Activist Nonhle Mbuthuma founded a local organization along South Africa’s Wild Coast to fight a proposed strip mine 17 years ago. Despite ongoing personal threats, she’s still working to protect her Pondoland community from oil exploration and other harmful development.
With the Eastern Cape hit almost weekly by protests over service delivery, premier Oscar Mabuyane reflected at the weekend on three decades of democracy, calling for people to be optimistic. Irate residents have taken to the streets across the province over grievances such as a lack of clean drinking water, proper schools and roads, unemployment, electricity, crime and corruption.
The Eastern Cape government has announced that more than R2bn has been earmarked to turn 11 strategic gravel routes into tar roads. Finance MEC Mlungisi Mvoko told the Bhisho Legislature on Tuesday that R512.9m had been added to the provincial roads maintenance grant, increasing it from R1.5bn to R2.
Health investigators have found that medical waste that was dumped along the Eastern Cape’s Wild Coast had labels and other identifiers like batch numbers ‘deliberately removed’. Medical waste has now been collected from five places on a 25km stretch between Sigidi and Mtentu villages, accordin.