Articles

HERE’S a health warning: this story is full of WTF moments, as social media would put it. But read on – at your own risk of apoplexy – for some stark light on why the Eastern Cape, that most disaster-prone of provinces, lives full-time in the dwang. First, meet...

The earth is certainly moving for us today. It’s taken years of planning and now at last we have a digging machine (a TLB for those who know the jargon) to shape a small dam for run-off rain water at the end of the garden. There are clouds of dust everywhere, but we...

WANNA see for yourself that the police service has created a culture of crime tolerance among its members? Read on. There’s this guy, Victor Vass. A police warrant officer for more than 20 years. Now he wants to join the bomb squad. So he passes the psychometric and...

LIKE a curse, the Dorsland Trek, even today. First of these treks started in 1874 continuing sporadically until 1905. Families from the Groot Marico and Rustenburg districts suffered unbearable hardship as they trekked through the Kalahari, leaving dead people, dead...

TAKE a look at the behaviour of a bunch of politicians in the Northern Cape, and you can see how even the remotest parts of South Africa suffer from people who put selfish party interests above serving the people. Earlier this year operations of the...

WHEN a woman kills her baby for no serious reason, what’s an appropriate punishment? It’s a hard question for judges in Namibia where infanticide has become such a problem that a judge recently imposed 20 years as a deterrent. The case involved Sara Kamutushi, 28,...

IT’S a standard of crime fiction – the deranged killer who tortures and kills street walkers and rent boys. Most readers would have the luxury of a detached consideration: was the story well-written; did we find it compelling? But for the last seven years, three...

FEW people think of court decisions as inspiration for comedy. This would be a mistake. Especially if you are a lover of Norwegian Blue parrots, John Cleese and Michael Palin. I am thinking, on this occasion, of a new decision from the labour courts, in which a...

THOUGH beset by serious problems of his own, South Africa’s Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng has a lot of advice for judges in the rest of Africa. Speaking at Chatham House in London last month, the Chief Justice’s given topic was ‘The Rule of Law in South Africa:...

WHY does the law have such an obsession about gender? A stupid question perhaps, but one I found myself asking the other day as I read court papers in which – as usual – everyone identified themselves in their affidavits according to whether they were male or female....