10. The Sunday Times report on how the ANC on the eThekwini (Durban) council had scuppered a DA effort to introduce a multi-party oversight mechanism for municipal tenders:

Paddy Harper reports that "At Thursday's full council meeting, DA caucus chief whip Colin Gaillard tabled the notice of motion that the city establish a multi-party oversight committee to scrutinise all awards by the city's bid adjudication committee. The committee, chaired by deputy city manager Derek Naidoo, effectively controls what contracts the city awards, using Section 36 of the Supply Chain Management Act, read with the Municipal Finance Management Act....Gaillard said that the motion was aimed at ‘reining in' Naidoo's committee, which awarded more than R1-billion in contracts without a tender process in terms of Section 36, which is designed for the award of ‘emergency' contracts."

9. The Sunday Independent report on the ongoing power struggle within the Presidency:

Sibusiso Ngalwa writes that head of communications Vusi Mona has effectively been stripped of his powers "after almost 10 members of his staff were shifted to Lakela Kaunda's office. The move comes after President Jacob Zuma's instruction to restructure his communications unit. Mona, who is the deputy director general of communications, will have no control over what goes out of Zuma's office because Kaunda - the deputy director-general and head of private office - has, in effect, taken over communications. Presidential spokesman Vincent Magwenya, three deputy directors and three speech writers have been moved to Kaunda's office."

8. The Mail & Guardian report on, and publication of, the documents on arms deal corruption that have emerged into the public domain following Menzi Simelane's decision to quash legal action against BAE secret agent Fana Hlongwane:

Stefaans Brümmer and Sam Sole write that the "newly disclosed court documents show how deeply Fana Hlongwane was enmeshed in the convoluted entrails of BAE Systems' covert scheme of ‘commission payments' for the South African arms deal." The newspaper notes that after Simelane ordered the abandonment of the preservation order against Hlongwane "It appears that Judge Willem van der Merwe, who granted the initial preservation order, took the unusual step of ordering the 500-page file placed in the public register, after being informed of Simelane's decision." The M&G posted the following documents from the case file on their website (all in PDF): "Saller affidavit; Downer affidavit; Annexures to Downer affidavit; and Preservation order."

7. The Sunday Times report on the 1998 memo in which arms procurement boss recording how Chippy Shaik allegedly asked for a $3m ‘success' fee from the German consortium which sold the country four frigates in the arms deal:

Andre Jurgens writes that the memo, "which has been in the possession of South African arms deal investigators for some time, was written by Hoenings, a former executive at Thyssen Krupp - a member of the [German Frigate Consortium] which eventually won the frigate contract." In translation it reads:

"The last trip (27-30.07.1998) was suggested by C Shaikh (sic), Director Defence Secretariat. During one of our meetings he asked once again for explicit confirmation of the verbal agreement made with him for payment to be made in case of success, to him and a group represented by him, in the amount of $3-million. I confirmed this to him and offered to record this agreement in writing at any time and proposed to put the latter in a safe that can only be accessed jointly. C Shaikh will report back on this shortly... Mr Shaikh has emphasised that the B+V/TRT offer was pulled into first place in spite of the Spanish offer being 20% cheaper. The Spanish offset was according to him also valued higher than ours. In this respect it had, according to him, been no simple exercise to get us into first place."

6. The Financial Mail lead story on South Africa's jobless youth crisis:

Carol Paton notes that "SA's general rate of unemployment is 26%...Among the youth, that rate is double. This is not because youth don't get jobs; it is mainly because SA has such a young population, the origins of which lie in the population expansion or ‘demographic bulge', which peaked in the late 1990s. The bulge has seen the growth of large generations of youth: since about 1998, the size of the age cohort entering school each year has been 1m. For policy makers there are good reasons for everyone to be worried about youth unemployment. One is the pressing consequence of social instability; a second is that the jobless youth tend to stay unemployed into later adulthood and are in danger of becoming a generation of long-term unemployed."

