South Africa

South Africa will hold the Fifth Summit of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group on 27 March 2013 at the Inkosi Albert Luthuli Convention...

South Africa’s Trade Minister Rob Davies gave a list of trade concerns to Beijing officials in October during his tour of East Asia. Davies’s government wants to reduce...

Rob Davies’s recent tour led to the strengthened economic relations with Indonesia and China. On 17 October in Jakarta, South Africa’s Minister of Trade and Industry...

President Jacob Zuma has sent 40 hand-picked intelligence operatives to the African National Congress’s 16-20 December conference in Mangaung, we hear. They will be on the look-out for...

President Jacob Zuma is tightening his grip on state-owned enterprises and purging boards and executives. His advisors say the SOEs often ignore his government’s objectives, behave too independently...

The re-election of President Jacob Zuma as African National Congress (ANC) President is an ‘unstoppable tsunami’, say his backers, yet many members of his original coalition of trades...

Of the 4,500 voting delegates who will decide the African National Congress presidential election at the party conference, 4,103 (91.2%) will come from ANC branches, each of which...

A furious row has erupted in cabinet between the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, and her counterpart at National Planning, Trevor Manuel.

African National Congress leaders are trying to stitch together a deal that would avoid a contest for the party Presidency between incumbent Jacob Zuma and Vice-President Kgalema Motlanthe...

The plan to secure President Jacob Zuma certain victory at the African National Congress’s leadership election focuses on one-to-one meetings with his main opponents. Zuma’s enforcers are concentrating...

A rousing welcome at a national trades union conference and a belated wage deal at the Marikana platinum mines are the first signs that President Jacob Zuma is...

A political fix negotiated on 16 September allowed the leaders of the Congress of South African Trade Unions to paper over their differences as Secretary General Zwelinzima Vavi...

Senior politicians, not least of all President Jacob Zuma, are failing to deflect public anger about the massacre of 34 miners by police on 16 August at Lonmin’s...

The dispute at the Lonmin mine is as much about rivalry between the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union and the National Union of Mineworkers as about wages....

Ex-President Thabo Mbeki has taken issue with South Africa’s push to get Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma elected Chairwoman of the African Union. She defeated the incumbent, Gabon’s Jean Ping, prompting criticism that South...

Security crises in five countries and pressing economic problems confront the new Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. Although she has three months to wind up...

Just hours before voting began for the new chairperson of the African Union Commission in Addis Ababa on 15 July, veteran diplomats were predicting a repeat of the...

The authorities have tried to hush up a break-in that took place at South Africa’s largest nuclear research centre, the Pelindaba facility near Pretoria, on 28 April. The...

Policies were not changed nor presidents toppled when the African National Congress met last week. Yet everyone – supporters of President Jacob Zuma and of his two main...

The Southern African Development Community, anxious to free its financial operations from domination by the large, state-owned Development Bank of Southern Africa, plans to set up a rival...

The Guinean government’s decision this week to shut down a bid by South African businessmen who wield high-level political connections, to run its national mining company follows growing...

• Walter Hennig, Chief Executive Officer of Palladino, a South African. The considerable fortune enjoyed by the Hennig family comes mainly from diamond trading and farming, though Walter...

An attempt to meet the political requirements and the economic self-interest of factions in the governing African National Congress has produced a plan for super-taxes on mining profits,...

The nucleus of a proposed state-owned mining company would be the existing African Exploration Mining and Finance Company (AEMFC), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Central Energy Fund (CEF)...

Ex-President Thabo Mbeki is again reinventing himself: his latest struggle is against corruption, leading a campaign to recover some of the hundreds of billions of dollars extracted from...

The battle for succession in the African National Congress is getting nastier as its outcome looks more uncertain. Supporters of the main protagonists fight their battles, firstly within...

President Jacob Zuma’s allies are trying to arrange the state security and financial apparatus to protect him from future prosecution. They also want security officials to pursue his...

Joseph Stiglitz, a United States Nobel prize-winning economist, has become an unlikely guru of the left wing of the governing African National Congress in its battle with...

Efforts to negotiate a compromise between Gabon and South Africa over the contest for the presidency of the African Union Commission are faltering. This is unlikely to...

Civic activists and concerned citizens are threatened by a steep drop in charitable donations. The funding model of voluntary donations for good works is a victim of the...

President Jacob Zuma is struggling to carry fellow leaders of the African National Congress with him in his campaign against dissident ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema. On...

The announcement of these grandiose schemes in Parliament last month coincides with leadership contests within the governing African National Congress, which will choose its presidential candidate at...

The cabinet is split three ways over control over the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and infrastructure spending.

Infrastructure investment is financed partly from the National Treasury or appropriations by Parliament. Yet a large share of the finance comes from the budgets of state-owned enterprises (SOEs),...

Afrikaners complaining of a ‘Boer genocide’ are joining forces with far-right members of the European Parliament to protest the murder of white farmers in South Africa. In 2010,...

South Africa seeks a global role and is standing up for democracy – in Madagascar, anyway.

President Jacob Zuma gave his third, and best, State of the Nation Address to a joint session of Parliament on 9 February. To show their growing power, the...

Central to President Jacob Zuma’s plans for 2012 is a massive infrastructure development programme. It is to be driven and overseen by the Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Commission (PICC),...

The election that matters is the one within the governing African National Congress, whose December conference in Mangaung in the Free State will pick its presidential candidate for...

Foreign investors will find the political climate discouraging. Exports, apart from gold, are likely to slow. The fall of the rand against the US dollar will help some...

Despite the fact that China has no chrome reserves of its own, it became the world's top producer of ferrochrome in the first half of 2012. It...

European officials expressed anger in early June about the governing African National Congress’s new strategy to sideline South Africa’s traditional trading allies and forge closer ties with India...

Despite the billions of dollars in investment that President Jacob Zuma’s ‘Look East’ policy could potentially deliver, Asian investment in South Africa has already yielded many promises, few...

Human rights campaigner Desmond Tutu is not winning many friends in Beijing. The Archbishop drew China’s ire in October last year by inviting the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, to his 80th...