A former Indian Consulate employee won R200,000 after the CCMA found his dismissal was unfair and procedurally flawed.

As audiences delve into the whimsical world of Tera Yaar Hoon Main, they may find themselves charmed by the familiar narrative tropes but ultimately disappointed by the film's inability to fully realise its potential.

The DA is challenging the Expropriation Act in the Western Cape High Court on Monday. The party claims that this legislation is divisive and poses a danger to property rights in South Africa. The party’s Federal Council chairperson, Ashor Sarupen, briefed the media ahead of the court proceedings in Cape Town. “The DA is in court today to protect property rights for all South Africans. We will not accept a Bill that legalises land grabs. It is not acceptable in a constitutional democracy. The DA’s case is built on very specific legal grounds. “Firstly, that section 19 of this Act is irrational, and that the final mandate before the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) when the Act was voted on was unlawful,” said Sarupen. Sarupen said the DA does acknowledge South Africa’s history of displacement and apartheid-era land grabs. But he said parallel legislation is not the solution to the problem. “Considering the history of our country with forced removals, where people were arbitrarily deprived of property, with people being told you can’t, and you can live in a certain area, with so much destruction to private property that denied the right to so many South Africans to build wealth. “What we need is stable legislation that attracts investments, that ensures that people can build intergenerational wealth and not destroy it further and create uncertainty in our economy, and protect as many rights as possible and not to erode rights,” he said. What about the injustices of the past? He said South Africa needs legislation that will not leave citizens feeling nervous and uncertain. “We do not need anything that creates uncertainty; we do not need anything that creates parallels to what we have lived through in this country,” he said. Sarupen said that even though the DA is part of the government of national unity (GNU), the party is within its rights to challenge what it believes is unconstitutional legislation. Fighting in the GNU? He emphasised that Public Works Minister Dean Macpherson did not bring the Expropriation Bill to parliament. He said this because Macpherson is one of the respondents in the DA’s application before the Western Cape High Court. “He did not support to vote for it when he was an ordinary member of parliament; it was under the previous administration and the minister at the time was Patricia de Lille.” Several attempts that threaten property rights DA spokesperson on public works, Bonginkosi Madikizela, told the media that the ANC has tried several times to pass laws that were dangerous to property rights. “In 2016, under president [Jacob] Zuma, the Expropriation Act passed parliament, but it lapsed before it was signed into law. The DA strongly opposed this law in parliament, and again in 2018 the debate returned and revolved [around] amending section 25 of the constitution, a section protecting property rights. Again, the DA outright fought against this, and the attempt to amend the constitution failed in parliament,” he said. State power over private property DA spokesperson Jan de Villiers said the Expropriation Act gives the state too much power over private property. “Property rights mean every single person can own property without the fear of the state having the ability of taking it away from them under some vague legislation. Property rights make the economy work and allow for jobs to be created. Without property rights, the economy will tank, and jobs will be lost,” he said.

