Tuesday evening.” He said after trying unsuccessfully for several hours to find the victim’s family and their homestead, units were forced to stand down. “However, yesterday morning, units located the scene. It was established that the young girl had been found by community members. The child was stabilised and taken to hospital,” Herbst said. | Mercury Reporter…

Baldwin Ndaba baldwin.ndaba@inl.co.za The South African Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) plans to intensify its campaign for municipal workers to be paid decent salaries and for municipalities to continue providing services to residents. The campaign comes in the wake of political parties holding negotiations to reach coalition agreements in the hung municipalities especially in five of the country’s eight metros. Labour unions are intensifying their call to parties to form municipal councils. Samwu general secretary Dumisane Magagula said they were urging the parties to put aside their differences and focus on ensuring that they form governments that are stable and responsive to the needs of South Africans and municipal workers. “The first priority for the councils should be the immediate implementation of the recently signed salary and wage collective agreement in…

Jolene Marriah-Maharaj jolene.marriah@inl.co.za Four people have been arrested in connection with the killing of a 53-year-old teacher on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast. According to police, Tholakele Cynthia Shelembe was found on November 7 in her Nyangwini home with strangulation marks on her neck and an open wound on her forehead. She was declared dead on the scene and two vehicles were missing. Police spokesperson Colonel Thembeka Mbele said a case of murder and robbery had been opened at Hibberdene SAPS. “Msinsini detectives successfully arrested four suspects aged between 18 and 36 for murder and theft of motor vehicles,” she said. Mbele said during the early hours of Tuesday morning police investigations led to the arrest of a suspect in Yangweni location, Mtwalume. “On Wednesday morning the three remaining suspects were…

WHISTLE-BLOWER Athol Williams deserves the highest honour this country can offer for his bravery in exposing alleged malfeasance involving some companies doing business with the SA Revenue Service (Sars). Instead, Williams has been forced to flee the country citing concerns about his safety. The former senior lecturer at UCT’s Graduate School of Business provided damning testimony at the Zondo Commission on information relating to Sars and his former job at management consultancy firm Bain. He testified about the role of the company in state capture, adding that UCT, his former employer, had not supported him when he blew the whistle. Instead, he claimed that the university continued to do business with companies involved in state capture, an allegation UCT has repeatedly denied. In a detailed statement on why he has…

Evidence over the past five years shows that such deals have collapsed A MONTH before the recent local government elections I sat down with Johann Mettler, the former city manager of the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality, and Clarence Johnson, the former mayor of the Cape Winelands District Municipality, to talk about the intricacies of coalition governments on my Great Governance ZA Podcast. Just to remind ourselves, coalition governments come into being when no single political party obtains 50% +1 of seats following an election. This is sometimes referred to as a hung council – something we heard a lot about in the past few days. This is now the reality, with hung councils having all but doubled from the 26 in 2016. In such cases, parties making up at least…

Mayibongwe Maqhina mayibongwe.maqhina@inl.co.za Issues around incomplete and inaccurate disclosure of irregular expenditure and material misstatements in the submitted financial statements were among the findings during the audit of Eskom’s finances for 2020-21. This emerged when the office of Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke, through audit firm Sizwe Ntsaluba Gobodo-Grant Thornton, briefed the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) yesterday on the audit of the entity’s finances. Auditor Siyakhula Vilakazi said the auditors had found a number of areas where there was non-compliance with the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA) regarding irregular expenditure. “When we ask for explanations from Eskom as to why those are not disclosed as irregular expenditure, most of the time there are no satisfactory answers,” Vilakazi said. He added that Eskom often claimed that the irregular expenditure identified by…

Letters come in themes, as if orchestrated. It’s been “grief” of late. The reasons, I think, are obvious. No one I know does it well. Some walk the hard path differently than others. I’ll write about that in a few days. Lately, I’ve been hearing from people about adoption: reservations and fears about adoption. Broadly, if you qualify in your country, go ahead. There are no guarantees for success, whatever success means, but you will learn more about love and teach about love and discover that adoption is a long and beautiful, often painful, journey. The greatest challenges of adoption for me, and I adopted two babies at birth, have been three-fold: earning the living we need, maintaining my own life while loving my sons (not getting lost in loving…

