10. The Mail & Guardian report on the extent of the recent service delivery protests in townships in Gauteng:
Karabo Keepile reports that "Finetown residents took to the streets on Thursday morning, throwing stones, burning tyres and strewing rubbish....This followed a torrid week in Gauteng, which saw similar protests in Mamelodi and Bronkhorstspruit (on Monday), and Dobsonville in Soweto (on Wednesday). On Thursday the protests escalated sharply to take in Dobsonville (again), Reiger Park and Daveyton on the East Rand, Ennerdale (Johannesburg South), Protea Glen in Soweto, Ramaphosa informal settlement, Atteridgeville and Mamelodi in Pretoria. Residents of the Oukasie informal settlement in nearby North West also took to the streets on Tuesday."
9. Rapport's two page spread on the growing movement by (mostly white) ratepayer organizations to pay rates into a trust account, rather than to their rotten local municipalities:
In many smaller towns there has, it seems, been a collapse of basic municipal service provision. In Louis Trichardt for instance the sewerage pumps stopped working, there was a build-up of sewerage in the pipes, and it ended up bubbling up through the shower floor of one local resident, Mike Galvin.
8. The Financial Mail article on SADTU's efforts to kick the other unions out of the Education Labour Relations Council - which would make it the sole teachers' union able to bargain with government:
Sadtu president Thobile Ntola told the FM's Carol Paton: "The issue is the unity of the workers. Sadtu's objective is to unite workers. One way of doing this would be to raise the threshold so that organisations that fall below it would be put out of the bargaining chamber. They would then have to look to other unions for co-operation....There is absolutely no reason for these [apartheid-era] divisions any longer. There is one employer and one common enemy."