For Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I’m Sane Dhlamini.

Making headlines: KZN Basic Education Department arranges mobile classrooms as 72 schools remain inaccessible, we owe the board and management of Eskom our full support, Ramaphosa asserts and, Jammeh Ally on trial in Germany over role in Gambian death squad

KZN Basic Education Department arranges mobile classrooms as 72 schools remain inaccessible

As mop-up operations in flood-hit KwaZulu-Natal continue, 72 schools remain inaccessible.

National Department of Basic Education spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga said that of the 630 schools that were affected by the disaster, 124 suffered serious damage and 72 are inaccessible.

Mhlanga said the department will send 98 mobile classrooms to the area to ensure that teaching and learning continue.

He said the provision of scholar transport was also affected at 34 schools.  

Last week, KwaZulu-Natal Education MEC Kwazi Mshengu said preliminary figures on how much it would cost to fix school infrastructure amounted to R442-million - an amount that is expected to increase.

we owe the board and management of Eskom our full support, Ramaphosa asserts

“We owe the board and management of Eskom our full support as they work to turn the utility around,” President Cyril Ramaphosa writes in his weekly newsletter.

Published against the backdrop of a recent bout of Stage 4 load-shedding and fresh finger-pointing over who is to blame for intensifying load-shedding, Ramaphosa insists that the crisis has its roots in events that pre-date the current Eskom leadership.

“Despite warnings from energy experts about impending energy shortages nearly two decades ago, there was a delay in commissioning new generation capacity.”

The President’s analysis gels with that offered by Eskom CEO André de Ruyter during a recent load-shedding briefing, where he also reiterated a call for an urgent injection of non-Eskom capacity to help address a supply deficit of between 4 000 megawatts and 6 000 megawatts.

Jammeh Ally on trial in Germany over role in Gambian death squad

The trial of a Gambian man accused of being part of a death squad that assassinated opponents of former President Yahya Jammeh, including a journalist of the AFP news agency, has begun in Germany.

The suspect, identified by media as Bai Lowe, is accused of crimes against humanity, murder and attempted murder, including the 2004 killing of longstanding AFP correspondent Deyda Hydara, who was also co-founder of Gambian independent daily The Point.

Lowe, arrested in Hanover in March 2021, will appear in court on Monday in the nearby town of Celle.

The trial is “the first to prosecute human rights violations committed in [The] Gambia during the Jammeh era on the basis of universal jurisdiction”, according to Human Rights Watch.

That’s a roundup of news making headlines today

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