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By Sally Evans Every day we are inundated with scandals relating to nepotism, tenders and corruption. And the media slogs away trying to expose those who — at the cost of development — are merrily filling their boots with cash and have just taken ownership of new BMWs. Tenderpreneurs — the mantra for jobs for […]

By Glenda Daniels This is my first blog. I will write about confessions of a non-blogger, non-tweeter, non-Facebooker, another time. For now, an exciting, nerve-wracking, tense, but maybe even adventurous year awaits us. There are confusing issues to digest regarding the democratic space of the media in 2011 after the traumatic flurry last year: journalists’ […]

By Ilham Rawoot So what does a journalist do when he or she is being assaulted for doing their job (this is not a riddle)? This is what our photographer, Oupa Nkosi and I had to grapple with last week, when we had six angry people throwing rocks at Oupa and his camera. And what […]

By Ilham Rawoot Circumcision is a touchy business. And writing about it has proven to be even touchier, especially when nobody wants to talk about it. When the KwaZulu-Natal health department decided to go ahead with using the TaraKLamp (a device that strikes me as the penile equivalent of a nail clipper) to circumcise men […]

By Ilham Rawoot While big things are happening on the media freedom front, it seems that some of the people on the inside of the SABC are the ones blocking the news themselves. This doesn’t make things any easier in a tense atmosphere where journalists still have to deal with difficult spokespeople who think that […]

By Adriaan Basson Since he and his team successfully prosecuted Jackie Selebi, the National Prosecuting Authority is refusing to grant me an interview with Advocate Gerrie Nel. Why? Nel and his team were the architects of Operation Bad Guys — one of the Scorpions’ final investigations that netted Selebi, Glenn Agliotti, Clinton Nassif and a […]

By Jackie Mapiloko During school holidays my parents would ship me to a relative’s house in Evaton, a tiny settlement in the Vaal Triangle. My ageing relative was landlord to about 20 families who lived in shacks in a yard, which she had inherited from her mother. As the landlord, or ”ma-stand” as she was […]

By Ilham Rawoot Writing a good investigative story is hard work. It’s not a matter of sitting down at a computer and typing away. It takes a lot of time, talking to many sources, going through documents, research and asking questions to people implicated or involved. This includes putting allegations to people and getting a […]

By Sam Sole So. Thanks to the Financial Mail we now know that the outcry over the Protection of Information Bill is an “overreaction” from people “obsessed” with openness and the availability of information. Chillingly that is the view of the man tasked with ushering this dangerous piece of legislation through parliament, the honourable Cecil […]

By Stefaans Brümmer I take no pleasure in seeing a man go down, stripped of his dignity, exposed for his lies. That sense is more acute in the case of Jackie Selebi, convicted of corruption on Friday. For Selebi’s story is in many ways a parable of our democracy: it is a story of struggle, […]