5 important things happening in South Africa today
·14 Mar 2017
Here’s what is happening in and affecting South Africa today:
- President Jacob Zuma has admitted that the ANC messed up, allowing divisions in the party to get in the way of governing, and ruining key metros for years; this is why it lost Tshwane, City of Joburg and Nelson Mandela Bay to the opposition parties. Zuma said that he hoped the ANC would never repeat these mistakes again.
- While much of the eastern half of the country recovers from a water crisis, things in the Western Cape are getting worse. Cape Town now only has 105 days of water left, if residents and businesses continue consuming at current rates. Dam levels in the region are at 30% with about 10% of that unusable. People have managed to bring down consumption levels, but are still 51 million kilolitres above the target of 700 million kilolitres.
- Social development minister Bathabile Dlamini and her hand-picked advisors are the ones who stand to gain from the botched Sassa grants deal, Business Day reports. Dlamini and her clique have reportedly sidelined Sassa executives in the process of negotiating a new illegal deal with CPS, and are said to be the ones consulting and orchestrating events. Ths is what led to the Sassa CEO resigning, and other officials being absent.
- Deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas says that his encounter with the Gupta family, where he was offered R600 million and the position of finance minister to be under their instruction in government, was just the tip of the iceberg, and pointed to a far larger problem of rent extraction in government. The Guptas have denied ever meeting Jonas, but the deputy minister has stuck to his version of events.
- South Africa’s rand firmed against the dollar on Monday ahead of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s interest rate decision, with both the currency and stock markets lifted by higher metals prices. On Tuesday, the rand was trading at R13.14 to the dollar, R16.03 to the pound and R14.01 to the euro.
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