{"id":165025,"date":"2017-03-17T07:54:44","date_gmt":"2017-03-17T05:54:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=165025"},"modified":"2017-03-17T07:54:44","modified_gmt":"2017-03-17T05:54:44","slug":"5-important-things-happening-in-south-africa-today-28","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/government\/165025\/5-important-things-happening-in-south-africa-today-28\/","title":{"rendered":"5 important things happening in South Africa today"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s what is happening in and affecting South Africa today:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/af.reuters.com\/article\/southAfricaNews\/idAFJ8N1GE00C\">The Constitutional Court will deliver its ruling on the Sassa matter at 10am today, finally giving various stakeholders direction in the ongoing grants crisis<\/a><\/strong>. The court will decide if it&#8217;s okay to go ahead with an interim contract with Net1&#8217;s CPS on an emergency basis, or whether dealing with the company is illegal and invalid like last time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/ewn.co.za\/2017\/03\/17\/s-and-p-flags-sa-govt-funding-to-soes-as-risk\">Ratings firm S&amp;P Global has reiterated that the South African government&#8217;s continued filtering of cash to its struggling SOEs is a major financial risk in the country, that is putting its credit rating in jeopardy<\/a><\/strong>. The group, which holds South Africa at one notch above junk, also highlighted the political tensions, slow growth and high unemployment, all of which is not being addressed.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.iol.co.za\/news\/politics\/helenzille-was-not-justifying-colonialism-8216572\">Western Cape premier Helen Zille&#8217;s spokesperson Michael Mpofu says that Zille was in no way defending colonialism in a series of tweets on Thurday <\/a><\/strong>&#8211; she was merely referring to how Singapore (where she visited) had moved past its colonial history to build a strong economy. Zille will face the DA&#8217;s disciplinary committee over the tweets. The ANC and the EFF have called for her to be removed.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.co.za\/2017\/03\/16\/there-are-577-000-child-labourers-in-south-africa-and-202-000-w_a_21898444\/?utm_hp_ref=za-homepage\">A new report by Stats SA shows that there are almost 580,000 child labourers in South Africa &#8211; children between the ages of 7 and 17, who are forced to do work for survival.<\/a><\/strong> The stats are even more alarming, showing that one in four of SA&#8217;s 11.2 million children not having a parent in the house, and 7% being orphaned, with no living parents.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>The South African rand continues to hold onto gains made in the wake of a rate hike announced by the US Federal Reserve, which softened the dollar and led to a rally in emerging markets, putting the local currency at its strongest level in almost 20 months. <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.xe.com\/currencyconverter\/convert\/?Amount=1&amp;From=USD&amp;To=ZAR\">On Friday the rand was trading at R12.76 to the dollar, R15.77 to the pound and R13.74 to the euro.<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Constitutional Court will rule on the Sassa grants crisis at 10am today; S&#038;P Global says SOEs will push SA to junk status; Helen Zille&#8217;s spokesperson insists the WC premier wasn&#8217;t defending colonialism; and Stats SA revealed that shocking levels of child labour persist in SA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":165027,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11121,23],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-165025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance","category-government","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165025"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":165029,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165025\/revisions\/165029"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}