Friday January 20, 2012

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I’m Brad Dubbelman

Making headlines:

Placing departments under administration created problems for people in Limpopo instead of helping them, the ANC Youth League in the province said. "As a result of the interference by national Cabinet, service delivery in Limpopo is literally paralysed," it said in a statement. "For the first time since 1994 we are experiencing problems." It claimed school nutrition programmes and transport were not being paid, medication in hospitals was not being procured, education bursaries had been frozen and various other service providers had not been paid. The national government placed five Limpopo departments under administration in December last year because of billions of rands in wasted spending, leaving the province bankrupt.

Ugandan police fired teargas and held opposition leader Kizza Besigye and several allies in a police cell yesterday to stop them leading an antigovernment protest the police said would stoke chaos. Besigye had been meeting a number of senior opposition figures in an upmarket suburb of the capital, Kampala, ahead of a rally to demonstrate against corruption and economic hardships. Armed police intercepted the group on the highway as they headed towards the city centre. A protracted standoff ended when the police fired a single teargas cannister before bundling the politicians into vans. The protest failed to go ahead.

SA Reserve Bank governor Gill Marcus sounded a warning about above-inflation price increases for administered costs, such as electricity. "The case for further significant above-inflation increases is questionable," Marcus said in Pretoria. Marcus was announcing the Monetary Policy Committee's decision to keep the repo rate unchanged at 5.5%. Marcus said administered prices -- a price set by law or official policy, not by demand -- remained a concern to the inflation outlook.

Also making headlines:
Nigeria has discovered a huge discrepancy in the amount of the motor fuel it subsidises and what people actually consume, a legislative committee said, supporting the idea that a government scheme to make petrol cheaper is wasteful and corrupt.
And, the process of documenting more than 250 000 Zimbabweans living in South Africa has almost been completed, a senior home affairs official said.

That’s a roundup of news making headlines today.