Tender don arrested; Cornal Hendricks dies: Today's top 7 stories in 7 minutes
9 LIVES: Tender king Cat Matlala arrested for botched hit on socialite ex-lover
Vusimusi Cat Matlala, a businessman with a controversial R360 million police tender, was arrested for allegedly masterminding a hit on his former lover, Tebogo Thobejane.
Thobejane survived the botched hit in October 2023, but another woman was paralysed; the hitmen are linked to another murder case involving a Transnet contract whistleblower.
Thobejane pleaded with authorities for justice, fearing that Matlala's wealth and influence were obstructing the case, and highlighting the trauma and financial strain she has endured.
'AGOA is dead' – now sell our biltong to the world, say analysts at NAMPO
Analyst JP Landman believes the Trump administration's tariff regime has effectively ended AGOA, urging South African producers to seek new markets.
Landman suggests focusing on the Middle East and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as potential export destinations.
Red Meat Industry Services CEO Dewald Olivier supports exploring ASEAN markets and promoting unique South African products like biltong for export.
Baseless and misguided: Cabinet slams US' classification of Afrikaners as 'refugees'
The South African Cabinet dismissed claims of persecution and genocide against Afrikaner farmers, stating police statistics don't support racially targeted violent crimes.
Cabinet rejected the US administration's narrative that white Afrikaner farmers are being persecuted, deeming accusations of discrimination unfounded.
The government criticised the US for granting refugee status to Afrikaners, asserting they don't meet the criteria under international refugee law.
Healthcare workers protest over intern doctor's death at KZN hospital
Dr Alulutho Mazwi, an intern doctor, died at Prince Mshiyeni Memorial Hospital after allegedly being forced to work while ill.
Healthcare workers protested, demanding accountability for Mazwi's death and calling for investigations into the circumstances.
The KZN health department and the Portfolio Committee on Health have committed to investigating the incident, while Mazwi's family is devastated.
President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Ramaphosa heads to White House to mend bridges with US President Donald Trump
President Cyril Ramaphosa will visit the US from 19 to 22 May to meet with President Donald Trump and discuss bilateral, regional, and global issues.
The visit follows Trump granting 'refugee' status to 49 Afrikaners, a move Ramaphosa disputes, asserting they are not persecuted but rather opposed to transformation in South Africa.
Ramaphosa aims to reset the strategic relationship between the US and South Africa, clarifying that claims of white Afrikaner persecution are false and stem from anti-transformation groups.
Former Bulls utility back Cornal Hendricks passed away on Wednesday night.Darren Stewart/Gallo Images
Bulls boss reveals 'Dr Death' Wouter Basson cleared Cornal Hendricks annually
Cornal Hendricks, whose career was previously halted due to a heart condition, died after collapsing at his home.
Bulls CEO Edgar Rathbone revealed Hendricks received annual medical advice from Dr Wouter Basson regarding his heart condition.
The Bulls will hold a pre-match tribute to Hendricks during their URC game on Saturday.
Anele Mdoda with fiance Buzza Mgudlwa.Supplied
Anele Mdoda's lobola sparks debate: Is she married or engaged? Customary law explained
Anele Mdoda's lobola finalisation has sparked debate about customary marriage presumptions, with a legal expert emphasising the importance of meeting the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act requirements.
According to Xhosa customs, the recent ceremony was a formal acceptance of the groom by the bride's family, but the traditional wedding with the groom's family is still pending.
A legal expert says that while social appearances may suggest marriage, legal recognition requires fulfilling the criteria in Section 3(1) of the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act, including consent, age, and customary law adherence.
