Children want G8 to do more on poverty

As the dust settles after the Gleneagles G8 Summit in Scotland that was overshadowed by the terror bombings in London as well as massive protests by anti-poverty campaigners, the world’s children have called on the most industrialised countries to do more to eradicate poverty if the organisation is to get the reckon it so much yearns for in the annals of history. ...Read on

Terrorism and the fifth freedom

After a disaster as visible and massive as the attack on the World Trade Centre, broadcasters and correspondents have gone on a rampage of using the language that matches the scale of horror, the anguish of survivors and untold feelings of insecurity within the general populace. But as we move away from the events of September 11 2001 to collect the debris left by the recent London bombings, many people have been left wondering why the world has been enveloped by terror of such magnitude. ...Read on

Colonial languages cannot speak for Africa

The comment in The Southern Times issue of June 12, 2005, titled, So Much to a Name After All, made quite some interesting reading. The comment in question highlighted that there is more in a name than meets the eye as shown by the manner in which Afrikaners had reacted to the proposed change of names, particularly that of Pretoria which until then, bore the name of an Afrikaner hero. Writing in an article titled Towards a Theory of Language Planning which featured in a book with the title, Can Language be Planned?, two linguistics scholars, B.H. Jernudd and J. Das Gupta in 1971 made a daring observation that language is a resource. One could add to this sentiment and say that language is actually a potent and strategic resource in development or lack thereof in any society or country. ...Read on