Friday, 14 August 2020
Anna Majavu is a trade unionist and journalist currently completing a PhD in journalism.
Living lives of desperation in rural areas where food is almost as scarce as work, the Eastern Cape Karoo’s impoverished are struggling to make it through the pandemic.
East London in the Eastern Cape is yet another South African city where the brutal demolition of homes in a shack settlement has left residents despairing during lockdown.
A psychiatrist in Bethlehem attests to Palestinians’ suffering as Israel denies them medical supplies to fight the coronavirus while continuing to colonise their land.
This sixth instalment in a series on police violence investigates the murder of 19-year-old Tyrone Moeng, who was surprised by the police while asleep in a shack and killed when he tried to escape.
The Eastern Cape government says it ordered mobile clinics, not ambulance scooters. But it hasn’t paid the R10 million budgeted for the clinics.
The coronavirus has hit the Eastern Cape hard, but many rural areas in the province still have no clean water for hand washing, forcing residents to break lockdown regulations to protest.
Creating a road blockade from felled trees was the only way Zweledinga residents in Port Elizabeth felt they could draw attention to their plight after the municipality disconnected their electricity.
There are not enough medical personnel in the Nelson Mandela Bay metro to keep all its public health facilities open – even as patient numbers spike due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Both private and public sector workers continue to bear the brunt of the Covid-19 lockdown, despite eased restrictions and some industries opening.
The leader of the Unemployed People’s Movement is in hiding after being warned about a plan to assassinate him. It is no idle threat in a province where political murders are rife.
Parents who want to keep their children at home until after the coronavirus has peaked face a stark choice: these pupils must either return to class or deregister from their school.
Rather than allowing state clinics in Port Elizabeth’s impoverished areas to become Covid-19 vectors, health workers have shut them down until such time they are properly equipped.
State assistance, especially during the Covid-19 crisis, helps people who literally have nothing to eat. But it is too little and its delivery is too patchy to bring real relief.
For years, hundreds of people have been forced to live in half-built structures with no windows, electricity or running water while the Buffalo City municipality stalls for time.
The provincial government stands accused of corruption and hiding critical information from the public – and these are just two of the burning issues alarming residents.
International Workers’ Day this year may herald strikes by those labouring in healthcare whose safety and wellbeing during Covid-19 have been forgotten by their governments.
As retrenchments of thousands of SAA workers loom, unions say government never intended to save the airline beggared by years of corruption. Ultimately, workers will pay the price.
Residents of a rural Eastern Cape town are concerned that the government using a guesthouse to quarantine coronavirus patients from another small town will cause the virus to spread through theirs.
In several rural and peri-urban settlements in the province, impoverished residents can only dream of food aid and a consistent supply of clean water during the Covid-19 lockdown.
New contracts from the North West resort’s board of trustees, which the guards were told to sign or lose their jobs, downgrade their pay and take away their on-site accommodation.
The Covid-19 lockdown has been plagued by employers failing to provide workers with suitable protective gear while others have been downright breaking the law, say unions.