Monty Roberts, the renowned American horse trainer who died at the weekend aged 91, was a man for his time. As the role of horses moved from the workplace to the recreational barn in the 20th century, Roberts and his methods reflected the mood and sentiment of the age, introducing gentler, kinder ways of getting horses to co-operate with humans. What impressed people most was his remarkable success with problem animals. Today, skittish thoroughbreds throughout the world are calmed by the application of the ubiquitous “Monty Roberts blanket” at the start of races. Other standout moments in a long life were working as a stunt double and riding instructor – while still a child – for actors Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean and buying and selling (for a big profit) a reject yearling called Alleged, who went on to win the Prix de la Arc de Triomphe twice in the late 1970s. In latter years, Roberts worked regularly in the areas of youth discipline and business corporate strategy, often integrating real-life horses into his demonstrations. Millions of horsey folk in all equine disciplines – most famously the UK’s Queen Elizabeth II – were and are fans of Roberts’s “join-up” method of controlling horses, which he said used a secret, soundless language called “Equus”. In a best-selling autobiography The Man Who Listens to Horses: The Story of a Real-Life Horse Whisperer, Roberts wrote of how he learnt this language as a teenager by closely observing wild horses’ behaviour when he was a wrangler rounding up mustangs in Nevada. The key idea of join-up, which has evolved into an international practice known as “intelligent” or “natural” horsemanship, is recognising that horses are herd animals, always seeking a herd leader. The trick is to assume some of that leadership role and win a horse’s trust and develop a spirit of co-operation with the creature. History Monty Roberts was born in California in 1935, the son of a horse trainer, and was an expert rider by the age of four, winning local rodeo trophies. He obtained a degree in animal science before spending years working on and running stud farms in California. From 1973 to 1986, he was a leading consignor to the Hollywood Park Two-Year-Old Thoroughbreds in Training Sale. One of the first people to recognise Roberts’s extraordinary talent was the Jacobs racing family of Germany and South Africa. On Sunday, Dr Andreas Jacobs of Main Chance Farms in Western Cape penned a tribute to the American in Sporting Post, saying: “Dear Monty, thank you for your friendship, your wisdom and your generosity. We will remember you always – not only as one of the greatest horsemen of our time, but as a loyal friend who changed our lives and the lives of so many horses for the better.” Jacobs related how his grandfather Walther invited Roberts to Germany, before the man became famous, to work with the great Lomitas, whose racing future was uncertain because of his refusal to enter starting stalls – even lying down on the turf before the German 2000 Guineas rather than going near the mechanical contraption. “With endless patience, remarkable empathy and his unique ability to communicate with horses, Monty earned Lomitas’s trust … Lomitas returned to racing, resumed his winning career and went on to become one of the finest racehorses in German thoroughbred history,” wrote Jacobs. “He later became an internationally influential stallion whose descendants continue to make their mark around the world. That remarkable experience marked the beginning of a friendship that lasted for more than three decades.” For more than 30 years thereafter, Roberts returned to Gestüt Fährhof stud each summer to work with yearlings – and in 2016 he was in South Africa to run the rule over Maine Chance and then champion stallion, and son of Lomitas, Silvano. Rave articles, live demonstrations and TV documentaries proliferated, bringing Roberts to the attention of Her Majesty, who invited him over to Windsor to show her horse staff how he did it. She encouraged him to write books – which he did – conferred on him a royal honour and named one of her favourite corgis Monty. In its obituary, Britain’s Racing Post quoted Newmarket trainer Ilka Gansera-Leveque, who studied under Roberts: “He really understood horses and I learned how to speak to horses non-verbally. He packaged Western horsemanship into something for everybody to understand. “He was a cowboy, a regular, down-to-earth, straight-shooting kind of guy. It was all about the horse for him.” Unsurprisingly, Roberts was a firm opponent of the use of the whip in racing and once said: “One day it’ll all be whip-free, because we’re brighter than that. Whipping a flight animal to make it run faster is stupid. It can’t be right.”

