Chief electoral officer Pansy Tlakula has called for a quota system to improve women's representation. She said the Independent Electoral Commission was not happy with the number of women candidates in local government elections to be held on 18 May. 'The male/female split is not pleasing at all,' Tlakula told a business breakfast in Johannesburg. Out of 53,000 candidates only 37 per cent are women.

'On the 5th May 2011, a 14 years old transman was raped in Attredgeville, Pretoria. He was left unconscious and traumatized by the perpetrators. The transman is believed to have been raped on his way to school. According to the victim’s mother, the school phoned her after one teacher realized that the victim was crying and bleeding from his genitals.'

'The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) has decided to break its silence and add its lone voice amongst the progressive forces in condemning the brutal rape and stoning to death with bricks of Noxola Nogwaza, KwaThema township, Ekurhuleni, Gauteng province. As Numsa we abhor homophobia with all its manifestations since its against the noble objectives of a non sexist society as envisaged in the Freedom Charter.'

A national task team is to tackle hate crimes against lesbians and gays, the justice and constitutional development ministry said on Wednesday. The decision came in response to a 170,000-strong Change.org campaign calling for action on 'corrective rape', spokesperson Tlali Tlali said in a statement. It followed the murder of lesbian activist Noxolo Nogwaza, 24, who was stoned, stabbed with broken glass and gang-raped in KwaThema, Johannesburg, last month.

ANC national executive committee member Billy Masetlha has become the first senior ruling party member to openly say the alleged plot to oust Jacob Zuma as ANC president next year is real. Masetlha spoke out on the same day that Tokyo Sexwale, the human settlements minister and also an NEC member, addressed a press conference in Pretoria at which he rubbished the allegations implicating him in the plot.

The Gender Based Violence Advisor will be responsible for providing technical direction to the implementation of a multi-faceted project aimed at Strengthening the Adjudication and Prosecution of Sexual Offenses. The project is based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Periodic travel is required for project implementation activities. Only candidates who have a permit to work in South Africa or South African citizenship can apply.

'We have no freedom to celebrate today. We live in a radically unjust society…Until everyone’s voice counts equally we cannot say that we are free’, the Unemployed People’s Movement writes from Grahamstown, in a statement to mark South Africa’s ‘Freedom Day’ on 27 April.

‘Few things are more hateful’ than the ‘deliberate manipulation of the minds of the broken and destitute in the name of liberation,’ writes Pedro Alexis Tabensky, as the ANC attempts to win support from South Africa’s poorest communities by portraying the party as ‘the representatives of God on earth’.

'Ekurhuleni Pride Organizing Committee (EPOC), the key LGBTI organization in the township of Kwa-Thema, Gauteng, South Africa, and the Coalition of African Lesbians (CAL,) condemn the brutal rape and murder, in cold blood, of a member of EPOC. Noxola Nogwaza is believed to have been murdered in the early hours of Sunday, April 24, 2011.'

'Sonke Gender Justice Network condemns the murder of Noxolo Nogwaza who was raped and brutally murdered in the early hours of Sunday morning over the Easter weekend in Kwa-Thema township, outside of Johannesburg. We offer our condolences to Noxolo’s family and to our comrades at EPOC and to the Coalition of African Lesbians (CAL).'

Anglo American plc has offered medical treatment to 14 former miners, who have brought a test case against its South African subsidiary, but it won't accept liability for the silica dust levels in apartheid-era gold mines that the former workers say caused their debilitating respiratory tract infections. If the test case succeeds it could open the door for tens of thousands of former mine workers to claim damages from companies such as Anglo, resulting in compensation payouts worth billions of rands.

The murder of a 24-year-old lesbian activist from Kwa-Thema township in Gauteng appears to be the latest in an epidemic of brutal homophobic attacks, Human Rights Watch has said. Noxolo Nogwaza was found murdered on 24 April 2011, in a vicious attack that seems to have been motivated by her sexual orientation. Nogwaza's face and head were completely disfigured by stoning, she was stabbed several times with broken glass.

A monument should be built for liberation songs and it should have its own precinct. This is according to Wally Mongane Serote, the poet, author and former MK soldier testifying in the hate speech trial in the Johannesburg High Court against ANC Youth League President Julius Malema. Defending Malema - who was charged by Afriforum, an Afrikaner minority group, for singing certain lines of the song Dubulu ’ibhunu (Kill the Boer) - Serote said the songs were 'as important as the Voortrekker monument', kept 'as a memory even after apartheid'.

Judge Nathan Erasmus ruled recently that the DA-controlled Cape Town municipality had violated the human and constitutional rights of residents of Makhaza in Khayelitsha by installing unenclosed toilets. He also dismissed the city's and Western Cape premier Helen Zille's argument that residents were consulted and had agreed to enclose the toilets at their own cost.

The latest statistics by JSE-listed job placement company, Adcorp, show that since January 2000 permanent employment declined by 20.9 per cent while contract and other forms of employment increased by 64.1 per cent. This, says the company’s March employment index, means that only 1.9 million South Africans were employed into permanent jobs while 2.4 million were hired into temporary jobs since 2000. Samela Manene, the general secretary of the National Council of Trade Unions, said there was nothing much for workers to celebrate because inequality and unemployment had risen, despite the country’s good labour laws.

Police have closed ranks about the investigation into the sex slave syndicate operating in northern KwaZulu-Natal. This after it was revealed that the police missed an opportunity to rescue the girls on Good Friday. The girls were believed to be held by a Nigerian and South African-run syndicate operating a brothel on a farm outside Paulpietersburg in KwaZulu-Natal. The girls are allegedly being trafficked from Mozambique, Swaziland and Zimbabwe to South Africa to work as sex slaves.

The arrest of six policemen for last week’s murder of protestor Andries Tatane is ‘a quick ploy to take attention away from the systemic factors that inform police brutality’, says Mphutlane wa Bofelo. Shouldn’t the country’s police force protect the interests of communities rather than criminalising service delivery protests?

© Abahlali.org© Abahlali.orgIf decisive action is not taken to persuade South Africa’s police that their job is to facilitate rather than repress the right to protest, we may have to add more names to those of Solomon Madonsela, murdered by the police in Ermelo in February, and Andries Tatane, murdered by the police in Ficksburg last week, writes Richard Pithouse.

Shell's plans to drill wells for natural gas across a large swathe of the Karoo are fatally flawed and should be rejected, according to lawyers representing local landowners. Derek Light Attorneys criticised Shell's environmental management plan submitted to the Petroleum Agency of South Africa (Pasa) this week, describing it as 'a worthless paper exercise' that was misleading, biased, unprocedural and unconstitutional. Shell's plan has set the stage for a possible legal battle over its ambitions to drill for natural gas in shale formations that cover about 90 per cent of South Africa.

Jacob Zuma is facing pressure to clarify the situation of a close ally, Minister of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs Sicelo Shiceka, against whom there have been serious allegations of wasteful and possibly fraudulent use of state resources. The public protector has been asked to probe Shiceka’s spending of R335,000 on a trip to Switzerland, R640,000 in one year to stay at the One&Only Hotel, and R160,000 in eight months flying his extended family round the country. The Sunday Times has reported that there is deep unhappiness in Shiceka’s home village of Ingquza Hill in the Eastern Cape, where water has been laid on for the building of a house for the minister and a R32m tarred road is being routed past this house, which would be among the first in the area to be electrified.