November 20, 2014.
For Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I’m Sane Dhlamini.
Making headlines:

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa and its seven supporting unions have filed papers in the High Court in Johannesburg in a bid to get Cosatu to hold a special national congress.

Zimbabwe's Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai is "deeply appalled" by a damning report on Zimbabwe's 2002 elections.

And, South African National Roads Agency CEO Nazir Alli blames the electronic national administration traffic information system for the e-tolling billing errors.

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (or Numsa) and its seven supporting unions have jointly filed papers in the High Court in Johannesburg in a bid to get the Congress of South African Trade Unions (or Cosatu) to hold a special national congress, said Numsa spokesperson Castro Ngobese.     

Numsa was expelled from Cosatu earlier this month during a special central executive committee meeting with a vote of 33 for and 24 against after the trade union federation charged Numsa with violating Cosatu’s constitution.

Cosatu said Numsa could appeal its expulsion at the federation's next national congress, which is expected to be held in September next year.

Ngobese said Numsa's call for a special national congress was never about its expulsion but rather about dealing with the "paralysis in Cosatu".

Internal divisions have wracked Cosatu since its general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi was suspended last year for having an affair with a junior employee, among other things.

 

Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change (or MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai says he is "deeply appalled" by a damning report on Zimbabwe's 2002 elections that has only just been released in South Africa after a lengthy judicial process.

In his first public response to the Khampepe Report, Tvangirai accused Pretoria of "wittingly or unwittingly aiding the subversion of democratic processes in Zimbabwe".

The South African judges who observed the run-up to Zimbabwe's 2002 presidential elections declared in their report that the vote "could not be described as free and fair", but Pretoria went on to endorse longtime leader Robert Mugabe's victory.

Tsvangirai has never accepted his defeat in that poll, or in subsequent elections.
His MDC party said that all elections from the year 2000 have been stolen by Mugabe’s ruling Zanu–PF. A verdict on a court challenge to the 2002 poll result had still to be delivered, the opposition leader said.

Tsvangirai said in a statement that the party was deeply appalled by [the report] and unreservedly deplored what was done by the South African government by trying to sweep the report under the carpet. 

South Africa's Mail and Guardian newspaper waged a long battle to get the Khampepe report published after resistance from the South African government.

South African National Roads Agency Limited (or Sanral) CEO Nazir Alli said that billing errors associated with Gauteng’s e-tolling system were not a reflection of the efficacy of the tolling system itself but were rather the result of an outdated electronic national administration traffic information system, referred to as eNaTIS.

Alli told the Advisory Panel on the Socioeconomic Impact of E-tolls that the system that records the vehicles as they pass through the e-toll gantries is stable, but the billing system was flawed. He said it was not anything that Sanral or the project had done but rather that Sanral relies on the eNaTIS system, which didn’t always have updated vehicle user details.

He said Sanral was looking at regulations governing eNaTIS and saw this as an opportunity to fix and update the system.  There is currently no regulation in South Africa that forced updates to information when registering vehicles.

Submissions to the panel, which had been tasked by Gauteng Premier David Makhura with investigating the overall impact of the tolling system on the province, concluded on Wednesday after Sanral made representations in defence of the system.

Sanral had earlier argued that instituting a fuel levy instead of the user-pays system would not be an “adequate, equitable or efficient” way of funding the upgrades undertaken during the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project, as those that lived outside of the province would be forced to pay for the upgrading of roads that they did not use.

 

Also making headlines:

According to the latest Afrobarometer report, more people across Africa have access to a cell phone network than they do to electricity and piped water.

Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown said on Thursday that whether or not government takes on a strategic business partner for embattled carrier South African Airways remained under discussion. 

The toll in the Ebola epidemic has risen to 5 420 deaths out of 15 145 cases in eight countries, the World Health Organisation said on Wednesday, with transmission of the deadly virus still "intense and widespread" in Sierra Leone.

And, Egypt's industry and trade Minister said three African economic blocs will merge into a new 27-nation free-trade zone under an agreement to be signed in Cairo next month, uniting markets worth 58 per cent of the continent's economic activity.

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That’s a roundup of news making headlines today.