Johannesburg – A woman died in an alleged hit-and-run accident in Roodepoort, west of Johannesburg, on Friday, paramedics said.

The woman was found dead on Killburn Road in Discovery after she apparently tried to cross the road, ER24 spokesperson Vanessa Jackson said.

She had succumbed to her injuries.

“The vehicle that allegedly knocked the woman down was no longer on scene and it is being investigated as an alleged hit-and-run incident,” Jackson said.

– SAPA

Pretoria – Former president Nelson Mandela’s condition was still critical but steadily improving, the presidency said on Friday.

Spokesperson Mac Maharaj did not provide an update on Mandela’s health but said nothing had changed from the last statement the presidency released.

On 11 August, Maharaj said: “The medical team also reiterated that although his health was improving steadily, Madiba still remained in a critical condition.”

Mandela was spending his 77th day at the Medi-Clinic Heart hospital in Pretoria.

The anti-apartheid icon was admitted on 8 June for a recurring lung infection.

– SAPA

Johannesburg – Police are investigating another 44 people with possible links to an international child pornography ring, and have obtained at least 30 search warrants so far, a spokesperson said on Friday.

“We did an investigation on 50 suspects… we then obtained 30 search warrants early in August,” said Lieutenant General Solomon Makgale.

“We executed those warrants and that’s how we arrested those six. The six are part of the 50.”

Top executives

He could not confirm a report in The Times that among the alleged paedophiles were top executives of banks, insurance firms, legal practices, and IT companies.

A policeman with knowledge of the investigation told the newspaper that several of the suspects have links to high-profile companies and professional practices.

“They are not small fry. A few are said to be quite powerful,” the source told The Times.

“There are a number of the suspects, married, with children and living so-called normal lives, who are being incredibly uncooperative,” the officer added.

Arrests

Police had followed up on a tip-off from Interpol last Thursday and arrested six men in four provinces for possession of child porn.

The accused were arrested in Lichtenburg, Bloemfontein, White River, Douglasdale, Florida, and Potchefstroom.

They were a teacher, a retired school principal, a headmaster, a lawyer, a dermatologist, and a businessman.

Since the arrests, they had appeared in various South African courts separately and had their cases postponed.

Makgale said police were trying to obtain the remaining 20 search warrants.

On Wednesday, the newspaper reported the case had links to Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Western Europe, and Australasia.

It reported that children as young as 5 were believed to have been groomed to have sex with each other and adults.

– SAPA

Johannesburg – A jump in South Africa’s headline consumer inflation needs to be watched, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said on Thursday, citing concern about higher fuel prices in tandem with a weaker currency.

Gordhan also said Africa’s top economy has not yet seen a big increase in exports even as the rand has softened.

“A rapid depreciation of the rand at the same time as the kind of increases in fuel prices [we’re seeing] is not healthy for SA’s inflation,” Gordhan told Reuters on the sidelines of a media briefing in Johannesburg.

“We’ve got to be watchful.”

Headline inflation accelerated to 6.3% year-on-year in July, from 5.5% the previous month, breaching the central bank’s target band of between 3 – 6%, mainly because of higher fuel and electricity prices.

While the weaker rand should support manufacturers as it makes South Africa’s exports more competitive, Gordhan said the benefits so far had been limited.

“We don’t see the massive increase in exports that we should be seeing,” he said.

Down tools

The rand fell to a four-year low on Thursday, mainly because investors dumped risky emerging markets assets due to uncertainty about whether the US Federal Reserve would start to curtail its monthly bond-buying programme.

The rand has lost 22% against the dollar since the start of the year and is looking more vulnerable than other emerging market currencies because of continuing labour unrest in the domestic vehicle manufacturing and mining industries.

The country is facing strikes across leading sectors of the economy, with the vehicle manufacturers strike in its fourth day and some construction workers and gold miners threatening to down tools from next week.

While many of the factors driving weakness in the rand were outside of SA’s control, Gordhan said the country would weather the storm mainly because of a floating exchange rate and a bond market that offers high yields to investors.

“We are not the Fed of the United States…we’re not tapering QE [quantitative easing]. We are not the financial investors who look for yield and move their money in a way in which they can get their yield, but we’ll survive it.”

Gordhan said economic growth for 2013 was likely to come in close to the central bank’s 2% forecast as mining production had shown some improvements since last year.

Reuters

Pretoria – North West deputy police commissioner William Mpembe pleaded with officers to be tolerant towards striking Marikana miners last year, the Farlam Commission of Inquiry heard on Thursday.

“I pleaded with officers to be tolerant… I even used the Andries Tatane case to show how we can be tolerant in exercising our duties,” Mpembe told the commission.

Tatane died in 2011 when police fired rubber bullets during a protest by residents of Ficksburg in the Free State.

Louis Gumbi, for the family of murdered Warrant Officer Sello Leepaku and wounded Lieutenant Shitumo Solomon Baloyi, said several officers indicated in notebook entries that Mpembe gave instructions to block marching protesters.

The commission is probing the deaths of 44 people in strike-related violence in Marikana, North West, last year.

Thirty four people, almost all striking mineworkers, were killed on 16 August while police tried to disperse and disarm them.

Ten people, including two police officers and two security guards, were killed in the preceding week.

Earlier on Thursday, Gumbi read out notebook entries by three officers dispatched to Marikana on 13 August last year.

Officers were attacked and two were killed, while some were seriously wounded as a result of them blocking the protesters, the officers wrote in their notebooks.

Leepaku and Warrant Officer Tsietsi Monene were shot and hacked to death that day.

Mpembe said the officers omitted some of the vital instructions he issued.

“Regarding these officers put to me as witnesses by Gumbi, none of them indicate that I told them to exercise tolerance,” he said.

“Some mentioned it in their statements, but none wrote it down in their notebooks or diaries.”

SAPA