Engineering News | Martin Zhuwakinyu

https://staging1.creamermedia.com/

Martin Zhuwakinyu

Martin Zhuwakinyu is Senior Deputy Editor for Engineering News and Mining Weekly. Dr Zhuwakinyu holds a PhD in communication (media studies) from the University of South Africa.

Tardiness Must Fall

29th March 2019 It has been 14 years since my employers persuaded me to become a desk-bound pen-pusher. This spelt an end to my career as a reporter, which I had thoroughly enjoyed, save for the all-too-frequent occasions when I would arrive for a government-organised event billed to start at a specific time,... →

Academy for Rwanda’s ‘born to code’ youngsters

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 22nd March 2019 Education accounts for the lion’s share of the Budgets of many countries. This huge investment, it is reasoned, is a prerequisite for future prosperity. But, as survey after survey has demonstrated, it must not be education for education’s sake – it must equip young people for the world of work.... →

Youth jobs: HP pledges big

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 15th March 2019 Like the rest of the world’s developing regions, Africa is faced with a youth bulge. Coined in the mid-1990s by German demographer Gunnar Heinsohn, the term refers to the phenomenon whereby success in reducing infant mortality while the fertility rate remains high results in a country’s or... →

Zimbabwe’s dagga strides

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 8th March 2019 That the politics of the governing party in Zimbabwe are repellent is common knowledge. Zanu-PF has perfected the art of rigging elections over well-nigh four decades and has not hesitated to resort to violent repression to remain in power. And the 2017 ouster of Robert Mugabe in a coup that... →

Customs and excise proposals in the Budget

By: Riaan de Lange 8th March 2019 It is just before 14:00 on the afternoon of February 20 as I wait for the National Budget Review 2019 to be published in its electronic form. While doing so, I am reminded of a time, not so long ago, when it was released in hard copy. At that time, the review being released in soft copy would be... →

Malawi: a shining democracy

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 1st March 2019 It’s election season in Africa. At the time of writing, Nigerians and their fellow West Africans in Senegal were due to go to the polls in a few days, while the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is in the process of charting a new course, having voted in a new administration in December. Later... →

Silver lining

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 22nd February 2019 That I am an Afro-optimist in no secret. This simply means that, unlike doomsayers like Donald Trump, who once likened our countries to latrines, I strongly believe in the Africa Rising narrative. Of course, I am not blind to the ills afflicting us as Africans: primitive corruption (as one... →

The rot continues

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 15th February 2019 Just more than a year ago, African heads of State and government converged on the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa to launch 2018 as the continent’s Anticorruption Year. No stone was going to be left unturned in the fight to rid Mother Africa of this pernicious scourge, which continued to deal... →

Matric pass rate improves, but …

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 8th February 2019 Our 2018 matriculants – those who wrote the National Senior Certificate (NSC) exams and those who attended schools affiliated with the Independent Examination Board (IEB) alike – deserve a huge pat on the back for doing the nation proud. The NSC pass rate was 78.2% last year, a significant... →

SA passport among Africa’s ‘strongest’

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 1st February 2019 A couple of weeks back, I mentioned in this couple that the African Union will this month be providing details of its plans to launch a pan-African passport as part of its efforts to improve the free movement of people on the continent. The benefits of such a move will be immense; they will... →

Growth forecast for sub-Sahara

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 25th January 2019 In last week’s instalment of this column, I took issue with African institutions’ not-so-golden silence while rogue governments on the continent ride rough-shod over their citizens. One of the examples I mentioned was the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where Presidential and Parliamentary... →

Movement, at last, on pan-African passport

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 18th January 2019 African institutions have often been accused of being long on talk and short on action. A case in point is the deafening rhetoric about good governance by the likes of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union (AU) while no action is taken against dictators in some... →

The year that was

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 14th December 2018 Time flies indeed. It has already been a year since my editor invited me to contribute a weekly column in Engineering News, an opportunity that I grabbed with both hands. During the past 50-odd weeks (it feels like just more than a couple of weeks, really), I have touched on a multiplicity of... →

