When you think of the combination of technology and education, you think urban schools, but this teacher has been bringing Mathematics to life through technology in a rural school. Multi-award winning teacher, Peggy Jona has replaced the chalkboard with laptops and has been teaching children at Bakuba Primary School in Tabankulu in the Eastern Cape how to code. She is confident that some of this country’s best programmers will come from her. She teaches in a quintile 1 school that caters to the country’s poorest 20% of learners, in a community marred by different socio-economic challenges, including unemployment and poverty. She came third in the recent National Teachers’ Awards in the Excellence in Teaching Mathematics General Education and Training Phase category. She is the 2017 winner of Excellence in Primary School Teaching award, and was voted in 2018 and 2019 as Internet Service Provider Association Super Teacher. How did she achieve this with all the challenges?

Guest: Peggy Jona, Mathematics teacher at Bakuba Primary School in Tabankulu. 

Is Twitter going down? Many have been sharing memorial posts of what the app has done for them. This comes after Twitter’s decision to shut down its offices until the 21st of November without giving a reason to the employees. The transition from the company’s old management to new owner, Elon Musk has been marred by controversy, as many do not agree with the direction Musk is taking. He has fired a significant number of employees and shut down different departments, including the only Africa office in Ghana. Is the company going down? If it shuts down, how will that affect newsrooms and how people consume news? Most importantly, how will it affect the lives of active Twitter users?

Guest: Tebogo Ditshego, CEO of Ditshego Media. 

The Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development (DALRRD) has warned South Africans about the outbreak of Rabbit Haemorrhagic Disease (RHD). The department says it has received reports of die-offs of wild rabbits and hares from the Karoo areas in the Western and Northern Cape. To tell us more about this disease is…. 

GUEST: Baptiste Dungu, Veterinary Doctor

As voters in Equatorial Guinea are preparing to go to the polls on Sunday. Not much will change as President Teodoro Obiang is expected to easily win. The 80-year-old Obiang is vying for a sixth term against two other candidates -Andres Esono Ondo and Buenaventura Monsuy Asumu. If re-elected, Obiang will face new challenges, with a declining economy hit by COVID-19 and a sharp rise in food prices.

GUEST: Dr Chidochase Nyere, from UJ’s Institute for Pan African Thought and Conversation 

THE INNVERVIEW: Today we hear from Senzo Mchunu who will contest the ANC deputy president position at the upcoming national elective conference, which is due to take place next month. Mchunu will share thoughts on various topics in relation to the ANC leadership race, but most importantly, he will talk to us about his political ambitions and the current state of the ruling party amid current ongoing divisions. 

GUEST: Senzo Mchunu, ANC NEC Member & Minister of Water and Sanitation  

On Monday next week, Ambassador Reuben Brigety will mark 100 days in office since his appointment as the US Ambassador to South Africa. So today he joins us to discuss the US-SA partnership and how he plans to enhance bilateral relations between these two countries. He will also talk to us about Ubuntu diplomacy and how he hopes to use it to keep the US-SA relations intact.  

GUEST: Ambassador Reuben Brigety, U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of South Africa 

Liberation military veterans will start receiving pensions from next month. The decision comes after a series of engagements between government and the veterans about the deplorable conditions they live under. The engagements included a march to the union buildings and an incident last year where a group of veterans held defence minister, Thandi Modise and other government officials hostage over pension and other benefits they had been promised. The veterans will receive R4 962 a month. Government has availed R37 million for the 2022/23 financial year, R102m the following year, R109m in 2024/25 and R115m in 2025/26. Deputy President David Mabuza met with some of the veterans in KwaZulu-Natal yesterday. 

Guest: Dan Hato, Umkhonto we Sizwe Liberation War Veterans Convener

A multi-disciplinary team led by Interpol South Africa, Organised Crime, Detectives, Crime Intelligence  and the Special Task Force (STF) have arrested a 46-year-old Israeli gang leader attached to a criminal organisation in Israel called the ‘Abergil Organisation’. The wanted fugitive has been arrested together with seven others at a house in Bryanston. The Israeli gang leader has been on Interpol’s Red Notice from 2015. He is a wanted suspect in Israel for conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder. For more on this, we are joined by….. 

GUEST: Andy Mashaile, Interpol Turn Back Crime Campaign Ambassador  

Some Afrikaans speaking South Africans have hit back at actress Charlize Theron’s comments about the Afrikaans language dying. Theron who now lives in the US shared her controversial opinion about the Afrikaans language during an interview with podcast SmartLess where she said “There’s about 44 people still speaking it. It’s definitely a dying language; it’s not a very helpful language.”  

GUEST: Elana Bailey, AfriForum’s head of cultural affairs

National Assembly Speaker Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula has extended the deadline of the Section 89 Independent Panel of Experts by 13 more days. The announcement of the extension comes a day before the panel had to conclude its assessment and report back to the Speaker. The panel is currently assessing the information that the ATM, EFF and UDM have submitted and President Cyril Ramaphosa has responded to.  

GUEST: Vuyo Zungula, President of the African Transformation Movement (ATM)