Wednesday, September 8, 2010

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I'm Schalk Burger.

Making headlines:

African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) president Julius Malema on Tuesday attacked ANC leaders denying that nationalisation was party policy, saying that they were "denouncing" the Freedom Charter. "It is the policy of the ANC and we want to reactivate it so it becomes policy of the government," he said.
Speaking at the Mining for Change summit in Sandton, Malema argued that to leverage South Africa's wealth of mineral resources for the benefit of the people, nationalisation was needed to boost State coffers for the provision of services. "We want to nationalise because we want to make profit.... to increase the budget of the State," he said.
Also speaking at the summit, South African Communist Party deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin said that entering a discussion on how to leverage the country's resources through a debate on nationalisation was "unhelpful". He argued that the narrow black economic-empowerment (BEE) focus had "set back" South Africa's critical mining sector, adding that the "potential leverage" for the State in trying to meet its socioeconomic demands by using the country's mineral resources was "squandered" by this narrow BEE focus.

The United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) plans to make the poorest and most remote regions of needy nations the top priority for aid, an approach that it says is not only morally but economically sound.
Unicef chief Anthony Lake said that a new study on aid distribution undertaken by Unicef, showed that aid agencies could save millions of lives by going first to the most disadvantaged mothers and children and their communities. Traditionally, aid programmes have focused first on a country's capital and major cities, where underprivileged populations are relatively accessible, only later moving to difficult-to-reach pockets of poverty and disease. But the new study, Lake said, found that the economic and developmental impact of going straight to the neediest and hardest to reach communities, and then working back to the central cities, was significantly greater than the traditional approach.
Unicef will be focusing its future humanitarian and developmental aid in line with the results of this study.

More South Africans are living in formal housing, but proportionally fewer of them own homes, according to the general household survey released on Tuesday.
The survey by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) showed that 75,5% of South African households in 2009 lived in formal housing, compared with 73,7% in 2002. The percentage of households in informal dwellings also slightly increased, from 13% to 13,4%.
Stats SA executive manager Dr Isabelle Schmidt said that the overall increase of South Africans living in formal dwellings indicated that formal housing was being provided at a rate that was slightly higher than the country's population growth rate.

Also making headlines:

African National Congress secretary-general Gwede Mantashe says that the party's upcoming national general council meeting should not be treated as a launching pad for election campaigns.
Niger's ruling military junta says that it has secured $41-million in aid from international donors to stage elections, raising prospects for a peaceful return to civilian rule.
South African Sport and Recreation Minister Makhenkesi Stofile says that suspended Athletics South Africa boss Leonard Chuene committed "gross misconduct" by allowing Caster Semenya to run in a world championship event in August last year.
And, United Nations (UN) secretary-general Ban Ki-moon visits Rwanda following a dispute over a leaked UN report saying that Rwandan troops may have committed genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

That's a roundup of news making headlines today.