Picture the moment someone opens a little velvet box. The gasp. The tears. Diamonds are the universal symbol of love, permanence, and arrival. “A diamond is forever,” as the most successful advertising slogan in history goes. Now picture where that diamond actually came from. Somewhere in central Africa, a man crawls through a tunnel the width of a washing machine. No ventilation, no safety equipment, a headlamp made from a flashlight and a rag. A kilometre above him, there may or may not be a rebel militia waiting for their cut. The diamond he pulls out tonight might end up in Antwerp, then a jeweler’s window in Manhattan, and nobody along the way will ask too many questions. This is the diamond paradox. The countries sitting on the most diamonds are, almost without exception, the ones where the least of that wealth reaches the people living above them. The stone travels upward, but the money almost never does. And in almost every case, the reason is the same: the people being robbed have no meaningful say over what gets taken from them. Angola: What Happens When No One Can Vote Them Out Angola sits on diamond fields that stretch across its northeastern highlands, an Atlantic coastline, vast oil reserves, and roughly 36 million people who have seen almost none of it. The country has been governed by the same party since independence in 1975, one of the longest-running single party dominances on the continent. Elections happen. Genuine opposition, not so much. That political lockdown has a direct economic consequence: when the same people control the government, the army, the courts, and the mining concessions, there’s no mechanism to stop them from helping themselves. And they did. The former president’s daughter, once ranked Africa’s richest woman, built her fortune through stakes across oil, diamonds, telecoms, banking and cement, routed through shell companies in Malta and Dubai including a diamond-marketing concession granted to a company she and her mother controlled. Angolan prosecutors allege that transactions she and associates carried out with state-owned firms cost the government more than $1.1 billion, and courts have frozen assets on that basis. No independent judiciary moved against it for years. No free press stopped it. No election threw anyone out over it. The money flowed because the systems that are supposed to catch that kind of theft, the basic democratic idea that public resources belong to the public, were either absent or controlled by the same people doing the taking. Roughly a third of Angolans live in extreme poverty by recent World Bank estimates, and inequality remains among the highest in the world. The diamond fields are still producing; much of their value still does not arrive. That’s not an accident of geography or bad luck. Its what extraction looks like when the people being extracted from have no real power to say stop. The DRC: Where the Mine Is the War The Democratic Republic of Congo sits on an estimated $24 trillion in untapped mineral wealth and has been at war, in various configurations, for three decades. That is not a coincidence. It’s the logic of what happens when there’s no functioning state to hold anyone accountable. The rebel group M23 seized Goma in January 2025 and by February controlled Bukavu as well. Since taking the Rubaya coltan mines in April 2024, M23 has taxed roughly 120 tonnes of coltan a month, generating an estimated $800 000 a month. The minerals cross into Rwanda, get mixed with legitimate supply, and are sold to manufacturers who ask essentially no questions. More than seven million Congolese remain internally displaced amid the fighting. The Congolese government filed complaints against Apple subsidiaries in France and Belgium in late 2024 over allegedly conflict-tainted minerals in its supply chain; the French case was dismissed in February 2025, while a Belgian investigation is proceeding. Apple’s market capitalization dwarfs the GDP of the entire African continent. The DRC’s economy, meanwhile, grew by about 6.5% in 2024 a slowdown from 8.6% growth in 2023, but growth, not contraction. There’s no mystery about where the value went. The mystery is why the systems that were supposed to stop it keep failing. The answer, usually, is that the people harmed most have the least power to demand otherwise. South Africa: Going Underground Just to Eat South Africa has a different story, not warlords or offshore accounts, but ordinary men from Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe squeezing through holes in the ground with headlamps and nothing else. They’re called zama zamas, which means roughly “those who take a chance” or “hustlers.” The chance they take is extraordinary, and the reason they take it is straightforward: South Africa’s big mining companies shut down operations as ore grades declined and costs rose, leaving behind abandoned shafts and tens of thousands of workers with no jobs and, in many cases, no legal right to stay in the country they’d spent their working lives in. The companies left. The workers stayed. The poverty didn’t. By 2024, illegal mining was costing the South African economy an estimated $1-3 billion a year, depending on the estimate, all of it underground, in shafts that officials largely ignored until the government sealed off access to a shaft. Officials cut off food and water in an attempt to force miners to the surface, with a minister facing accusations of trying to “smoke them out.” By the time the rescue operation concluded in mid-January 2025, at least 78 bodies had been recovered. Survivors described eating cockroaches and surviving on toothpaste. South Africa has a modern constitution, an independent judiciary, and a free press. It has all the machinery for accountability on paper. The syndicate bosses who built the criminal networks sending those men underground have largely faced no consequences. The machinery exists. It just doesn’t run for everyone equally, and that gap between rights on paper and power in practice is where people die. Botswana: What Democracy Actually Did In 1966, Botswana was one of the poorest countries on earth. Then geologists found diamonds. What happened was different. Instead of letting a foreign company extract everything and leave, Botswana negotiated and kept negotiating, because it had a government stable enough, and accountable enough, to stay at the table. It got a 50/50 joint venture with De Beers (Debswana), captured revenue through taxes and royalties, and built schools, hospitals and roads. The wealth, for once, didn’t just disappear, because citizens could ask where it was going and someone actually had to answer. The story isn’t perfect. For decades, Botswana was entitled to sell only 25% of the rough diamonds produced from its own ground. Under a new 10-year sales agreement signed in February 2025, that rose to 30% immediately, climbing to 50% by 2035. Progress, but also a country spending years negotiating for a larger share of something that was, by every natural right, entirely theirs. Now the industry itself is in crisis. Lab-grown diamonds have captured a significant share of the global market putting lab-grown stones at around 40-50% of US engagement ring sales. De Beers reported a $288 million net loss in 2024 as rough diamond sales plunged roughly 44%. Botswana’s response has been to pursue a majority, potentially controlling, stake in De Beers itself so that no future negotiation is necessary because the whole table belongs to them. But why did it take six decades, and a market crisis, for the country that owns the diamonds to try to own the company that sells them? The Ring on Your Finger Every year, millions of people buy diamonds to mark the moments that matter most. They ask four questions: cut, colour, clarity, carat. Almost nobody asks the fifth: where did this come from? Who dug it up? What did they get paid? The answers depend on the mine. A man with a rag for a headlamp. Almost nothing. Gone to a president’s daughter, a holding company in Malta, shareholders in London. Gone. Angola, the DRC, South Africa, and Botswana all sit on some of the most extraordinary mineral wealth on earth. In three of the four, ordinary citizens have seen relatively little of it. Botswana changed the equation not through luck or better geology, but through something more specific to a system where the people making decisions could actually be held responsible for them, where citizens could ask where the money went and someone had to answer. In Angola, the same party has ruled for fifty years and accountability has come slowly, if at all. In the DRC, an armed group taxes the mines directly while state authority struggles to hold. In South Africa, the men underground didn’t have anyone to ask. The diamond doesn’t remember where it’s been. The people it came from do.

