BizNews

Jaco Zuma’s ambition to become president of South Africa was rooted in personal interests: to evade the law and assuage his dire financial circumstances - and his faction used chilling tools to get and keep him in power for as long as possible. So says political scientist Professor Mcebisi Ndletyana, the co-author of the “The Zuma Effect”, a five hundred-page work regarded as the definitive work o...

Retief Odendaal ran Nelson Mandela Bay for eight and a half months before a no-confidence vote removed him in 2023. Three weeks out from the 4 November local elections, with a new poll putting the DA and ANC almost level in the metro, the DA's mayoral candidate told Alec Hogg why his party has gone to court to make mayor Babalwa Lobishe personally liable for leasing a R25m municipal transformer to...

Freedom Front Plus leader Corné Mulder tells BizNews the government of national unity could technically run to 2029, but Parliament can dissolve itself from May next year and a new ANC president elected in a year's time could recall Cyril Ramaphosa. Mulder also reveals the DA agreed early on to leave international relations to the ANC, and says the FF+ has declared a dispute under the GNU's deadlo...

A six-year-old girl was critically injured in a school stabbing this morning allegedly by a former pupil who also planted a homemade bomb at a Ballito Mall in March. Describing the attack, Willem Ells of the Institute for Security Studies and the Security Initiative for Africa, says: “He was armed with a homemade firearm as well as a kitchen knife with a six-inches long blade. And apparently he di...

A week after an ANC committee chair floated treason and suggested stripping critics of their citizenship, Corné Mulder joked that the state had better move fast, because his tax return was due. Then he got serious. The Freedom Front Plus leader told Alec Hogg why he believed the threat had no constitutional footing, why he had moved to invoke the GNU's deadlock-breaking mechanism rather than fight...

The DA finished first in Ekurhuleni, the metro that once carried the ANC over the line in Gauteng, but by less than two percentage points, and with no party anywhere near a majority. Wayne Sussman took Chris Steyn through the first eNCA MarkData metro poll and explained why the East Rand mattered more than many people assumed. In Hermanus, the DA's Western Cape leader Tertuis Simmers told Alec Hog...

Boxer's shoppers fill their pantries in grant week and run short by mid-month. Diesel has pushed up taxi fares, rice is selling for a fifth less than a year ago, and like-for-like sales barely moved. Yet the discounter sold nearly 4% more goods, opened its 600th store and cleared its long-term bank debt. On results day, chief executive Marek Masojada told Alec Hogg what his customers are leaving o...

With 23 days to go to the local government elections, the DA's Western Cape leader Tertuis Simmers sat down with Alec Hogg in Hermanus and drew a hard line. He said he would never govern with Gayton McKenzie's Patriotic Alliance, and described what he said he had seen with his own eyes during the by-elections that cost the DA three wards in George. He spoke about the 2024 building collapse in Geor...

In this edition of the Electoral Road Show with Chris Steyn and analyst Supremo Wayne Sussman, he unpacks the polling results of the first two of six metros surveyed in the highly scientific eNCA MarkData 2026 election poll. In Ekurhuleni, the DA emerged first with 31.2% of the vote, the only party to breach that 30% mark. Second was the ANC with 29.4%. A distant third was MKP at 11.5%. The EFF ca...

Intelligence analyst Jasmine Opperman warns Chris Steyn that instability ahead of the local elections could expand beyond the state's capacity to control, with the military underfunded and crime intelligence unable to pay sources. David Shapiro and Alec Hogg return to the Dimension Data Campus saga, asking why Jason Goodall would sign away R350 million, and whether the remaining directors' defence...

In this interview with Chris Steyn, Independent Intelligence Analyst Jasmine Opperman warns that an expansion of instability in South Africa in the lead-up to the Local Government Elections would likely be beyond the government's capability to control. “We have never seen the ANC in a crisis situation, political power-wise, as now. The fact of the matter is at the political level, they’re lost. If...

One of the Campus Six has cracked. Jason Goodall, former chief executive of Dimension Data and NTT, signs a statement naming four former colleagues and agrees to pay NTT R208.6 million. In a special BizNews Edge, Alec Hogg reads the private WhatsApp Goodall sent those same colleagues on the day he settled, puts the four’s detailed reply on the record, and asks why a man would pay that much to say...