M-Pesa goes global

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 7th December 2018 First things first – M-Pesa stands for mobile pesa, with pesa Swahili for money (I have been busy building up my Swahili vocabulary ever since Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga announced a few months ago that Swahili would be offered in South African schools as an optional foreign language... →

Bridging the gap – literally

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 30th November 2018 Mozambique’s founding President, the late Samora Moises Machel, is famous for having coined and popularised the slogan Aluta Continua! (Portuguese for ‘the struggle continues’). He used it to rally combatants from his Frelimo movement in the struggle against Portuguese colonial rule, which... →

Graduating into unemployment

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 23rd November 2018 At the end of this month – or at least by the middle of December – scores of young men and women will be completing their undergraduate studies at South Africa’s 26 public universities and at the few such institutions that are privately run. This will cap a three- to four-year slog characterised... →

Latter-day Cape to Cairo vision

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 16th November 2018 Nineteenth-century British imperialist and entrepreneur Cecil John Rhodes had grand plans to construct a railway line from Cape Town, on the southern tip of the continent, to Cairo, in North Africa. But a continuous line connecting the two cities that runs through Anglophone countries had not... →

Donald Trump’s praise-singers?

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 9th November 2018 It’s mind-boggling. Donald Trump is a darling of more than half of Nigerians, the very people he derided as hut-dwellers not so long ago. This, of course, is if a new study conducted by the Pew Research Center, a US-based pollster, is to be believed. The study, which surveyed respondents in 25... →

Disappearing forests

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 2nd November 2018 In rather melodramatic fashion, one journalist, writing in June this year, portrayed the rate at which the world is losing its forests thus: “Image looking down on huge swathe of lush forest – but before you can pull out your phone to take a picture, it’s gone.” A look at the latest tree cover... →

Debt-trap diplomacy?

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 26th October 2018 I have made no bones about my cynicism about Chinese generosity towards African countries, which has taken the form of top-dollar freebies, government and State-owned company loans and investment in infrastructure. As I have said before, my uneasiness heightened when it came to light that Sri... →

Positives of migration

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 19th October 2018 Television footage of desperate Africans drowning in the Mediterranean Sea en route to Spain and other European destinations that hold out the promise of a better life has become all too frequent. The International Organisation for Migration puts the cumulative toll since 2000 at 33 000, with... →

Joblessness scourge

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 12th October 2018 South Africa’s inaugural Jobs Summit was convened in Johannesburg last week to brainstorm on possible solutions to the country’s stubborn unemployment scourge. Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) tells us that the unemployment rate stood at 27.2% in the second quarter of this year, a deterioration... →

SA to offer Swahili as a school subject

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 5th October 2018 Readers of this column who are not news junkies like yours truly may have missed the announcement, made last month: South African schools, both public and private, will be offering Swahili as an optional language from 2020, alongside such foreign languages as French, German and Mandarin, which... →

Flicker of hope in Zimbabwe?

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 28th September 2018 The main opposition party across the Limpopo insists that “we wuz robbed” in the July 30 elections that returned Zanu-PF to power and gave Emmerson Mnangagwa, who had been caretaker President since the November 2017 ouster of Robert Mugabe, a fresh, five-year mandate. Not even a Constitutional... →

Lingering misgivings

21st September 2018 I start with a mea culpa this week. In the September 7 edition, I waxed lyrical about the exploits of Sophia, the humanoid robot, at the SAPNow conference, which had been held in Johannesburg the previous week to showcase some of the latest developments in artificial intelligence, the Internet of... →

SA cities not among the least liveable

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 14th September 2018 South Africans are a whinging lot – there is survey data from credible research entities to prove this – and one of biggest gripes is about living conditions in towns and cities, especially in the less-well-to-do areas, better known in our lingo as ‘locations’ or ‘townships’. The service delivery... →

