Kategorie: South African news

About 3,000 miners were trapped underground Wednesday when a water pipe burst and probably caused a shaft to collapse in a South African gold mine, officials said.

There were no immediate reports of any injuries at Harmony Gold’s Elandsrand Mine near Johannesburg. A company executive said officials have been in contact with the trapped workers and expect to rescue them over the next 24 hours.

Harmony’s acting chief executive, Graham Briggs, said on MSNBC that the miners have been receiving food and water.

He said the rescuers would evacuate the miners over the next day using a small cage in another shaft, but the process would be a slow one.

"It’s a case of getting a large number of people up in cages," he told MSNBC, according to Dow Jones news service.

Briggs said that the workers – consisting of the mine’s entire morning shift – became trapped after damage to a shaft made it unsafe for workers to use.

"Nobody was injured, but there was extensive damage to the steel work and electrical feeder cords," said Harmony Gold spokeswoman Amelia Soares, according to the South African Press Association.

The spokesman for the National Union of Mineworkers, Lesiba Seshoka, said the managers were meeting with union members.

"It’s a terrible situation," Seshoka told The Associated Press. "The only exit is blocked, probably by a fall of ground."

Officials said burst water pipe probably caused soil in the underground shaft to collapse. Seshoka said it wasn’t clear how deep the miners were underground but gold mine shafts in South Africa are typically about 1 1/2 miles below ground.

The union feared the men could be trapped without oxygen because of collapsed ground, or impeded by rock falls and mud slides by the burst ware pipe.

Seshoka charged the shafts had not been properly maintained. "Our guys there tell us that they have raised concerns about the whole issue of maintenance of shafts with the mine (managers) but they have not been attended to," he said.

Last year, 199 mineworkers died in accidents, mostly rock falls, the government Mine Health and Safety Council reported in September.

The Madiba Banqueting Halls in Potchefstroom were defaced sometime on Thursday, the Tlokwe City Council said on Saturday.

The defacement was discovered on Friday morning by workers at the building, said the council – the building had been defaced with the old apartheid flag colours of blue, orange and white.

"Those behind these acts of vandalism are people with a political agenda.

"There are people who are mobilising for a rent boycott in protest against the name changes," said the council.

The council condemned "racist graffiti" found across the city as "completely unacceptable.

They contained insults, political defiance, and attacks on black people, their leaders and government.

The council said they had lodged a complaint with the police and would be studying their CCTV cameras for more information about who was behind these acts.

The city’s new street names were being removed and dumped in the Vaal River.

Others had been defaced with black paint, said the council.

"One of the Nelson Mandela Drive street name-plates was painted with black paint to read "Dela rylaan".

"We are now convinced that those engaged in these acts of political vandalism are people with a clear political agenda," said the council.

Farmers in South Africa have been warned that they could have their land taken from them unless they stop "abusive" policies towards workers.

Most highly productive farmland in South Africa is still in the hands of white farmers. While the government has enacted a "restitution" policy of handing plots to blacks under a willing buyer, willing seller system, critics have said progress has been too slow.

While the situation is far from that witnessed in neighbouring Zimbabwe, tensions have soared recently over alleged illegal lay-offs of workers and mistreatment by farm owners.

Lulu Xingwana, the agriculture and land affairs minister, said at the weekend that some farmers could face tough punishment.

"We are obviously disturbed by the persistent reports of abuses on farms," she said. "For those people who are not keeping [within] the law, the government has the right to expropriate."

Mrs Xingwana was reacting to claims on Wednesday by Dirk du Toit, her deputy minister, that white farmers had a lingering feudal attitude towards their staff.

In response to a question about farmers who lay off and evict workers unlawfully, Mr Du Toit told MPs: "Those people who don’t want to hear, we are not only going to take them to court, we are going to also take their land away from them."

The leading opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, called Mr Du Toit’s statement racist. "As a senior member of the ANC, he [is] insinuating that all of [white farmers] assault their farm workers," said Maans Nel, the party’s land affairs spokesman,.

The country’s largest farmers’ union, Agri SA, said it was not aware of any illegal farm evictions this year.

A lone South African submarine left some North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) commanders with red faces yesterday as it "sank" all the ships of the Nato Maritime Group engaged in exercises with the SA Navy off the Cape coast.

