- African Rainbow Minerals headline earnings for the six months ended December more than doubled to a record high. An interim dividend of R10,00 per share was declared. Both platinum and ferrous metals earnings were boosted by higher US Dollar prices.
- The Solidarity Fund, set up to finance South Africa’s fight against Covid-19, plans to spend half a million rand to boost the country’s vaccine-rollout programme. The fund will withdraw half of the money from its own account and an equal amount will be raised from donors, said Chief Executive Officer Tandi Nzimande. The support will ease pressure on a government trying to contain spending after a surge in debt and an economic contraction.
- South African civil servants have demanded a pay rise that’s more than double the inflation rate, a week after the nation’s finance minister insisted the government can’t afford increases. The Public Servants Association, which represents almost a quarter of a million government employees, said they want across-the-board wage increases of inflation plus four percentage points.
- South Africa’s inability to balance competing interests is hampering the implementation of growth-enhancing structural reforms, according to Kuben Naidoo, a deputy governor of the central bank. Naidoo says the country doesn’t have a large enough middle class to play a stabilising role in policymaking. Policy paralysis means Africa’s most-industrialized economy was stuck in its longest downward cycle since World War II even before the coronavirus pandemic.
- Two residents of New York City have been infected with a variant of Covid-19, first discovered in South Africa. According to our partners, The Wall Street Journal, the city’s health commissioner said that officials are looking at whether the new variant is more transmissible, causes more severe illness and reinfection and whether it reduces the effectiveness of vaccines.
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