JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa’s churches launched a blistering attack on the African National Congress (ANC) on Tuesday, accusing the ruling party of moral decay and of abandoning Nelson Mandela’s goal to build a non-racial democracy from the ashes of apartheid.

In a letter to President Jacob Zuma published a week before an ANC leadership election and policy conference, the South African Council of Churches (SACC) threatened to agitate for a “more healthy democracy” if its concerns were brushed aside.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa has got rid of the “spectre of nationalisation” that hung over the mining industry and now needs to guard against damaging regulatory changes, the outgoing head of Anglo American (AAL.L: Quote, Profile, Research) said.

Cynthia Carroll also said on Tuesday that proposals for a minerals “resource rent tax” being debated by the ruling African National Congress were “unnecessary and unwise”.

PRETORIA (Reuters) – Uganda feels “gutted” and “betrayed” by a U.N. report saying it is helping rebels in eastern Congo and will pull its troops out of peace-keeping operations in Somalia unless the allegations are withdrawn, its junior foreign minister said on Friday.

Speaking four days after a senior U.S. official said she expected Kampala would keep its forces in the war-torn Horn of Africa nation, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Okello Oryem was adamant his government had not softened its stance.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa’s ruling party will fracture before the decade is out, pulled apart by tension between big business and labor that was laid bare by three months of mining unrest, opposition leader Helen Zille said.

In an interview with Reuters, Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Zille said the unprecedented mining turmoil, including the police killing of 34 strikers at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine in August, had exposed unsustainable contradictions in Nelson Mandela’s 100-year-old African National Congress.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) pledged on Wednesday to stop its supporters singing the “Shoot the Boer” anti-apartheid anthem to avoid upsetting white farmers and stirring racial tension.

The agreement between the ANC and white-minority interest group Afriforum ends a two-year legal battle over the song that had ignited a debate about freedom of speech, censorship of history and efforts to mend the racist rifts in South African society.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – According to his “final ultimatum” to wildcat strikers, Gold Fields chief executive Nick Holland is hours away from firing 23,000 miners.

In the poisonous atmosphere of the worst industrial unrest in South Africa since the end of apartheid, everything points to him making good on his threat on Thursday, adding to the 15,000 men already sacked by platinum mines in the last two weeks.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – According to his “final ultimatum” to wildcat strikers, Gold Fields chief executive Nick Holland is hours away from firing 23,000 miners.

In the poisonous atmosphere of the worst industrial unrest in South Africa since the end of apartheid, everything points to him making good on his threat on Thursday, adding to the 15,000 men already sacked by platinum mines in the last two weeks.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – If it was a declaration of a bid to become president of South Africa, it was a very strange one.

After weeks of speculation that he is lining up a challenge to President Jacob Zuma in an African National Congress (ANC) leadership election in December, Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe attracted a packed house at the launch of an official biography on Thursday night.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South African rail freight operator Transnet is bracing for a one-day strike by port and rail workers in support of a walkout by 20,000 truckers that has hit fuel supplies round the economic hub of Johannesburg and at least one car plant.

Large parts of South Africa’s gold and platinum mining sectors have been brought to a standstill in the last two months by a wave of wildcat labor unrest in which almost 50 people have been killed — 34 of them by police.

SALIMA/BEIJING (Reuters) – Malawians bill their country as the “Warm Heart of Africa” and pride themselves on a reputation for friendliness. But Jaffa Shaibu, a burly 32-year-old merchant in a clothes market in Salima, a dusty town near the shores of Lake Malawi, feels less than welcoming to the Chinese traders who have moved in over the past four years.

“The way it looks, one day there will be a big fight with them,” Shaibu said. “One day there will be blood.”