The S101 – or the SAS Manthatisi – not only evaded detection by a joint Nato and SA Navy search party, consisting of several ships combing the search area with radar and sonar; it also "sank" all the ships taking part in the exercise.

Several times during the exercise, that lasted throughout Monday night and yesterday morning, a red square lit up the screens where the surface ships thought the submarine was, but it remained elusive.

This gave Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota something to brag about when he landed on the SAS Amatola yesterday to speak to the media.

"To be able to frustrate detection by Nato nations is no mean achievement, it speaks of the excellence of the equipment we acquired for this purpose," Lekota said.

And while this left one of the world’s strongest military alliances frustrated, it was also a sign that the group had a capable partner in Africa, Lekota said.

"With sustained interoperatability with foreign forces such as Nato we are well positioned to respond to any unforeseen circumstances that may confront either ourselves or other regions," he said.

Lekota was quite clear that a working relationship with Nato was desired. "They have a partner of reliable capability because we are forging working relations here," he said.

These sentiments were echoed by the commander of the Nato maritime group, Rear Admiral Michael Mahon.

"I can’t speak for what the future will hold but certainly this was valuable. Africa is a strategic continent. The freedom of the seas, energy, security, they are all critical issue to Nato countries," he said.

A proposal by France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy that South Africa and four other emerging economies be included in the influential Group of Eight (G8) has met with mixed response from local commentators.

Goolam Ballim, the group economist at Standard Bank, said the inclusion would be a constructive gesture. "There is increasing recognition that, in their current format, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund will become irrelevant if they don’t evolve to include both leadership and opinion of emerging markets, and the same is true of other international groupings."

Bloomberg reported that Sarkozy, in his first major foreign policy speech yesterday, proposed the inclusion of China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa in the G8. Sarkozy’s call flies in the face of the position adopted by the body’s chairman, Angela Merkel. The German chancellor has opposed the extension of G8 membership.

Ballim added that the inclusion of emerging market leaders would give credibility to global dialogue. "It is recognition that, for global dialogue to have a genuine meaning, the leading emerging economies do need a seat at the table. South Africa can be a meaningful voice for Africa’s interest at the altar of global dialogue."

Steve Friedman, a research associate at Idasa, holds a similar view. "It would create a platform for a more equal conversation about international trade."

But Garth le Pere, the executive director of the Institute for Global Dialogue, said it would not be in South Africa’s interests to join the G8 as this would compromise its position "as a strong proponent of South-South co-operation".

Finance minister Trevor Manuel, who has played a high-profile role in engagements between the developed and developing worlds, would not comment, said national treasury spokesperson Thoraya Pandy. She referred inquiries to the presidency, which also declined to comment, referring all questions to foreign affairs, which could not be reached.

The G8 is an informal, but powerful, grouping of the world’s seven leading industrialised countries – the US, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Canada and Italy – and Russia. While the size of gross domestic product (GDP) is no longer a major qualification for membership, it did determine the original membership in 1975.

South Africa’s inclusion would break the mould. Cees Bruggemans, the chief economist at First National Bank, said South Africa, with an economy worth only $280 billion (R2 trillion), was far smaller than the G8 members.

The World Bank’s July 2007 development indicators show South Africa has the 27th-biggest GDP. Russia, the smallest of the G8 economies, has a GDP of $986 billion, while the biggest is the US, with an economy worth $13.2 trillion. After South Africa, Mexico is the smallest of the proposed entrants, with GDP of $839 billion.

Ballim said, however, that South Africa "can be seen to represent the considered opinion of emerging markets and also is a beachhead for Africa. Even though Africa comprises less than 3.3 percent of global GDP and 2.5 percent of world exports, it houses at least 13 percent of the world’s population."

Bruggemans added that global institutional arrangements were changing daily as emerging markets gained in stature.

Peter Draper, a research fellow at the SA Institute of International Affairs, said an important question was whether the other members would accept the inclusion of the five countries. And he pointed out that China was not a democracy, which is seen as a precondition for membership.

A South African-based observer commented that it was unlikely there would be support from other members, except for the UK.