The road to continental glory officially begins this week after the Confederation of African Football (CAF) confirmed the date, time and venue for the preliminary round draws of the 2026/27 TotalEnergies CAF Champions League and TotalEnergies CAF Confederation Cup. The draws will be held on Thursday, 6 August at CAF headquarters in Cairo, Egypt, where clubs from across Africa will discover their opening-round opponents in the continent’s two biggest club competitions. CAF Champions League draw date and time confirmed The TotalEnergies CAF Champions League preliminary round draw will take place at 15:00 Cairo time (12:00 GMT) (14:00 CAT) following the Confederation Cup draw earlier in the day. Supporters across Africa and beyond will be able to watch the draw live on CAF TV as clubs begin their quest to reach the lucrative group stages and ultimately compete for the continental crown. Defending champions Mamelodi Sundowns will begin the defence of their title after lifting Africa’s most prestigious club trophy last season. CAF Confederation Cup draw details announced The TotalEnergies Confederation Cup preliminary round draw is scheduled to begin at 14:00 Cairo time (11:00 GMT) (13:00 CAT) at the same venue. The competition has become a platform for ambitious clubs seeking continental success, with reigning champions USM Alger looking to defend the title they won last season. CAF said the preliminary rounds have consistently produced memorable fixtures, bringing together established African powerhouses and emerging clubs eager to make their mark on the continental stage. Prize money boosts Champions League and Confederation Cup rewards CAF has also reaffirmed the financial incentives on offer during the 2026/27 campaign. The winners of the Champions League will receive US$6 million, while the Confederation Cup champions will earn US$4 million. In addition, clubs eliminated during the preliminary rounds will each receive a US$100 000 solidarity payment, part of CAF’s continued efforts to support participating teams and strengthen its interclub competitions. The preliminary round draws mark the first step in another highly anticipated African club football season, with teams across the continent aiming to secure a place in the group stages and eventually challenge for continental honours.

Africa's first Google Cloud Summit drew top leaders as AI adoption gains real momentum, says Digicloud Africa.

Nearly a quarter of Telkom's prepaid recharges are now funded by airtime credit, the operator's latest results show.