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At 16, he mediated a hijacking. Now he's negotiating for the survival of HIV programmes
Ndiviwe Mphothulo grew up in Jabavu, Soweto, with activism in his bloodline. At 12, he started in student politics. By 16, he managed to calmly talk a student who hijacked a bakery truck – 'We were hungry,' the student explained – into returning it. Mphothulo ended up in medical school, realising he could practice medicine and build communities, and then at Taung Hospital, where he helped transform multidrug-resistant TB cure rates by addressing social barriers like transport and unemployment rather than just focusing on medical treatment. Now he's president of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society and fighting to keep South Africa's HIV programmes intact in the face of the Trump administration's devastating funding cuts. The first black president of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society is not okay with the current phenomenon of lambasting the country's preeminent struggle heroes. 'You see it more and more, this thing of South Africans labelling Mandela a sellout, calling Mamphela Ramphele a sellout. People need to start telling us about themselves first, like 'I am Thabo from Taung, I helped this many marginalised black people in my village and township, and that is why I hold this view'. Activism is hard,' Ndiviwe Mphothulo says, his spectacles reflecting the spacious living room of his Glenvista home. We gaze out through picture windows at the faint outline of Suikerbosrand and, to the west, the Klipriviersberg. Beyond those hills is the low-level city known as South Western Townships – Soweto – and Jabavu, dubbed 'the Wild West' in the 1980s on account of its high crime rate. Mphothulo grew up there. 'Some of the boys I knew would slip into nearby white suburbs like this one at night to do housebreaking. It was like a badge of pride,' he says. Supplied/Bhekisisa The list of things that kept Mphothulo from this path reads like a poem: 'Kung fu films at Eyethu cinema, in neighbouring Mofolo.' 'Swimming in the Jabavu pool, which everyone called Jakes.' 'Games of five-a-side in the yard of the Lutheran church on our street.' 'Big fights in the early hours: Mike Tyson, George Foreman and Roberto Duran.' 'Prayers that ended with 'Ha le lakatsa ho tseba' (If you want to know about the gospel), our neighbours' favourite hymn.' More than these things, though, it was the influence of family that kept Mphothulo on track. 'I was born into a culture of activism, just as my parents were born into it,' he says. From Tsomo to Soweto Mphothulo's paternal grandfather, Molose Mpotulo, was a self-taught water harvester from Tsomo in the Eastern Cape. Mphothulo's father, Bongo Mphothulo, travelled from Tsomo to Johannesburg after completing his schooling and became influential in both the All African Convention and the Non-European Unity Movement, which led to his arrest and banishment to Pimville in 1969. Left alone in their Orlando West house after only a few years of marriage, Mphothulo's mother, Elizabeth Tembela Mphothulo, became increasingly involved in resistance activities herself. 'Her parents founded the church and school in Qunu in the Eastern Cape, the very same school that Nelson Mandela attended,' says Mphothulo, who spent some years living in the famous village with relatives. 'My grandmother, Tandiwe Zidlele, was already bedridden by that time, but she commanded so much respect; people from all over would come to her for help. She didn't have much, but she would feed people.' If Mphothulo learnt selflessness from his grandmother, his mother taught courage. 'She would be arrested, dragged around, and the following week, you find her picketing outside court. If young people were hurt, she would get them to doctors and get arrested again herself. She taught us to stand up for what is right, irrespective of the consequences.' Supplied by Bhekisisa As a pre-teen back in Jabavu, Mphothulo's reality was one of political meetings in the home, occasional police raids in search of documents, and the smell of tear gas on the streets. In 1989, he witnessed a police attack on a gathering of students at a youth centre near his home. Some of his neighbours were severely injured. That left an impression, and from the age of 12, he became involved in student organisations like the Soweto Youth Congress, the Soweto Student Congress, the ANC Youth League and the Congress of South African Students (Cosas). 'It is hard to imagine the power that students had then,' says Mphothulo, who was called in by his principal the day after being elected chairperson of his Cosas cluster at the age of 16. 'He said, 'We've got an issue at a school called Lebone [Secondary], some of the students have hijacked the bakery truck.' So I went there, and I met the guy who hijacked the truck, and I asked him why he did it and he said, 'We were hungry.' After some discussion, he agreed to return it.' It was an object lesson in negotiation and the power of being calm when other people are losing their minds. 'It also made me realise, you know, if this is what it takes to get back a bakery truck in Mofolo, what must it have been like for Mandela and others, leading the entire revolution? That is why I always say, before you criticise those figures, first understand what it means to be an activist.' When activism took a back seat The extraordinary pressures of the time caused many of Mphothulo's peers to drop out of school. He says the thought never crossed his mind. Mphothulo attended Morris Isaacson High School. Chosen for its reputation for discipline, Mphothulo arrived to find classes that were dilapidated, with political slogans scrawled on the walls. His teachers were sound, though, and his marks were excellent, presenting an array of life choices. 'Some said I should study law, due to my involvement in student politics. My English teacher said, 'You can write, you must enrol in humanities at Fort Hare, become a professor.' But my maths, science and biology teachers said, 'No way is this one doing English',' Mphothulo recalls. In Soweto in the 70s and 80s, doctors like Abu Baker Asvat and Nthato Motlana were the heart and soul of the resistance. 