South Africa May Cut Rate by Half a Point

Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) -- South Africa's central bank may cut the benchmark interest rate for the first time in more than three years this week as the global credit crisis undermines economic growth and inflation eases.
The Reserve Bank will probably lower the repurchase rate by half a percentage point to 11.5 percent on Dec. 11, according to 12 of 17 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. The rest predict the rate will stay unchanged.
Six interest rate increases since June last year have sapped consumer spending, helping push the retail industry into recession and restricting economic growth to a decade low. The central bank is under pressure to make its first interest-rate cut since April 2005 as plunging oil costs ease price pressures and a recession in much of Europe and the U.S. undermines demand for exports.

Powering Africa's future

Africa is a continent of darkness and is desperately in need of power.
Only one in three of Africa's 700 million people have electricity - and in the countryside only one in ten has light at the flick of a switch.
Namibia is essentially a desert country and it relies on South Africa for almost half its electricity.
However, it does have plenty of uranium and the government is already quietly getting on with a nuclear programme.
"We are going for nuclear power, there is no question about it, but what we are going to do - I am not prepared to talk about it because we haven't even got legislation in place yet," said Joseph Iiata, the permanent secretary in Namibia's ministry of minerals and energy.
"Why should we sleep in darkness if we have been given resources like uranium," he added.

Sudan build-up in oil-rich state

The Sudanese army says it has sent more troops to the sensitive oil-rich South Kordofan state.

The army told state media that it had information that a Darfur rebel group planned to attack the area.

Bled of funds, hospitals close their doors to the dying

THE signs are all around. In the spectre of cholera haunting the sewage-strewn streets of Harare's townships. In the fading bodies of the hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans surviving on wild fruits because their fields are barren. In the glass littering streets after embittered soldiers smashed their way into shops that stopped accepting Zimbabwe's near worthless currency as the inflation rate surged through the billions and trillions.
But perhaps nothing is as disturbing a symbol of the collapse of governance in Zimbabwe as the ghostly corridors of the country's biggest hospital as patients are turned away from its doors to die.

Ghana votes for new president to usher in oil era

Ghanaians queued up and began voting on Sunday to pick a new president in a tight race between two foreign-educated lawyers competing to lead the West African nation as it prepares to cash in on offshore oil reserves. Peaceful elections, as most observers are expecting, would be a shot in the arm for African democracy campaigners after electoral violence in Kenya, Zimbabwe and Nigeria.Voters in the coastal capital Accra began forming hundreds-strong queues from the early hours."I was here at 3.15 (3.15am GMT). I'm anxious for my party to win," Gregoire Adukpo (62) a retired private security official, said at a polling station set up at a Catholic Church in Accra.

Taxi industry shoots down S Africa's public transport plans - Feature

Johannesburg- Alex Mabizela is a poster boy for the lawless world of South African minibus taxis. Standing outside a taxi rank in central Johannesburg, amid drivers soaping down their cars and hawkers roasting corn on the cob on makeshift grills, he cuts a hapless figure, with his tattered shirt and mobile phone dangling from a cord around his neck.
Then you notice his chest-high sjambok, the traditional whip made of hippopotamus hide, he uses in confrontations with other drivers.
"When you start to talk you start to fight. You have a sjambok like this, you are going to hit some people," he explains. "Guns? Yes, there are also plenty of guns."
From the chapa in Mozambique to Kenya's matatu, the privately- owned 16-seater minibus taxi is the transport of the masses in sub- Saharan Africa, ferrying people to and from townships in the absence of decent rail or bus services.