SABER AHMED JAZBHAY | Newlands West Roman poet Juvenal was being sarcarstic when he asked “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”, that is, “Who will guard the guards themselves?”, considering the level of rampant crime and corruption during his times, like we face right now. Way back then, the system of governance was not developed and advanced as today, with constitutionally empowered institutions to keep the guards in check. Juvenal could never have conceived, let alone anticipated, the level and scope of crime and corruption as well as the breakdowns that humiliate ordinary citizens in 21st century South Africa. So President Cyril Ramaphosa’s hand-wringing statements regarding the “calamity of calamities” confronting us in the form of load shedding leave me angry and fuming that minister Pravin Gordhan and Eskom’s Andre de Ruyter…

Choo-choo choo-choo Choo-chi chi-boogie, Get me right back on the track – Jack! YES, Bill Haley and his Comets. Nothing like a bit of 1950s music to accompany a nostalgic ride along the old main road between Durban and Maritzburg, route of the Comrades Marathon. I’d heard this was still possible. I didn’t quite believe it. But I wuz wrong. The other day I drove from Durban to the capital without once going on the chaotic and scary N3, where heavy duty trucks and trailers – some of them 28-wheelers – dice one another at hair-raising speed downhill and at crawling pace uphill, sometimes taking up all three lanes. What a pleasure the old route is, once you accustom yourself to wagons drawn by oxen (only kidding!) but the pace…

Chulumanco Mahamba chulumanco.mahamba@inl.co.za THE Department of International Relations and Co-operation (Dirco) and the Department of Health are investigating an incident in Cuba in which South African medical students were allegedly assaulted by the police. “The Department of Health would like to confirm that some of the people who appeared in the video clip currently circulating on social media are indeed South African medical students based in Cuba,” the department’s spokesperson, Foster Mohale, said. The video shows a man sitting on a couch with his hands behind his back and a man in uniform restraining him. The restrained man is then slapped by another man in uniform, while other people in the room are heard shouting. The man on the couch is then dragged out of the room flanked by two…

Yogashen Pillay yogashen.pillay@inl.co.za A WOMAN was left in a critical condition after she was assaulted in her home on her farm in Middlerus, between Mooi River and Greytown on Tuesday. The attack comes after a family of three were held up, assaulted and robbed on an Estcourt farm on Monday night. They were held at gunpoint, handcuffed and assaulted by two suspects. Police said the two fled with jewellery and guns. Commenting on Tuesday’s incident police spokesperson Colonel Thembeka Mbele said yesterday that Mooi River police were conducting patrols when they were alerted about the attack. “The police proceeded to the woman’s place of residence and found her with injuries on the body, head and legs and she was taken to hospital. The victim alleged she was attacked with a…

Xolile Bhengu xolile.bhengu@inl.co.za A number of locally made candidate vaccines – including one for Covid-19 – received a boost recently after a landmark grant was awarded by the Chemical Industries Education and Training Authority (Chieta). It announced an investment of R3.5 million for what it said was much-needed research and skills transfer, which is being headed by Professor Markus Depfenhart at Walter Sisulu University (WSU) and North-West University. Depfenhart has been involved at both institutions in the development of vaccines and pandemic management interventions in Africa. Chieta’s role is to facilitate skills development as well as to ensure that skills needs are identified and addressed through training initiatives. Chieta’s chief executive Yershen Pillay said vaccine development was a scarce skill on the African continent. “Locally made vaccines give us the…

At the 2021 UN climate change conference in Glasgow, moving between the corporate slickness of the official “Blue Zone” (a UN-managed space that hosts the negotiations) and the wider fringe was quite a disconcerting experience for me. These were two different worlds. Everyone was committed to saving the planet, but there were highly diverging views about how to do it. The contradictions were all too apparent at the conference, known as COP26. The hired exhibition spaces were hosted by fossil fuel polluting countries and sponsored by large corporations. Corporate spin, also known as greenwash, abounded. There were a few African delegations with their own space and a vanishingly few civil society voices in the main venue. Meanwhile, the discourse was very different in parallel fora. Here the talk was of…

Thami Magubane thami.magubane@inl.co.za THE incoming leadership of uMngeni Municipality has urged municipal staff members not to panic about their jobs, saying no staffers will be victimised, or fired without cause. The municipality said workers would go through a skills audit and the council’s organogram was likely to be assessed and “realigned”. In a telephonic interview with The Mercury yesterday with the incoming deputy mayor, Sandile Mnikathi, and in text communication with mayor-elect Chris Pappas, the DA said it would not go on a witch-hunt and fire workers willy-nilly, once it assumed power. Pappas and Mnikathi are expected to be sworn in tomorrow. The DA seized control of the municipality in the local government elections on November 1. It’s the party’s first municipality in KwaZulu-Natal and was previously under the ANC.…

