Great musicians are waiting in the wings.

Can you believe it?

In December 2015 the Sunday Times reported that South Africa had 52 billionaires, with “retail king” Christo Wiese coming in easily at number one with R104.8 billion.

Newcastle Municipality is drowning in debt and driven to paying salaries out of ringfenced infrastructure grant funding for a low-cost housing project, because all its cash reserves have been plundered.

In an explosive exposé in the Newcastle Advertiser in June this year the Caxton local media investigative team revealed examples of the corruption that has set in under ANC rule in that KwaZulu- Natal town – which is undermining governance of the municipality and emptying its treasury.

The paper also described how for the past year the ANC’s regional executive had succeeded in hiding two explosive official forensic reports that detail the corrupt activities of senior party cadres.

Farmland given valuation of developed, serviced land.

The owner offered his farm to Tshwane for R30 million but the metro was already conniving to rather pay R90m to a politically connected middleman for the same property.

In its August issue Noseweek reported that two men had walked away with R126m of taxpayers’ money by acting as intermediary owners, selling farmland at highly inflated prices to the Tshwane Metro in 2016. They owned the properties for only a few minutes on paper before selling them on, making profits of R94m and R32m respectively with the back-to-back transactions.

School feeding scheme loses out as processing plant switches to importing pilchards and sardines for animal feed.

Mossel Bay’s economy will soon receive a major boost if the establishment of a fishmeal and fish oil plant gets the green light. Afro Fishing, a local sardine-canning enterprise, has raised foreign capital of nearly R350 million to expand its operation. It is planning to process thousands of tons of pelagic fish species such as anchovies and red-eye herring at the plant and will provide an additional 200 people with seasonal work.

President Ramaphosa’s land advisor Professor Ruth Hall has plans for a happier land future.

She grew up in the Eastern Cape, “frontier country”, a descendant of 1820 settlers. “It took me many years to work out that I was living in a colonial enclave and my ancestors were allocated land that had been stolen. Violent conflict and theft of cattle made way for my ancestors, so I’ve always been aware of land as a question of rights and justice”.