Category Archives: South African News

eNCA | UPDATE: Two dead, 24 wounded by gunfire in Las Vegas, says hospital

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• Editor’s note: This is a developing story. We will bring you updates as more information becomes available.

LAS VEGAS – At least two people died early on Monday and 24 were hospitalised with suspected gunshots wounds in Las Vegas, a local hospital spokesman said, as police investigated reports of an active shooter in the city.

One Twitter user posted that the hotel was on lockdown, while another, citing police scanners, posted there were two shooters on the 32nd floor of the hotel who had shot at a bodyguard and police.

Video footage circulating on Twitter purportedly of the Mandalay Bay showed a crowd enjoying a concert before what sounds like volleys of automatic gunfire halt the performance.

Authorities could not be reached to confirm those details.

CNN reported that multiple people were taken to hospital with gunshot wounds.

“We’re investigating reports of an active shooter near/around Mandalay Bay Casino,” police said on Twitter. 

Several people including a police officer had been shot at a nearby outdoor concert, the Las Vegas Sun newspaper reported.

– Additional reporting AFP

Reuters

News24.com | Zuma tried to give her house away

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Days after the death of Ontlametse Phalatse, who suffered from progeria, a rare genetic disorder that causes premature ageing, President Jacob Zuma vowed to fulfil his promise to her and her mother that he would build the family a house.

But RDP house recipient Velaphi Nkosi, who had been on the housing waiting list for 19 years, was shocked to learn that Zuma wanted to give her home to the Phalatses.

It was reported in March that the Jacob Zuma Foundation, headed by SAA board chairperson Dudu Myeni, agreed to help meet some of Ontlametse’s wishes by joining forces with the Ontlametse Phalatse Trust.

One of Ontlametse’s biggest dreams was to own a home.

Zuma had invited the teenager to spend her 18th birthday with him and promised to ensure the family got their house. She died a few weeks later, on April 11.

Nkosi (46) was horrified when she received a letter on June 7 from the Gauteng department of human settlements, saying: “The old site number which was provisionally allocated to you has been withdrawn due to the request from the office of the presidency, so that they can allocate the house to the Phalatse family.”

Nkosi said she applied for a government house in 1998. Last year, she received a letter from the Tshwane municipality informing her that she had finally been allocated a stand number in Nellmapius extension 22, outside Pretoria.

Nkosi had often travelled to the site while her new home was being built and had waited anxiously for its completion.

But her delight turned to misery when she received a call from a ward councillor informing her the house would instead be given to the Phalatse family.

She was told it was a “special case” and that she would get another home in the “near future”.

“I was so shocked that after so many years of waiting for a house, I was now being told stories,” Nkosi said.

The Phalatses, who come from Hebron in North West, 56km from Nellmapius, were to be given the house on June 9.

It had been freshly painted and upgraded to include a boundary wall, a gate, paving, a lawn and a garden.

But angry residents in extension 22 were having none of it.

After Nkosi told them what was on the cards, they protested and burnt tyres the night before the new occupants were scheduled to arrive.

They gathered outside the house in the morning to turn the caterers and furniture vans away.

“I was sure they were going to give me someone else’s house and that would have caused chaos with its owner,” Nkosi said.

“I don’t know why they wanted to give the family my house because they live far away. But I will fight for my house and the stand I was given, and no one will live here but me.”

Tshwane mayoral committee member for housing, Mandla Nkomo, said that, although the municipality supported the foundation’s decision to give the Phalatses a house, it couldn’t be done at the expense of another recipient.

“He must build them a house. This thing of not allocating a house to a rightful beneficiary and giving it to a family who is not even on the waiting list, and not even residing in this municipality, undermines transparency and all efforts to bring credibility to the housing department,” he said.

Meanwhile, Nkosi is delighted with her “beautiful” house and thankful to her neighbours.

“I won’t have to do much to the house because the government has already done much to [improve] it,” she said.

eNCA | Limpopo cops make breakthrough after Bela-Bela farm attack

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POLOKWANE – A South African Police Service (SAPS) special intelligence-led joint task team made a major breakthrough when they arrested three suspects in connection with a recent farm attack in which a farmer was seriously wounded and his wife shot dead on a farm near Bela-Bela in mid-September, Limpopo police said on Saturday.

During the arrests, police recovered a 9mm pistol and ammunition, and stolen goods and cash, Lt-Col Moatshe Ngoepe said.

READ: Traditional doctor nabbed in Limpopo for allegedly robbing graves

Police in Bela-Bela launched a manhunt for a group of armed men who attacked the farmer and his wife on the farm TNT (Verloren) outside Bela-Bela at about 8.30am on 13 September.

It was alleged that four unknown armed men, two of them wearing balaclavas and gloves, arrived at the farm and confronted a domestic worker.

They pointed a firearm at her and forced her into the house. Inside the house, they demanded money and during the robbery, the 82-year-old farmer was shot and seriously wounded. His 73-year-old wife was fatally wounded. The farmer was still recuperating in hospital.

The three arrested suspects, aged 22, 31, and 37, would appear in the Bela-Bela Magistrate’s Court on Monday on charges of murder, attempted murder, house robbery, and possession of a firearm and ammunition without a license. The police investigation was continuing, Ngoepe said.

African News Agency

eNCA | Can Themba tombstone unveiling marks end of Heritage Month

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JOHANNESBURG – On the last day of Heritage Month, the family of Can Themba were joined by Minister of Arts and Culture, Nathi Mthethwa, as well as journalists like Mathatha Tsedu and Joe Thloloe, to pay tribute to the writer 50 years after his death in exile in Swaziland. Themba was a major intellectual of his time, admired by his peers and those who came after.

