Author: Sue Maclennan

Melanie Verwoerd was the featured speaker at a business breakfast last week at Kingswood College’s Wyvern Club, hosted jointly by the Rhodes Business School and Makana Brick. Verwoerd is a former ANC MP and SA Ambassador to Ireland. Verwoerd, who lives in Cape Town and works as a consultant to NGOs and political analyst, was divorced from Wilhelm Verwoerd in 2005 and they have two children. Wilhelm is the great-grandson of the architect of apartheid. She started her talk to a receptive breakfast audience of around 80 people by focusing on her surname. She described introducing herself to someone at…

The driver of a 14-wheeler truck was injured after his vehicle hit stray cows on the N2 south-east of Grahamstown early Wednesday 13 September. Tyre marks and blood on the road a few hours later supported accounts that the truck, travelling south-west towards Port Elizabeth, hit the cows at the bottom of a long hill where the freeway crosses the Bloukrans River. It crashed over the Armco barrier and plunged down a 20-metre embankment, landing in the pasture of a local dairy farmer. Crushed foliage and smashed tree trunks mark its path down the steep slope. Around 9.30am Wednesday morning,…

Our cash-strapped municipality has two weeks to buy essential chemicals to treat water supplies to Grahamstown, Alicedale and Riebeeck East, after Amatola Water ended their operations in Makana at the end of August. Makana Municipality says it has this in hand, and that the institution is ready to take over operations from Amatola. Amatola Water’s acting CEO, Asanda Gidana confirmed they have withdrawn their services from the municipality as a result of a R40 million unserviced debt. Amatola was contracted to manage Makana’s bulk water supply, ensuring treated water to the three centres. Amatola is also the implementer of the…

One of the five Grahamstown men accused of torturing a man and dumping his battered body in a dam after a laptop went missing, this week gave in shocking detail his account of an assault over several hours that escalated in intensity and brutality until the man’s death. Siviwe Gqotholo will stand trial alone after Judge John Smith accepted his guilty plea to acting in common purpose in causing the death of 29-year-old Thembelani Qwakanisa in October 2016. The other four accused of murder are Thembani Onceya, cousins Akhona Onceya and Simamkele Theron Onceya and Mzwanele Degree Maki. All four…

Spring is here, and with it Grahamstown seems to have woken a bit from its winter slumber. It is nice to hear the birds chirping in the trees again, and it is going to be nice to put the long johns aside once more. There are two big bits of garden news this week: one regarding an indigenous garden project, and one regarding general spring planting. The project to build a new park in town seems to be gaining some momentum, with a lot of interest from the staff at the Carinus art school. There is a nice big plot…

Stringent water rationing has been introduced in Bedford and Adelaide, while reports emerge that Amatola Water have withdrawn their services from Makana Municipality. On the national front, raw water tarriffs for domestic, industrial, agricultural and stream flow reduction sectors (the latter includes the commercial forestry industry) will be in the front line of a proposed 14.6% across-the-board increase in raw water tariffs. Average Eastern Cape dam levels increased marginally by 0.2% from 56.6% to 56.8% this week. However, the dam water levels stood at 66% this time last year and the situation remains critical, the Department of Water and Sanitation…

Grade 11 and 12 pupils from Ntsika Secondary School headed for the Festival Gallery on the corner of Somerset and High streets after school last Friday, to see their work on display there. The exhibition, which will run until next Friday (8 September) represents a small selection of work by Ntsika visual art students who have been taking visual art as a subject through Carinus for the past few years. The project was initiated by Creative City with the support of the EU, with the aim of affording students the opportunity to study visual as a matric subject – something…

Mayor Nomhle Gaga expressed relief at a ruling that may allow Makana Municipality to proceed with the process of appointing a full-time municipal manager. However, Paul Notyawa, who has pursued his two-year battle for the post has another seven days to appeal the judgment handed down in the High Court in Grahamstown last week. Judge Judith Roberson last Thursday dismissed with costs Notyawa’s application to have Makana and the Co-operative Governance MEC declare him to have been lawfully appointed as municipal manager in March 2015, and provide him with an employment contract. Notyawa had also held that the decision to…

Family, friends, former classmates and teachers are struggling to come to terms with the death of a young Grahamstown man in a car accident during the weekend. Henry Olivier, 20, who completed matric at PJ Olivier last year, died at the scene when the vehicle he was travelling in struck a tree. He and a friend were travelling on the Port Alfred road, late on Saturday night. Police spokesperson Captain Mali Govender said the accident occurred after 11pm on Saturday night, 2 September, 17km from Bathurst on the R67 towards Grahamstown. “The vehicle hit a tree,” Govender said. “It is…

Less than two years ago, Saturday markets and steak evenings were among the community events that brought the Grahamstown public to the clubhouse of the former Grahamstown Golf Club. As a base for the town’s golfing community, the clubhouse was a hub of social activity, with weddings and special anniversaries celebrated in a venue that was comfortable and well maintained. Today, shattered windows, doors, window frames and bathroom and electrical fittings ripped out and sections of roofing disappearing greet visitors. Leather golf bags and clubs lie strewn around the clubhouse of the 125-year-old facility. With a dispute over the management…