Amnesty International has called on global governments to provide more support to Sudan, as NGOs say they are unable to help desperate people amid severe funding cuts. By The New Arab Staff Amnesty International has called on international governments to expand aid funding to Sudan as its civil war nears its third anniversary. In a statement issued on Friday, Amnesty said that aid cuts are “threatening efforts to tackle a host of grave health risks, including malnutrition, cholera, trauma and injury”. The funding cuts have already had a direct effect on how international NGO’s have been able to respond to the…
Author: nkosinathi
From new regulatory bodies to data sovereignty concerns, South Africa’s draft national AI policy sets out an ambitious blueprint for governing artificial intelligence — and the public has 60 days to shape its final form. By Staff Writer Cabinet has published a draft national AI policy that sets out plans for new governance institutions, financial incentives for local innovation and measures to reduce the country’s reliance on foreign technology platforms. Approved on 25 March 2026 and gazetted on 10 April 2026, the draft policy is open for public comment for 60 days, closing on 10 June 2026. Developed by the…
After the CAF Appeals Board overturned Senegal’s controversial AFCON final victory, a familiar question resurfaced: What does this mean for the credibility of African football? The wrong question. The real issue is not how African football appears to the outside world — it is whether CAF governs the game in the interests of Africans. By Maher Mezahi A few months have passed since that unforgettable 2025 Africa Cup of Nations final in Rabat—a match in which Senegal defeated Morocco 1-0 in extra time. The final itself was appointment viewing: a tightly contested and entertaining tactical battle that boiled over after…
By Tanya Pampalone, Anna-Maria van Niekerk, Mia Malan, Jessica Pitchford, Yolanda Mdzeke, Thatego Mashabela, Justin Barlow and Jeannine Snyman The tattoos on Zandile Simelane’s arms tell a story that most people cannot read. Hidden beneath the delicate blue ink of flowers and butterflies, small white scars rise, remnants of the time when cutting herself seemed like the only way to express how much she was hurting. “I didn’t want to die,” the now 31-year-old told Bhekisisa’s television programme, Health Beat, about her teenage self. “I just needed someone to help me through the pain. A part of me was just…
Bartolomeo Sala sat down with football historian David Goldblatt for a searching conversation on football’s uneasy entanglement with politics—how, despite the vast wealth and power marshalled to sanitise the game, politics has never been, and perhaps never can be, kicked out of football. There are few things that have been so consistently political as football. This is true of the sport’s early folk origins, in which village-wide kick-abouts became an excuse to destroy fences threatening to enclose common agricultural land. It is true of the mid-nineteenth century, when—expunged of its plebeian elements and codified along a clear set of universal…
The spotlight shines, but the tables are empty. Our storytellers are starving as bureaucracy strangles creativity. By Themba Khumalo There is a painful reality in witnessing a nation’s storytellers struggle while the institutions established to protect them remain detached — maintaining their routines, unmoved by the hardship around them. On 28 January 2026, South Africa’s film and television workers gathered outside Parliament, holding placards reading Save SA Film Jobs. This was not a stunt. Not cosplay activism. It was an industry on its knees, begging the state to unclamp the oxygen tube before the patient flatlined. By the next day—29…
In Gauteng politics, yesterday’s liability has a habit of becoming today’s most valuable asset. When a man once blamed for a municipal financial crisis lands one of the most powerful fiscal positions in the province, two kinds of people emerge: those who are outraged, and those who saw it coming. By Themba Khumalo What has unfolded in Gauteng’s corridors of power is almost operatic — a discordant political duet in which Nkosindiphile Xhakaza and Panyaza Lesufi have cast the same man, within the span of a year, as both arsonist and fire chief. One condemned him. The other just handed…
The voice, you know. You have always known it — on the radio — and you have seen him on television. But the man himself, who he truly is, where he comes from, what stirs his soul and what drives him — that has remained a quiet, closely guarded mystery. For forty years, he has stood in plain sight, yet just out of reach. Well…until now. By Themba Khumalo For nearly four decades, Wilson B. Nkosi’s voice has been a companion — in cars, in homes, on lazy Sunday mornings when South Africa slows down and simply listens. Somewhere along…