The 1950s was a turbulent decade in South Africa, both politically and culturally. It was the period just after the official consolidation of white supremacy in the National Party’s electoral victory in 1948. Yet, the decade would also see a resurgence in African nationalism, which gave rise to the Defiance Campaign, and the Women’s March on the Union Buildings.

As the musical “King Kong” returns to the South African stage nearly seventy years later, the end of Heritage Month was marked by the official unveiling of the tombstone for Can Themba in the West Park Cemetery in Johannesburg.

READ: Can Themba’s ‘The Suit’ hits film festival circuit

Themba was a significant figure in what has become known as ‘the Drum Decade’. He graduated from the University of Fort Hare with a first class degree in English and Philosophy. Themba became a high school teacher just as the repressive apartheid government began gutting Black education across the 1950s. He entered the inaugural Drum magazine short story contest, and was offered a position as a writer.

His journalism covered the urban Black experience of the time, focused on Sophiatown. This was the home of South African jazz, a cluster of culture under threat from the white supremacist policies of the time. 

Figures no less than Trevor Huddleston helped the community resist the proposed forced removals of the regime. Yet, Sophiatown was also a vibrant space, which gave the world figures like Dolly Rathebe and ‘Mama Afrika’ herself, Miriam Makeba. And it was this cultural life that inspired Themba, and which he contributed to.

Themba was part of a generation of Black intellectuals who laboured under increasingly repressive conditions. He worked alongside figures like Henry Nxumalo, an early investigative journalist known colloquially as ‘Mr Drum’,  who was eventually murdered in 1957. 

Some of his other contemporaries were Nat Nakasa, Todd Matshikiza, and the photographer Jürgen Schadeberg. Their work not only captured the popular culture of the time, whether in the work of musical artists or of popular beauty contests, but also uncovered the inhumanity of the apartheid regime’s treatment of Black people across its first decade in power.

Lewis Nkosi, who had worked with Themba, but later became a novelist and literary critic in exile, thought that the ravages of apartheid had wasted the genius of his colleague. His death, Nkosi felt, was evidence of apartheid’s cost to humanity, reducing a man of such talent in his final years. 

As his tombstone was unveiled, his daughter Morongwa Themba reminded everyone that, having been buried and exhumed twice now, she hoped this would be his last resting place, next to his wife, Anna Sereto Themba, not far from the Sophiatown he had chronicled so eloquently.

eNCA

News24.com | Police officer ‘wrongfully’ releases cop-turned-robber from custody

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Cape Town – A police constable arrested for robbery and allegedly smuggling an official R5 rifle was wrongfully released from custody in Bellville on Friday along with two other suspects, police said.

The 24-year-old appeared in the Bellville Magistrate’s Court on Friday and it is understood that he was released from police custody either before or after his appearance.

However, officers managed to arrest him and the two other suspects afterwards – the second time they were arrested in three days.

Police spokesperson Captain Frederick van Wyk on Friday said the incident happened at around 11:00.

Aiding in escape case under investigation

“Due to an administrative mistake they were wrongfully released. A case of escape was opened and a case of aiding in escape was opened against the member responsible,” he said.

“A disciplinary case will also be investigated against the member responsible.”

The constable was initially arrested on Wednesday in Delft – an area about 25km from the Cape Town city centre – after a shop there was robbed.

On Thursday Van Wyk said officers had managed to pull over a vehicle matching the description of the one used in the robbery.

“The two occupants were taken out of the vehicle and searched, whereupon two 9mm pistols with two magazines and 30 rounds were found in their possession. It was then discovered that the one passenger was a police constable,” Van Wyk said then.

Two cartons of cigarettes were also seized in the search.

Hidden rifle

The constable then allegedly confirmed he had booked out the firearms at the Nyanga police station.

“He later informed the [police] members that he also booked out an R5 rifle and asked another of his civilian friends to keep it for him,” Van Wyk had said.

Police officers followed up on this information and recovered the rifle, with 20 rounds of ammunition and a magazine, hidden between the base of a bed and a mattress.

Police gun problem

Firearms smuggled out of police stations for use in crimes are a massive problem in Cape Town, forming the subject of a mammoth court case set to proceed in the Western Cape High Court in 2018.

Recently, a total of 33 firearms went missing from the Bellville South and Mitchells Plain police stations.

Police Minister Fikile Mbalula previously said those firearms were stolen by police officers and were now in the hands of gangsters.

An audit of firearms at all Western Cape police stations is set to be conducted.

eNCA | Auditor General says will continue using KPMG

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JOHANNESBURG – The Auditor General will continue using the services of KPMG South Africa pending investigation in to the firm’s work in the country.

Kimi Makwetu and his team met with KPMG representatives on Friday.

They decided to continue using KPMG on audits that are currently allocated to the firm.

“While we are awaiting the outcome of the above investigations, the Auditor General will continue to secure the services of KPMG SA, limited to the audits currently allocated to them. This arrangement will be in place as an annual allocation rather than a two-yearly allocation of audit work as is current practice with all firms we contract with. This will be reviewed subject to the outcome of the pending investigations,” the Auditor General said in a statement.

Earlier this month, KPMG withdrew its findings and recommendations from the controversial SARS report on the intelligence unit.

WATCH: Lessons to learn from KPMG

The firm also admitted it made mistakes when working for Gupta-linked companies.

KPMG has since lost several clients and other companies are reviewing their relationship with the firm.

eNCA