SO, LOCAL actors plan to stop American actress and singer Jennifer Hudson from being cast as Winnie Madikizela Mandela in a film based on the ANC veteran’s life story.
The film, to be shot on location in SA, is based on an unofficial biography of Maikizela-Mandela written by local journalist Anna Marie Du Preez and will be directed by accomplished South African filmmaker Darrell Roodt.
As I prepared to write this blog yesterday, I called a dentist friend of mine who works at a public hospital in Johannesburg to get a number of another friend for an expert opinion on HIV/AIDS, and she blurted out: “I’m on ARVs again”.
Again, I ask as I seem to recall that we have had this conversation many times before. “No,” she says. “It’s only the fourth time in 10 years, really.” She laughs for a minute or two before explaining that two days earlier she was doing an extraction on a patient, and as she was taking out the root she felt the instrument she was using dig into her index finger. She had pricked herself, again.
I am not looking forward to the festive season. And I think there are a whole lot of us out there who aren’t . This season is unlike any I have experienced before. The Christmas cards that usually fill my pigeon hole at work and my letter box at home just aren’t coming in.
Neither are the invitations to the many parties that normally take place at this time of the year. I’m not even going to mention the endless shopping trips to the malls, which have all but disappeared.
The fun and excitement that usual precedes this time of the year ain ‘ t there anymore, courtesy of the “R” word. Read the rest of this entry »
That a single company could continue to enjoy the largesse of a government department and receive multiple contracts worth billions of rand, despite being under investigation, is simply breathtaking.
Parliament heard on Tuesday how top officials in the correctional services department colluded with a major company in tender rigging, and accepted substantial inducement to ensure that lucrative contracts continued to be awarded to this group of companies.
Willie Hofmeyer, chief of the Special Investigating Unit (SIU), who conducted the probe, found clear evidence of corruption, including officials allowing the supplier to draw up the tender specifications.
After my colleagues ” went live” with their blogs on the Business Day website , it was only a matter of time before I also joined the bandwagon.
My editor, Peter Bruce, and colleague Sam Mkokeli went live last week and it is an honour and a privilege to join them on this exciting medium . A forum we print journalists sometimes treat with a certain degree of suspicion with all this talk of print journalism being an endangered species .
With that I welcome you to my very first blog.