Two days after their first take on the Dimension Data campus saga, David Shapiro and Alec Hogg came back to it with the remaining four directors' rebuttal in hand. The four said Jason Goodall's statement contradicted what he had said under oath, and that NTT's Japanese owners knew about the deal all along. Shapiro and Hogg asked how that defence squares with Goodall's account, and why a man who ro...

Political commentator Solly Moeng asks why the Madlanga Commission has heard Hangwani Maumela's name but has not called him, warning that commissions keep naming minions while the powerful are quietly protected. Paul Hoffman SC of Accountability Now unpacks Jason Goodall's bombshell confession over Dimension Data's Campus deal, saying it amounts to fraud and asking whether the criminal justice sys...

One of the campus six signed a confession and agreed to pay NTT R208 million. The other four said he was under pressure and cut a deal to save himself. Paul Hoffman SC of Accountability Now told Alec Hogg what Jason Goodall's statement means in law, and why the Supreme Court of Appeal, which reserved judgment in May, may not be able to consider it at all. He set out the criminal exposure he believ...

In this interview, Chris Steyn talks to political commentator Solly Moeng about concerns relating to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s future handling of the recommendations of the Madlanga Commission. “We have to be supremely naive to think that the president doesn't go back to the party that deployed him to the top leadership of the ANC and just look at who sits around the table in the party to say, g...

Afrimat has been on the JSE for 20 years and has never had a half like this one. A strong rand and Iran-driven shipping costs battered its iron ore exports, the ferrochrome smelters that bought its anthracite went quiet, and the group swung to a headline loss. Yet a day after the trading update, Andries van Heerden was not in retreat. He told Alec Hogg how the old Lafarge quarries, mocked when Afr...

In this interview Paul Smith, the Head of Local Governance at Kagiso Trust, talks to Chris Steyn about the launch of the #StartWhereYouAre Playbook, the anchor tool of its nationwide #StartWhereYouAre active citizenship and voter education campaign leading up to the 2026 Local Government Elections. He describes how the playbook can be a tool for shifting the relationship between citizens and their...

One of the Campus Six broke ranks this week, and David Shapiro said it was only ever a matter of time. On BN Daybreak, he unpacked Jason Goodall's admission in the R1.4bn Didata property saga and asked who would carry the can now; the four executives Goodall named deny wrongdoing. Safe Citizen's Jonathan Deal argued that South Africa takes its standards from the very top. Police committee chair Ia...

For two years, the Dimension Data executives known as the Campus Six insisted they had done nothing wrong. Now one of them has signed a statement saying otherwise. Former Didata and NTT chief executive Jason Goodall admitted to being secretly on the buying side of the R1.4bn sale of The Campus in Bryanston while advising NTT on the selling side, named four former colleagues, and agreed to pay NTT...

In his latest interview with Chris Steyn, Safe Citizen Founder Jonathan Deal expresses concern that - despite the scale of revelations at the Madlanga Commission - certain people “may be protected by people at the top in terms of what they have done and how much the public will get to know about that.” He charges: “In February this year, President (Cyril) Ramaphosa said that organised crime poses...

Why is the National Sex Offenders Register still not public? Parliament's police committee chair Ian Cameron tells Chris Steyn he sees no urgency from government, and that a random sample of just ten offenders turned up 113 rape convictions, 12 murders and 67 life sentences. MOVE SA's Rali Mampeule says Johannesburg now takes seven years to approve a development, one shopping centre took 18, and w...

Two big JSE companies had received buyout offers in under a month, one of them listed for 62 years, and value investor Piet Viljoen said both deals undervalued the businesses on a ten-year view. He also expected most shareholders to take the money anyway. A day after Sanlam's R505-a-share offer for the rest of Santam, and weeks after India's Solar Industries moved on Omnia, Viljoen told Alec Hogg...

The CEO of the South African Housing and Infrastructure Fund and President of the new political party, MOVE SA, Rali Mampeule, has joined the hotly-contested race for Mayor of the City of Johannesburg. In this interview with Chris Steyn, he expresses confidence that he can duplicate in the public sector what he has achieved in the private sector. “In the last six years, through my fund, The South...

In his latest interview with Chris Steyn, Ian Cameron, the chairperson of Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Police, reveals details of his 30-day campaign to expose convicted sexual offenders. “I've decided that if they won't make the National Register for Sex Offenders public, then we'll start releasing the names and the faces of people.” Just one of those, Nkosinathi Phakathi, was convicted of...