'I saw that it was possible to cure tonsillitis and cut an appendix while also building communities, and so I enrolled for a Bachelor of Science at what was then the Medical University of Southern Africa (now Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University) and got into medicine the following year.' For the next six years, however, Mphothulo's activism would take a back seat. 'I think it was like a deep debriefing period for me. I was telling someone that university was the first time I had not heard gunfire in a week. I have since thought that perhaps I just wanted to be a child again.' It wasn't long before the activist in him was reawakened. In fact, it was already stirring in his internship years in Groote Schuur Hospital, where Mphothulo picked up the nickname, 'The Social Worker'. 'My registrar started to notice that I took an interest in patients' social issues. In the orthopaedic ward, you would get patients who'd fallen off trains having traumatic amputations, and there would be stress about going to work – 'I've been here so long, what will my employer say,' and I'd call the employer for a conversation,' says Mphothulo. For his community service in 2003, Mphothulo was dispatched to Taung Hospital in North West province. He had no intention of staying a minute longer than required, but history had already overtaken his personal plans. On the TB frontlines In July 2002, the Treatment Action Campaign won its case against the government, compelling the rollout of the antiretroviral (ARV) drug nevirapine to pregnant women to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to unborn child. Taung Hospital was selected as the ARV site for both North West province's vast Dr Ruth Segomotsi Mompati district and parts of neighbouring Northern Cape province. Mphothulo was asked to stay and help set up the HIV clinic. 'Within months, I found myself working in the hospital's TB ward, after it became clear that a high percentage of the patients we were working up for ARVs already had TB,' he recalls. In 2008, in the context of a national drive to decentralise multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) care, his bosses asked him to set up and run an MDR-TB ward in Taung Hospital. Again, Mphothulo agreed, a decision that would prove auspicious. Supplied by Bhekisisa 'The cure rates for MDR-TB at this time were bad, around 50–55%, and although the drugs we had to fight with were not perfect, I saw our patients struggling more with transport, a lack of food in the home, unemployment, stigma – social issues. I thought, 'No man, let me come with some initiatives, even if it requires me to fight with management a little bit'.' Fight he did. With patients living up to 250km away, Mphothulo pressed district management to provide transport. He also enlisted traditional leaders, local NGOs, and the Department of Social Development to provide supportive services in different areas, and the hospital's treatment success rate skyrocketed. 'It was unbelievable, people were so interested, asking: how can a rural hospital have such high treatment cure outcomes?' For his master's thesis, Mphothulo delved into these social barriers. His doctoral thesis, which he is about to submit, builds on this, proposing ways of supporting patients with MDR-TB to overcome social challenges. 'Our message is clear' In Taung, various threads of Mphothulo's upbringing came together – the activism, the humanitarian values, the instinct to go beyond the merely curative. Several discretely displayed certificates and trophies on the far side of the room attest to his effectiveness. And as his work became known, Mphothulo was drawn into patient-centred organisations like the Rural Doctors Association of Southern Africa, the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society (SAHCS) and, in 2020, the ministerial advisory committee on coronavirus disease. In February 2024, Mphothulo became the fifth president of SAHCS. It was fateful timing – he had hardly sat down to work when Donald Trump became the 47th president of the United States and quickly made good on old threats to cancel US contributions to global health and development. Trump's infamous stop-work order on 20 January 2025 hit South Africa's HIV programmes hard, triggering, among other cuts, a R1.6 billion withdrawal in Global Fund for HIV/TB and Malaria grants to South Africa. It also opened a rift between the Department of Health and the leadership of HIV civil society. 'They (senior government figures) will say, 'Let's go to the clinic, we will show you shelves stocked with ARVs'. 'In other words, there is no crisis. But this misses the point. Ending HIV as a public health issue, which is something we were on track to do by 2030, is not just about pills on shelves. It's about interventions targeting the most at-risk populations, like young women, sex workers, men who have sex with men. 'It's about the continuation of South Africa's cutting-edge research into HIV. These are the areas of the response that have been hit by the funding cuts, and without urgent action, we risk reversing a lot of our gains in the fight against HIV,' he says. Mphothulo's idea for a solution is that the government should strongly consider reprising its approach to the Covid-19 pandemic, appointing multi-sectoral advisory committees to work on the various facets of the crisis in HIV. 'We think they are too relaxed,' he says. Simulation modelling analysis published in the Annals of Internal Medicine suggests cuts to the US President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, or Pepfar, programme could cost South Africa 565 000 new HIV infections and 601 000 more deaths from the virus by 2034. If Mphothulo could be granted one wish, he says, it would be that the government heed the warning of medical activists. The subject of medical activism is close to his heart, to the extent that he wrote a book about it, Medicine & Activism, launched in July this year in the company of old comrades. It is a love letter to activism. As he signs my copy, Mphothulo says, 'When I entered medicine, it satisfied my Science and Maths teachers, and when I returned to activism, I pleased those who were politically inclined. All that remained was my English teacher, so ja, now he can be pleased, too.'
