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I like the Johannesburg city centre. There - I've said it.

I like the lazy pavements of Little India, the hustle and optimism around Braamfontein, the Ghanaian bars of Yeoville, the slick transformation of old buildings around Arts on Main, and the outdoor cafes sprouting around Newtown and the financial district.

One of those myths is the belief that no-one walks in Johannesburg. It's true that crime - and the fear of crime - conspire with potholed pavements and poor public transport to nudge anyone who can afford a car to shuttle between gated compounds, offices and malls.

But the truth is that every day half the people leaving their in tiny apartments in central Johannesburg to commute to work make the entire journey, both ways, on foot - earnest crowds of young men half-jogging through the suburbs as they head towards business centres like Rosebank and Sandton. Half of the rest walk for at least some of their journey.

"We're a pedestrian city," Sharon Lewis, from the told me. The JDA is now working to rewire the city's outdated infrastructure in order to better serve all those pedestrians. They're putting in walking zones, widening pavements, building bridges, contemplating bolder steps like congestion charges and cycling lanes, and hoping their funding doesn't dry up.

Many of the walkers are new residents. The population is rising sharply. Back in the 1990s, the city centre was something of a ghost-town, as businesses fled the crime and escaped to the northern suburbs. But the past five years or so have seen a dramatic transformation, as old commercial buildings are bought up by canny developers and converted into small, low-rent apartments and even dormitories.

"This is a story about the fortune to be made at the bottom of the pyramid... Forty-four percent of people living here now use email," said Sharon Lewis, pointing out that developers are already struggling to keep up with the soaring demand for affordable accommodation that isn't an hour's drive outside the city.

The trick now is to keep those rents low, and to convince big businesses that it's safe, and economically wise, to come back.

It's still early days - and be careful where you wander after dark - but the changes are real. I've spent two years exploring the city, without incident, touch wood.

I walked through the financial district recently with Nelson Mandela's lawyer, George Bizos, who said - I think without too much exaggeration - that the area could hold its own with some European capitals.

Incidentally, a few streets away, Mr Bizos has been battling for years to restore the old law office where Mr Mandela worked.

I understand from the JDA that the derelict building has finally been taken over by the City, and renovation work will start any day now.

As for the pleasures, and necessities of walking in a city... Here are a couple of recent articles I've enjoyed - one about and another celebrating

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Still, the party has acknowledged at least some of the huge it faces - not so much in holding onto power, but in tackling corruption and delivering on its many promises.

Foreign investors may be relieved to note that the explosive issue of whether, and how, to nationalise the country's mines .

It's always struck me as odd - well, more than odd - that the ANC's Youth League should be the one leading the charge for nationalisation. Shouldn't it be focusing on the crisis in education, skills shortages and the crippling lack of jobs available for young South African school leavers? This article is one of the on the mines issue.

While the delegates are now cloistered in policy huddles, the party is trying harder than usual to keep the media firmly on the outside. The continue, but relations between the ANC and journalists are not good.

Some of the party's scandalously self-serving plans to curtail press freedom may end up getting watered down, .

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How do you market Africa to the world? Is there such a thing as And if there is, does it help or hinder the continent?

In the aftermath of a successful football World Cup, South Africa has been hosting an interesting conference here in Johannesburg to explore ways to build on that

A few delicate sparks flew early on as a rift emerged between the - anxious to talk about Africa's "can-do spirit" and ways to focus on "aspirations" - and more sceptical voices arguing that the continent shouldn't be trying to airbrush away its problems.

Santhie Botha, chief marketing officer for the telecom giant MTN, muttered that she felt "like I want to slit my wrists" listening to railing against the Fifa "mafia", his country's "apathy" and other failures.

Unsurprisingly, seems to have done , nosing ahead of Spain and Russia in a new survey of "brand strength". But tellingly, that same survey couldn't evaluate the rest of the continent due to a lack of data.

Dambisa Moyo picked up on that issue during her speech. The author of Dead Aid is still bemoaning the distorting effect of decades of foreign aid on the continent, and pointed out that only 16 countries in Africa had bothered to get credit ratings - leaving investors with "a bad smell" from countries that haven't.