5. The Mail & Guardian interview with ANCYL President Julius Malema, in which he denies ever having received a lucrative tender:

Malema told Matuma Letsoalo and Rapule Tabane: "I am not rich. I do not have millions as reported. All my houses have got bonds. They are financed by banks. I've never got any lucrative tender from anybody, including the company called SGL. I live on handouts most of the time. If I don't have food to eat, I can call Cassel Mathale [premier of Limpopo] and say: ‘Chief, can you help me? I've got nothing here.' I can call Thaba Mufamadi, I can call Pule Mabe [ANCYL treasurer general] or Mbalula. They all do the same with me. That's how we have come to relate to each other. That's why at times you can't even see our poverty because we cover each other's back. As comrades, we have always supported each other like that."

4. The City Press report on how Malema's company SGL Engineering Projects has botched (yet another) tender to design and cost the building of a centre for the disabled in Mpumalanga:

Piet Rampedi and George Matlala write that the "company has bungled the designs for the construction of an R8-million centre for people living with disabilities at Marite Village, Bushbuckridge, about 70km east of Nelspruit [in Mpumalanga]. Embattled Buchbuckridge mayor Milton Morema, who is under siege from service delivery protesters pushing for his removal, is considered one of Premier David Mabuza's trusted confidants in the province's Bohlabela region. The unfortunate beneficiaries of SGL's shoddy work in Mpumalanga are more than 1,000 disabled people from the area. They are still waiting for the centre, more than two years after SGL was appointed to design and determine its costs."

3. The Sunday World report on the mysterious R14m that when missing from the farm house of Mpumalanga Premier David Mabuza:

Charles Molele and Mzilikazi Wa Afrika write that "Mxolisi S'gudla, a relative of the premier, was taken to the Barberton Police Station in connection with the theft [which took place on December 21 2009]. A police source says the case was later ‘killed to avoid too many questions being asked'." The newspaper observes that, "this was not the first time there was a theft at the farm and that the previous matter was also not reported to the police. A source says: ‘A security guard was sent to Joburg to deliver bags of money to certain politicians but he took the money and ran away. He is known, as he was officially working for the security company guarding the farm, but he was never questioned or arrested - he just stopped working there'."

2. The City Press/Rapport feature on the explosion of drug dealing and sex slavery in the small town of Ermelo, after the "Pakistanis and the Nigerians" moved in:

Julian Rademeyer writes that the town "seems an unlikely nexus for organised crime and trafficking. Situated in Mpumalanga's commercial farming and coal-mining region, it is a close-knit ­community. ‘It is the loveliest place to bring up your children; a place where there wasn't evil,' said Inspector Magda Scholtz, one of the first investigators on the case. ‘But between the Pakistanis and the Nigerians, we find ourselves in the middle of a crime wave.' In just over two years there has been an explosion in the number of prostitutes working the streets and in the amount of heroin, cocaine, crack and LSD being sold in drug dens. ‘The women are trafficked from all over the country: Kimberley, the Cape, Upington, Pretoria, PE, Bloemfontein, Johannesburg. They're black, white, Indian, coloured. Most come from Rosettenville in Johannesburg and most had never done drugs until the Nigerians forced them to smoke crack,' Scholtz said."

1. Eveyln Groenink's feature article in the Mail & Guardian on the ‘R80m' wedding of IT billionaire Robert Gumede and Portia Mkhize in Nelspruit:

Groenink writes that the 2,500 strong crowd is full of the great and the not-so-good of the new ruling elite: "There are quite a few middle-aged - not to mention ancient - men here with Girls of the Playboy Mansion lookalikes. At the next table, one such man, of impressive girth, rubs his pregnant partner's belly with satisfaction, as if saying: ‘There grows my next president'. ‘He wants a boy,' his partner confides. The main course is served on bejewelled skewers; the dessert is a ‘decadent honey nougatine mousse with a ferrero roche (sic) centre, served with a berry coulis and topped with a 24-carat gold-leaf sprinkled quill'... Starry-eyed and self-satisfied, the crowd drinks it all in: the white drapery over the stadium-become-ballroom, the red carpet and the chandelier, the ministers and the heads of state, the luscious salmon roulade, the Three Afro Tenors with their Italian arias, and the gold-encrusted ‘G' for Gumede emblazoned on the posters, the cars that ferry dignitaries and even the friandises."

Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter