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Here’s a fairly simple choice: the global North would pay the hard-hit global South to deal with the climate crisis, either through the complicated and corrupt “Clean Development Mechanism” (CDM), whose projects have plenty of damaging side-effects to communities, or instead pay through other mechanisms that provide financing quickly, transparently and decisively to achieve genuine income compensation plus renewable energy to the masses.

With high-volume class strife heard in the rumbling of wage demands and the friction of township “service delivery protests”, rhetorical and real conflicts are bursting open in every nook and cranny of South Africa.

One of US president-elect Barack Obama’s leading advisers has done more damage to Africa, its economies and its people than anyone I can think of in world history, including even Cecil John Rhodes.

A far-reaching strategic debate is underway about how to respond to the global financial crisis.

“We are the creditors!” insist a new layer of African social activists, victimised by the ongoing Third World debt crisis but now gathered to fight back.

Durban’s University of KwaZulu-Natal vice-chancellor Malegapuru Makgoba is expected to deliver an edict that the UKZN’s Centre for Civil Society (CCS) will close on December 31.

Should poor people be given pit latrines and other devices to limit their consumption of water? A resounding yes was heard at the Africa Sanitation conference held during February at the Luthuli International Conference Centre in Durban.

The murder of South Africa’s reggae icon Lucky Dube on October 18, in an attempted car hijacking — one of South Africa’s most common crimes these days — has been condemned by all. The African National Congress (ANC) government has urged the nation to unite against the scourge of crime threatening “our democracy”. For opposition parties, Dube’s killing is further proof that crime is out of hand. As a deterrent, some have called for the reinstatement of capital punishment. There is a general feeling that the four “monsters” who recently appeared in court in connection with the crime should “rot” in jail. Typically, however, the debate remains very narrow and shallow.