The recent furore over the lawyers in the huge silicosis court case focused on race, but the real issue is how lawyers advance the cause of justice, argue Pasika Nontshiza and John Clarke.
Pasika Nontshiza and John GI Clarke
Opinion | 23 October 2015
If the court did not decide in favour of the gold miners in the silicosis case, hundreds of thousands of sick miners and their families would not be heard, advocates for the mineworkers told the Gauteng High Court yesterday.
Pete Lewis
News | 23 October 2015
Attempts by lawyers for mining giant Anglo American to play the race card in the silicosis case were rebuffed by the South Gauteng High Court yesterday.
Pete Lewis
News | 22 October 2015
Lawyers for the mining companies have begun to set out their case in the South Gauteng High Court, which is hearing an application from mineworkers to be allowed to claim for damages due to exposure to silica dust on behalf of a bigger group of affected mineworkers.
Lwandile Fikeni and GroundUp staff
News | 15 October 2015
While the government earnestly pledges its commitment to reversing inequality, it reproduces inequality in the normal behaviour it expects for itself and the broader elite of South Africa’s political-economy. Two recent and very public events illustrate these opposing positions.
Jeff Rudin
Opinion | 13 October 2015
In King Leopold’s Ghost, the historian Adam Hochschild uncovers the horrors committed in the Belgian Congo in the years before and after 1900. It is a history of slavery, murder and mutilation – anyone who’s seen the pictures of piles of cut-off hands cannot but be horrified by it.
Marcus Low
Opinion | 9 October 2015
South Africa’s R7 billion a year fruit industry is threatened with potentially massive job and financial losses. It is a looming crisis that calls for urgent and comprehensive action at government level before the threat, still restricted to the Western Cape, spreads. It is also something that highlights the integrated nature of the modern economy.
Terry Bell
Opinion | 14 September 2015
Some of the top companies on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange are flouting environmental laws and not telling their shareholders, according to a study by the Centre for Environmental Rights.
Alide Dasnois
Feature | 8 September 2015
Robert Thompson has been collecting material for recycling in Cape Town since 1999. On an average day he makes R100, selling the cardboard and paper he collects to Harrington Buy Back Centre (HBBC) in the city centre.
Bernard Chiguvare
News | 7 September 2015
Rubbish is piling up in front of people’s homes in Barcelona informal settlement near Gugulethu and the airport in Cape Town. Residents showed their displeasure this morning by dumping rubbish on the N2.
Mary-Anne Gontsana
News | 2 September 2015
Phakisa, from the Sesotho word meaning "hurry up", has been touted by government as the silver bullet that would “fast track the implementation of solutions on critical development issues.”
Christopher Rutledge
Opinion | 1 July 2015
Earlier this week, the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance formally released the long-sought Environmental Master Plan for the Vanderbijlpark Steel Works owned by international steel giant ArcelorMittal (AMSA). AMSA only handed over this Master Plan, a series of expert reports on the environmental and health impacts of the steel works compiled in 2003, in December 2014, after being ordered to do so by the Supreme Court of Appeal.
Melissa Fourie, Robyn Hugo and Nicole Löser
Opinion | 29 June 2015
When Manie Louw took over a farm outside Paternoster last year his neighbours warned him about three things: stock theft, jackals, and pied crows. Louw, a 53 year-old sheep farmer from Calvinia, grew up raising livestock, and thought himself familiar with the risks of the trade. He brought 42 aging Dorper ewes to the coast with him, hoping to fatten them for slaughter on the farm’s Strandveld vegetation. “I didn’t know what people meant about the crows,” he said.
Kimon de Greef
News | 4 June 2015
Garbage is piling up in Marikana informal settlement. Residents, concerned about their health and the squalor in which they are living, are calling on the City of Cape Town to begin providing services.
Nombulelo Damba
News | 13 May 2015
Khayelitsha residents who applied for funds from the Khayelitsha Motsepe Foundation in 2013 might have to wait months for the money, says the head of the Motsepe Foundation in the Western Cape, Steve Mashalane.
Nombulelo Damba
Feature | 8 April 2015