5 important things happening in South Africa today

Here’s what is happening in and affecting South Africa today:

• SAA’s deal with Takatso is off: Minister of Public Enterprises, Pravin Gordhan, has announced that the agreement between South African Airways (SAA) and Takatso, a strategic equity partner, to sell 51% of the entity has been cancelled. Gordhan said that a new valuation of the national carrier’s worth was made, and this overshot Takatso’s original R3 billion offer. [BusinessTech]

• RAF secures interdict against planned NUMSA shutdown: The Road Accident Fund (RAF) has secured an interdict against Thursday’s planned workers’ strike by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA). The union said it was planning a “national shutdown” and would be marching on the Department of Transport’s Tshwane offices to express their opposition to the current restructuring process and are calling for the removal of the RAF CEO. [EWN]

• eThekwini service delivery protests: Angry residents in eThekwini have continued to protest over water and power outages across the metro. The outages stem from an allegedly illegal strike by South African Municipal Workers Union (Samwu)-affiliated municipal workers. The strike is over, but service delivery backlogs persist. The workers were calling for their salaries to match that of municipal workers in other metros. [News24]

• Ekurhuleni loses clean audit status: For 2022/23, Ekurhuleni received an unqualified audit opinion with material findings, while in the previous three years, it received an unqualified audit opinion, with the Auditor General flagging concerns about irregular expenditure in the Gauteng metro. [Daily Maverick]

• Markets: The South African rand strengthened at closing on Wednesday as the U.S. dollar dipped in global markets. On Thursday (14 March), the rand was trading at R18.62 to the dollar, R23.92 to the pound, and R20.28 to the euro. Oil is trading at $84.13 a barrel. [Nasdeq]