Baldwin Ndaba and Xolile Bhengu Eskom has reported several big metros and other key industrial sites which are allegedly undermining the power utility’s instruction to implement load shedding to the National Energy Regulator of South Africa for action to be taken against them. The power utility has also threatened to carry out compulsory load shedding if these entities continue to fail to comply with the instruction to load shed. This was revealed by Eskom group executive for distribution Monde Bala and chief executive officer André de Ruyter when they gave the latest update on the state of load shedding yesterday. De Ruyter had earlier also revealed that the power utility was ready to lift load shedding by 5am on Saturday, saying Eskom had managed to recover several megawatts from some…

BEVERLEY TSITSI MUTANDIRO | United Kingdom I am deeply hurt and disgruntled by the lack of professionalism and insensitive attitude that the Zimbabwe government has created within the crucial health sector’s maternity wards. The rights of pregnant women are being violated, they are being deprived of crucial health treatment that they require. They instead face demands of bribery by those who are supposed to provide care for them throughout the pregnancy and childbirth process. Failure to pay the requested unaccountable US dollars before attendance sees these women and their unborn children facing grave danger. Unfortunately, those without means of obtaining the bribery fees face delays in being attended to, hence some babies are born in non-dignified places, or others die in the process of waiting, while some desperate…

FAROUK ARAIE | Benoni Philanthropist, Mr Sayed Mia, was among the top 50 to be honoured with the title, “Influential Personalities of South Africa 2021”. It was Albert Schweitzer who said: “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know. The only ones among you who will truly be happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.” His award is a tribute to a true citizen of the world, extraordinary humanitarian, and practitioner of reverence for human dignity. The impact of his decades of devoted public service is evident in the worthy causes he lifted up as a patron. He personified the quiet reserve, stern fortitude, and unbending integrity of the nation he represented. His exceptional example of service, constancy, and patriotism is…

Police are investigating cases of murder after two people were killed in a house in Osindisweni, near Verulam. Prem Balram, of Reaction Unit SA (Rusa), said they responded to reports of a shooting in the Ogunjini area just before 10pm on Tuesday. He said residents had contacted Rusa after hearing gunshots at a house which is allegedly used as a drug den. “On arrival they found one of the men lying on the floor in one of the bedrooms. He was shot in the head and died at the scene. According to residents, a second person was also shot, but was rushed privately to a hospital and died shortly thereafter.” Police spokesperson Colonel Thembeka Mbele said police were informed that two friends – aged 41 and 47 – were sitting…

Zelda Venter zelda.venter@inl.co.za THE legal challenge by the ACDP and other concerned organisations to halt the roll-out of the Covid-19 vaccine to children between the ages of 12 and 17 could not go ahead as planned yesterday. The urgent application before the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, was postponed indefinitely by Judge Dawie Fourie. Counsel for the applicants said because the matter was complex and arguments were expected to last several hours, it could not proceed before the ordinary urgent court. They wrote a letter to the deputy judge president asking to be allocated a special and urgent date for the application to be heard. They have not yet received a court date. Judge Fourie was also told that the SA Health Products Regulatory Authority (Sahpra), instrumental to this application, had…

AFTER being without a board for about two years, President Cyril Ramaphosa has finally appointed the new board of the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) to be led by its first female chairperson. In a statement, the Presidency announced yesterday that Ramaphosa had appointed Asanda Luwaca, Avela Mjajubana, Karabo Mohale, Lebo Mulaisi, Thulisa Ndlela, Pearl Pillay and Alexandria Procter. Luwaca was designated as the board chairperson and Mohale as the deputy chairperson. “The new board of the NYDA carries a great responsibility in the country’s drive to empower young people through skills development, employment, work experience and other opportunities. “I see the NYDA as a vital partner in the implementation of the Presidential Youth Empowerment Intervention, ensuring that young people are prioritised as part of the Presidential Employment Stimulus,” Ramaphosa…

THIS morning, Eskom Group chief executive Andre de Ruyter woke up, put on his suit, kissed his wife and children goodbye, telling them: “I am going to mount a dead horse today.” When strong statements of criticism and calls for De Ruyter to step down were made, he knew that his days at Eskom were numbered. In a rushed press conference, he defended himself. His most bizarre statement was when he used the analogy of a dead horse to describe his employer, Eskom. De Ruyter said it did not matter whether one changed the jockey; if a horse was dead, it was dead – and it wouldn’t go anywhere. De Ruyter, the jockey, has been collecting millions of rand in salary, riding this “dead horse” Eskom. Any self-respecting executive…