Draft regulations for drone usage in South Africa do not have safeguards against the use of the devices by the state as weapons or to invade people’s privacy, activists have warned. But the sub-committee in charge of compiling the regulations has said Constitutional rights will not be violated.
Daneel Knoetze
News | 27 January 2015
Three Zimbabwean men whose permits are pending have been told to leave their jobs at Touareg Tents in Capricorn Business Park and return only when they can prove they are legally in the country.
Tariro Washinyira
News | 27 January 2015
A year ago, some boys in my street came home late at night with a sex worker. They refused to pay her.
Abigail McDougall
Opinion | 22 January 2015
Today GroundUp publishes this image in solidarity with journalists all over the world following the attack in Paris on ​the staff of ​Charlie Hebdo, in which ten journalists and two police officers were killed.
GroundUp Staff
News | 7 January 2015
Sadie Forman (1929-2014) one of the most unconventional, interesting and lovable fighters in the South African anti-apartheid movement, died on the morning of 11 December, aged 85. She spent the last years of her life with her daughter, Sara, in Lewes, in the East Sussex county of England. Her funeral will be held on 23 December.
Terry Bell
News | 19 December 2014
When it is late at night and Cape Town’s streets are quiet, Mark Philander’s faint hammering at his pavement workshop on Hope Street can still be heard.
Daneel Knoetze
Feature | 18 December 2014
In 2011, President Jacob Zuma made promises about the provision of sanitary towels to poor women. Three years later, GroundUp tried to find out whether these promises have been kept.
Pharie Sefali
News | 17 December 2014
The Department of Labour is investigating allegations of child labour on a grape and mushroom farm in the Hex Valley, outside De Doorns.
Daneel Knoetze
Feature | 15 December 2014
Gauteng hospitals are suffering severe medicine stockouts. Here are photos that GroundUp has obtained of the empty shelves of a pharmacy in a Gauteng tertiary hospital. All the medicines shown (or, to be more precise, not shown) are used to treat psychiatric conditions.
GroundUp Staff
News | 12 December 2014
This is a challenge to young people, and to law students in particular, to think about how we can use the law to effect change: we have a Constitution now, but what are we going to do with it?
Rachel Mazower and Isabeau Steytler
Opinion | 10 December 2014
Immigrants who live in Goodman Close and Le Ruth Close at 194 Voortrekker Road Parow are fed up with the awful conditions they live in.
Tariro Washinyira
News | 10 December 2014
Hospitals throughout Gauteng ran out of essential medicines in recent weeks, including a life-saving drug for people with AIDS called amphotericin B.
Daneel Knoetze and GroundUp staff
News | 9 December 2014
Residents of Kanana informal settlement in Gugulethu have blamed power cuts for a fire that left over a hundred people homeless on Friday evening.
Johnnie Isaac
News | 8 December 2014
Police have confirmed that live ammunition was used yesterday against people looting rice from a broken-down truck near Mbizana in the Eastern Cape. Two people were killed.
Pharie Sefali and Daneel Knoetze
News | 3 December 2014
One of the striking features of South African politics in recent years is its re-militarisation - a tendency for political issues to be addressed or resolved by force. This is part of a wider problem of violence suffusing South African society in general - that people, especially men, vent their anger with violence rather than discuss what has caused them to be annoyed in areas unrelated to politics, for example so-called “road rage”.
Raymond Suttner
Opinion | 2 December 2014
Shackdwellers from the original settlement in Marikana, Philippi, are celebrating a court interdict which will protect them from being arbitrarily evicted “through the back door”. Interdicts secured by landowners and municipalities are supposed to prohibit further settlement. Yet they are often so vague that they allow for people who have already settled to be removed.
Daneel Knoetze
News | 1 December 2014