Rwanda - where Ms Moyo says one "can get a business licence online in less than 30 minutes", as opposed to two years in some countries - proved to the rest of the continent that "it is possible".

Ms Moyo argued that Brand Africa was generally a negative thing, associated internationally with war, disease, corruption and poverty.

That might be unfair to more prosperous, better-run countries on the continent, and unjust given the fact that there are more poor people in both India and China that in all of Africa.

But in marketing terms, she argued, the whole of Africa was "tarred with the same brush... no country is an island".

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Apologies if you've but I thought it worth stirring into the mix in the context of with its call for billions more in aid to Africa.

The of course but is it gaining traction?

I spoke to one of the writers of the letter, in Kampala, who said he had received hundreds of messages of support from around Africa, and only a handful of queries or criticisms - mainly from the "West".

"Aid used to be such a cool thing to talk about," he told me, "but in academic and intellectual circles the argument for aid has significantly diminished."

The original letter is short, provocative, and simplistic. Andrew acknowledged as much, agreeing that there "should not be one blanket aid [or anti-aid] policy for all of Africa," and that in many places, including his own Uganda, aid has been "critical to reconstruction."

The Millenium report itself welcomes the dramatic surge in foreign investment the continent has experienced in the past few years. Another
and a

But the report also rightly laments the lack of progress on key international trade negotiations, and points out that economic growth has not yet shown signs of trickling down to improve the lives of most Africans.

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President Jacob Zuma's son, Duduzane, that he plans to donate a fortune
- earned abruptly and in somewhat unusual circumstances - to underprivileged South Africans. People who "are needy and disadvantaged like I once was".

All of the money comes from a that has outraged many here and to describe South Africa as "heading in the direction of a full-blown predator state, in which a powerful, corrupt and demagogic elite of political hyenas increasingly controls the state as a vehicle for accumulation".

Interestingly, it's not just Duduzane who has suddenly been overcome by a charitable urge. His , the Gupta family, are also reported to be giving away 70% of their profits.

The timing is interesting. President Zuma - bruised and weakened - is trying to rally support ahead of the ANC's national general council in a week's time. He has in relation to his family. But stand by for plenty more revelations and fireworks in the coming days.

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16,834 murders in one year. Hardly something to crow about - and to be fair, South Africa's police bosses were not exactly punching the air at the news conference where they unveiled the latest annual crime statistics.

The police say they are making progress in the fight against crime

The World Cup wasn't included in the latest figures - which covered the year running up to this March. But the crime figures did help explain why the tournament proved to be such a safe, successful event.

The police experts on hand to explain their graphs pointed out, not for the first time, that "about 90%" of all violent assaults in the country were between people who knew each other - mostly in the poorest communities in brawls fuelled by alcohol and drugs.

About 65% of murders fell into the same category. In other words, there are two South Africas, a nation now more sharply divided by class - let's leave race aside for once - than almost any other. Locals may ricochet between the two worlds, but foreign tourists rarely catch more than a glimpse of the poorer, more dangerous one.

But back to the drop in violent crimes - and the third biggest fall in murders since records began. How to explain it?

Sceptics will argue - not unreasonably - that the police are cooking the figures. They do have a track record. But murder numbers are harder to fake, and a trend of sorts seems to be developing. "Stabilisation" was the word on everyone's lips at the news conference - from police, analysts, and business representatives.

Many seemed quietly confident that years of investment in infrastructure and intelligence gathering - as well as a big rise in the number of police - were finally starting to pay off.

But let's not get carried away. Private security officials shake their heads in despair when they see how feeble the police still are when it comes to gathering, sharing and acting on intelligence. The force is riddled with corruption. And talk of "stabilisation" seems absurd when you stop to think about the numbers involved.

Almost 17,000 murders a year. That sounds like a war zone, not a country. Making a serious dent in those figures will require a lot more than better policing - and South Africa's entrenched poverty and unemployment could well be here for generations.

There has been some progress, and I can understand that it may be hard to maintain the appropriate level of outrage, year after year, but the police and the government could do a better job of hiding that swagger I saw on the podium.

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