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Proposed tax change; Sibiya faces suspension: Today's top 7 stories in 7 minutes
News24 brings you the top 7 stories of the day. News24 brings you the top stories of the day, summarised into neat little packages. Read through quickly or listen to the articles via our customised text-to-speech feature. Sandile Ndlovu/Sowetan/Gallo Images Sibiya served with notice of 'intended suspension or temporary transfer' - Deputy police commissioner Shadrack Sibiya faces suspension or temporary transfer due to alleged misconduct related to withdrawing case dockets from a political killings task team. - Sibiya has responded with a letter of demand, seeking withdrawal of the notice and an end to police opposition to his court bid to return to work, claiming the process is unlawful. - The police accuse Sibiya of hindering investigations, acting without authorisation, and intending to harm the service's interests, while Sibiya's attorney alleges bad faith and constructive contempt by the national commissioner. Hudson Institute 'So obvious' which ANC leaders would be targeted for sanctions, says US bill champion - A US bill proposing targeted sanctions on ANC leaders is gaining traction, with proponents citing the Zondo Commission report as evidence of corruption. - The bill aims to punish alleged human rights abuses and foreign policy positions, but the South African government believes it is unlikely to pass, given the failure of similar bills in the past. - If the bill passes the House, observers believe it will be difficult for it to pass through the Senate. SETA scandal déjà vu: Like Nkabane, Manamela appoints an official without notifying him - Higher Education Minister Buti Manamela appointed three SETA administrators, but one appointee, Oupa Nkoane, claims he is unaware of his appointment and has not received an official letter. - DA MP Karabo Khakhau is questioning the appointments, alleging that Nkoane was implicated in a forensic report detailing the mismanagement of R872 million. - OUTA CEO Wayne Duvenage expressed concern that SETAs placed under administration often revert to chaos and that some administrators have been accused of maladministration and corruption. Gallo Images/OJ Koloti 'Integrity is everything': Mbalula on suing Anele Mda for linking him to 'best friend's' murder - Fikile Mbalula won a court order against Anele Mda, preventing her from linking him to the 2015 murder of Wandile Bozwana, whom Mbalula describes as his 'best friend'. - Mda's tweets referenced news articles suggesting Mbalula was a 'person of interest' in the murder investigation, citing his alleged contact with one of the convicted killers and a claim that Bozwana funded Mbalula's trip to Las Vegas. - The judge found Mda's claims defamatory, ordering her to retract the statements and apologise, while Mda and free speech advocates argue the ruling stifles freedom of expression and the ability to scrutinise public figures. Heinstirred/Getty Images Surprise tax proposal threatens to disrupt SA corporate funding - A proposed tax change in South Africa may eliminate preference shares as a funding option for local companies. - The change would subject payouts on all preference shares to income tax, potentially requiring restructuring of existing funding deals. - Experts warn this could increase the cost of capital and negatively impact BEE transactions that utilise preference shares. Sacha embraces Springbok evolution: The 80/20 split he needs to be Rassie's guy - Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, a highly touted young player, is working on consistency to complement his natural attacking talent and versatility for the Springboks. - He aims to learn from experienced players like Handre Pollard and adapt to various roles, understanding the importance of fundamentals within the Springbok system. - Feinberg-Mngomezulu acknowledges the need to balance his flair with the dependable, consistent play expected of a Springbok flyhalf, as demonstrated by Pollard's experience. Alfonso Nqunjana/News24 BOOK OF THE MONTH | Jeff Wicks' extraordinary search for the truth about Deokaran murder - Babita Deokaran's murder led journalist Jeff Wicks to uncover a network of corruption involving officials, politicians, and syndicates siphoning funds from Gauteng's public hospitals. - Vusi 'Cat' Matlala, a key figure in the Tembisa Hospital extraction syndicate, was found to have a history of criminal investigations and close ties to high-ranking police officials. - Wicks' investigation revealed the extent of Matlala's wealth and influence, including his wife's lavish lifestyle and his ability to access top police officials. Show Comments ()