Sophia comes to South Africa

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 7th September 2018 Sophia the Saudi Arabian. Rings a bell? If it doesn’t, a clue: she was the subject of a recent instalment of this column and has the rare distinction of not having been born of flesh and blood. She came to our shores last week and wowed attendees at the SAP Now conference, in Johannesburg, where... →

Narrowing divide

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 31st August 2018 The mobile phone has undergone an almost dramatic transition in the past two decades from a status symbol affordable only by the well-to-do to a ubiquitous device that even those of very modest means now regard as a must-have. The market penetration of this handy invention has been facilitated by... →

Gauteng: a looter’s paradise

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 24th August 2018 Gold has been associated with our neck of the woods since its discovery on a farm just outside the present-day Joburg central business district back in 1886. Thanks to this association, it was not too difficult for our leaders in the early years of the post-1994 dispensation to come with a name... →

Whither Zimbabwe?

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 17th August 2018 It could be back to the future for Zimbabwe, where many had set great store by the general elections held on July 30, which returned the governing Zanu-PF and its Presidential candidate, Emmerson Mnangagwa, to power. Mnangagwa had been interim head of State since the November 2017 ouster of... →

Should we worry about Chinese generosity?

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 10th August 2018 Back in March, former US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson became the umpteenth Western big gun to urge Africans to beware of Chinese generosity on the continent, which has taken the form of freebies such as the African Union headquarters in Addis Abba, Ethiopia – built at a cost of $200-million... →

Redefining philanthropy

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 3rd August 2018 Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man – with a net worth of $12.4-billion – is redefining philanthropy in his native Nigeria. But the 61-year-old is doing this in a way that will make his bank account even fatter. Dangote Group, the 30 000-employee multinational industrial conglomerate he founded... →

SA varsities deserve a pat on the back

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 27th July 2018 Two international university rankings published in the last couple of months had me thinking about a perception index released by consultancy firm Ipsos in January, which revealed that South Africans are in a league of their own apropos of their perceptions of key scenarios in the country, with... →

Dagga: a budding opportunity

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 20th July 2018 First, a disclaimer: I am of very sober habits and this week’s topic – the apparent desire by many on our continent to embrace the cannabis business – is not at all indicative of my recreational preference. I am also not a closet Rastafarian. The latest country to hop on the cannabis bandwagon is... →

Corruption’s heavy toll

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 6th July 2018 Picture this scene: you are driving along a road in suburban Johannesburg and a stern-looking cop pulls you over, informing you, as you wind down your window, that you have exceeded the speed limit or committed any of several traffic infractions. In a tone that can put the fear of God into any... →

Morocco: it’s fifth time (un)lucky

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 29th June 2018 The Beautiful Game is obviously the flavour of the month, what with the World Cup currently under way in Russia. So, apologies to those readers of this column who cannot tell the difference between FIFA and Uefa – the focus this week is on matters football once again. Those with more that a... →

Namibia’s world-class roads

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 22nd June 2018 I have been to a few countries in Southern Africa but Namibia seems to always fall into the blind spot whenever I plan to travel beyond the borders of Mzansi. However, the good work being done in that country has not gone unnoticed by those who really matter. By ‘those who really matter’ I mean... →

History to be more equal than other subjects?

By: Martin Zhuwakinyu 15th June 2018 Some associate professor was an in-studio guest on one of our television channels the other night. To mangle a famous quotation in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, he was on about why history should be more equal than other subjects at high school level in South Africa. He and other dons who... →

About

Engineering News is a product of Creamer Media.
www.creamermedia.co.za

Other Creamer Media Products include:
Mining Weekly
Research Channel Africa
Polity

Newsletters

Sign up for our FREE daily email newsletter

Receive daily sector news alerts

More

Subscriptions

We offer a variety of subscriptions to our Magazine, Website, PDF Reports and our photo library.

Subscriptions are available via the Creamer Media Store.

View store

Advertise

Advertising on Engineering News is an effective way to build and consolidate a company's profile among clients and prospective clients. Email advertising@creamermedia.co.za

View options

Subscribe