Bloomberg said Sarkozy’s comments came two months after the last G8 meeting established the Heiligendamm Process, in which Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa would have regular, formal talks with the G8. Previous invitations tended to be ad hoc.

The Eastern Cape land affairs department has introduced the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) and Area-Based Planning (ABP) to speed up land redistribution to try to meet the 2014 deadline.

These two programmes, among others, would play key roles in assisting the department achieve its objectives of redistributing 30 per cent of white-owned commercial farms to the previously disadvantaged, said department head Dali Matta.

Redistributing 30% of white- owned commercial farms by 2014 is the national agriculture and land affairs‘ directive, which all provinces are expected to meet.

These programmes will not necessarily replace the government‘s land redistribution delivery vehicles, Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD), the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy (Plas) or expropriation.

They would rather complement the three delivery vehicles to speed up the process and ensure sustainable farming operations after the farms had been handed over to the beneficiaries, Matta said.

The ABP and SPV were conceived after the realisation that meeting the target would be difficult if land redistribution continued at the current pace.

“The SPV is a system whereby a land redistribution applicant accesses all the services under one roof. Currently applicants have to access all the services from different institutions.

“For example, when applying for project funding, the applicants come to us, but for support services they have to go to agriculture, and elsewhere for evaluation of land, business plan and surveying of the land. The SPV will house everything under one roof,” he said.

The SPV would shorten the length of time in which applications were processed. In turn, this would increase the pace of processing more farms, and would result in more hectares being delivered.

The concept goes to the Cabinet for final approval sometime in September. Consultation with stakeholders had taken place and they had bought in, he said,

The Eastern Cape has managed to redistribute only about 4% of the envisaged 30%, which is about 297 000ha.

With the department still having to redistribute about 2,2 million hectares in the next seven years, Matta said the SPV and ABP became more critical. The entire 30% is about 2,65 million hectares of arable land. More than three quarters of the 4% had been redistributed after 2001 after the introduction of LRAD, he said.

Before that, the government‘s delivery vehicle was the Land Acquisition Grant (Slag), which was introduced in 1995.

“Slag had to be reviewed as it was not doing well. It had limitations,” he said. Under Slag a household could only access R16 000. This did not work because in order to acquire a farm many families had to pool their grants, which created all sorts of problems as it made too many the beneficiaries of a single farm.

Unlike Slag, LRAD offers the individual the opportunity to access a minimum grant of R20 000 and a maximum of R100 000.

“With LRAD, individuals within a family can pool their grants, acquire a farm and work as a family,” he said. But LRAD is also under review. “We want to see where we can improve.”

With Plas, the government acquires arable land, develops it and leases it to beneficiaries who manage it, with the option to buy it after a certain number of years.

ABP is a new system which requires municipalities to integrate land redistribution and how best it can be achieved, in their integrated development plans. “Municipalities have been consulted about this, and they should include ABP in their annual IDP reviews,” Matta said.

Over and above the 30% of white-owned commercial farms to be acquired, Matta said, the government was busy with other projects aimed at redistributing its own land for agricultural purposes.

Speaking in Addo recently, Deputy Land and Agriculture Minister Dirk du Toit painted a sobering picture, saying about 82% of the 100 million hectares of farmland in South Africa was still in the hands of white people.

Moreover, he said since 1995 national government had managed to deliver 4% of land through redistribution. To meet the 2014 deadline, he said, about 2,86 million hectares should be distributed each year.

“This is an awesome challenge, but not insurmountable.” To this end the government would also pursue expropriation if necessary.

It would be done within the confines of the law, though, he said.

Although it could not provide figures, the Eastern Cape Commission on Restitution of Land Rights said it was close to settling all urban claims.

Project co-ordinator Mandisi Jekwa said he was confident that the commission would meet the 2008 deadline on all urban claims, except in cases beyond the commission. These were mainly claims being dealt with by the courts.

However, he said a significant number of rural claims still needed a considerable amount of attention. “Rural claims are challenging. They take much too long to process.”

Rural claims were protracted for longer than anticipated, he said, because of the lack of proper documents from claimants, the difficulty of tracing claimants, contested tribal boundaries and the fact that most rural claims, as opposed to urban claims, were communal.

“Given these challenges, it is unlikely that we will meet the deadline with rural claims.”