It takes a worker 100 years to earn what a director earns in one year, and other stories

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It takes a worker 100 years to earn what a director earns in one year

In 1993, it would have taken the average labourer 40 years to earn what the average executive director of a top company in South Africa earned in a year.

Alide Dasnois

A \xe2\x80\x9chouse full of faeces\xe2\x80\x9d in Khayelitsha

Metres away from the entrance to the Airport Industria depot, the smell of human waste and chemicals is already unbearable. Inside, people in overalls are emptying portable toilets down a big central drain while others try to clean the floor.

Zintle Swana

After hundreds of jobs lost, Free State promises to fix impassable road

Four years after a R100-million provincial government contract crashed in the Free State \xe2\x80\x93 driving a large civil engineering company into bankruptcy and rendering a major road impassable \xe2\x80\x93 the province has finally taken action to repair the disaster.

Barbara Maregele (with amaBhungane)

Over a million children fall through foster care cracks

Over a million orphans and abused, neglected, and abandoned children in South Africa are falling through the cracks of an overburdened foster care system.

Joyce Xi

Reports

Another Cape Flats housing project goes bust

A Khayelitsha housing project has gone bust amidst allegations of corruption. Beneficiaries are frustrated that they may not get their houses, or that problems with houses that have been built will not be fixed.

Mary-Anne Gontsana

Hout Bay man arrested by 18 cops has bail extended

Santonio Jonkers let out a sigh of frustration as he was told for the third time that his court case was postponed, this time till next year.

Mary-Anne Gontsana

Vrygrond taxi driver beaten at roadblock

Long running tensions between City of Cape Town traffic authorities and the Vrygrond Taxi Association boiled over into a roadside beating of a taxi driver in Muizenberg on Tuesday.

Daneel Knoetze

Disabled Khayelitsha resident has to use neighbours\xe2\x80\x99 toilet

Disabled Site C resident Vincent Gaelejwe, 43, lives in a one-roomed shack and has nowhere to keep the portable toilet supplied by the City of Cape Town. Instead, he limps to his neighbour\xe2\x80\x99s house every day to use the portable toilet there.

Zintle Swana

Not enough dentists or doctors, long queues: Nyanga residents protest

Members of the Treatment Action Campaign and residents marched today in Nyanga to protest about poor health services in Nyanga and surrounding townships.

Zintle Swana

Who is behind Confessions of a Bisexual Chick?

A year ago, Ntombikayise Matyumza of Jeffreys Bay in the Eastern Cape started a Facebook page aimed at gay and lesbian youth. Today she has more than 14,000 followers across the country.

Pharie Sefali

Poor Sanitation and lousy maps contribute to Khayelitsha's crime problems

Following the Khayelitsha Inquiry into Policing, a series of meetings are being organised between SAPS and the Khayelitsha community. One took place at the University of Cape Town's middle campus on the weekend.

Johnnie Isaac

Call for national minimum wage of R5,000 a month

\xe2\x80\x9cWe would like the government to legislate a national minimum wage of R4,500 so that the private sector cannot get away with murder,\xe2\x80\x9d Langa resident Fezile Olifant told a parliamentary hearing on the national minimum wage in Gugulethu at the weekend.

Katy Scott

Ndisebenzisa ikawusi njengephedi, utsho umfundi wakwaLanga

UAkhona ufunda kwibanga lesibhozo. Njengabo bonke abalingane bakhe baseklasini abaninzi, usoloko ephoswa kukuya esikolweni xa esexesheni ngenxa yokuba usapho lwakhe alukwazi ukumthengela iiphedi. Xa kufuneka abhale uvavanyo, usebenzisa ikawusi, utsho.

Pharie Sefali

Farm worker activists acquitted

Four activists and farm workers, arrested two years ago while marching in the Koo valley outside Montagu, have been acquitted.

Daneel Knoetze

Zimbabweans afraid to go home for Christmas

Zimbabweans whose permits expire on 31 December and whose applications for new permits have not yet been processed face a difficult decision about whether to return home for Christmas - and risk trouble at the border on their return to South Africa.

Tariro Washinyira

SAPS to investigate torture in Zimbabwe

South Africa\xe2\x80\x99s highest court has ordered the police to investigate allegations of torture by Zimbabwe police carried out in Zimbabwe on Zimbabwean nationals.

Carmel Rickard

ArcelorMittal and environmental groups battle it out in court

Can civil society organisations compel private companies to provide documents about their impact on the environment? This is the central question in a court battle that reached the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) in Bloemfontein yesterday.

GroundUp staff

Marikana: World Bank loan undermines Lonmin's arguments, says academic

During the hearings of the Marikana Commission, Lonmin executives said the company had not been able to afford to keep its 2006 promise to build 5,500 new houses for workers. Yet a year later, in 2007, the International Finance Corporation had made finance of US$150 million available to Lonmin - part of it for a “large-scale community development programme”.

Alide Dasnois

Opinion

Recruiting child soldiers on the Cape Flats

Calvin* has spent over half of his life in Cape Flats gangs. Today, he is 26 years old and a high-ranking member of both the Mongrels street gang and the 28s prison gang.

Dariusz Dziewanski

Real art makes the privileged uncomfortable

Several Cape Town landmarks have been defaced in recent weeks. Here members of The Tokolos Stencil Collective explain why they have done this.

Members of the Tokolos Stencil Collective

Current struggles of historic school that Biko attended

Forbes Grant Senior Secondary School is not safe. The flimsy fence structure around the school is easily breakable. On the school\xe2\x80\x99s perimeter, the fence has gaping holes in many places. In some parts, there is no fence at all.

Daniel Linde

When the representatives of labour become employers

The very public scrap between former trade union leaders John Copelyn and Marcel Golding, both now billionaire business people, has raised a crucial question for the labour movement: the role of union investment companies.

Terry Bell