Sharp Sharp

ActionSA president Herman Mashaba joins Rob Rose and Zukile Majova in studio for episode 28 of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on politics, money and power from the Financial Mail and Scrolla. Africa. Mashaba makes his position clear: he will not work with Helen Zille. Rob and Zuks question him on his fallout with the DA, his conditions for coalitions and what that means for the fight to govern Jo...

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are joined by Gareth van Onselen, CEO of Victory Research, for episode 27 of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on politics, money and power from the Financial Mail and Scrolla. Africa. Can we trust the polls? Gareth explains how election polling works, what separates good research from bad numbers, and why a poll is a snapshot rather than a prediction. They examine sample...

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova return for episode 26 of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on politics, money and power from the Financial Mail and Scrolla. Africa. The pressure is building on Fikile Mbalula. The ANC secretary-general is being blamed for the party’s failure to submit 181 council candidates on time. He also faces Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s vote-buying allegations and threatened legal action...

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential for episode 25 of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on politics, money and power from the Financial Mail and Scrolla. Africa. The Trump administration has announced targeted visa restrictions for foreign nationals involved in race based discrimination, repeating its claims that South Africa is persecuting Afrikaners. Rob...

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova return for episode 24 of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on politics, money and power from the Financial Mail and Scrolla. Africa. The ANC failed one of the most basic tests facing any political party: submitting all its candidates for an election. Nearly 200 ANC candidates across several municipalities could be affected after the party missed the IEC’s deadline. Rob and...

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential for episode 23 of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on politics, money and power from the Financial Mail and Scrolla. Africa. The week began with two Airlink jets flying dramatically low over Cape Town Stadium ahead of the Springboks and All Blacks Test, sparking a global safety debate. Rob and Zuks use it as the perfect...

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova pay tribute to country music icon Dolly Parton, who died this week aged 80, before turning to the ANC's election manifesto, launched this weekend in Diepsloot, one of the areas where the party has failed to deliver basic services for three decades. Rob and Zuks pick apart promises of free electricity and water that ring hollow given municipalities owe Eskom over R110 bil...

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential for episode 21 of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from the Financial Mail and Scrolla. Africa. Patrick unpacks Zambia's disputed election, where incumbent president Hakainde Hichilema was declared the winner with 60% of the vote, but mismatched turnout figures between the...

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are back for the twentieth episode of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from the Financial Mail and Scrolla. Africa. A new poll from the Social Research Foundation has the ANC at just 18% in Johannesburg, down from 30% in March, in a city that's been the party's political heart since before 1994. Rob and Zuks unpack what t...

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential for the nineteenth episode of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from Currency News and Scrolla. Africa. This week Zuks makes the case, from his own reporting and personal experience in the Eastern Cape, that the Freedom Front Plus, long seen as an exclusively white party, is qui...

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are back for the eighteenth episode of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from Currency News and Scrolla. Africa. This week covers South Africa's culture of paying for political access, ANC gala dinners selling seats next to the president for up to R2 million, set against Donald Trump's Truth Social selling millisecond trad...

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential for the seventeenth episode of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from Currency News and Scrolla. Africa. This week: the Public Investment Corporation, Africa's biggest single asset manager, is in freefall. The CEO was suspended, five directors have resigned, and two of the A...

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are back for the sixteenth episode of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from Currency News and Scrolla. Africa, and this one's a first, our debut video episode, filmed live in studio. This week Rob and Zuks start with the sorry state of South Africa's diplomatic missions abroad, from a London embassy where staff are report...

Three scandals, one theme. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova, joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential, dig into the week the Democratic Alliance turned on itself. Former DA leader Tony Leon’s lobbying firm, Resolve Communications, has allegedly sought audiences with government ministers on behalf of clients including SpaceX’s Starlink, while John Steenhuisen has gone public claiming Geordin Hill...

The June 30 deadline came and went, and South Africa held remarkably steady. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova, joining from Mount Frere in the Eastern Cape, unpack what actually happened and why the anticipated chaos never materialised. Then they go deep on who is really behind March and March. Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, the former Vuma FM broadcaster whose movement grew out of a contract dispute with an ANC...

June 30 is days away. March and March have set their deadline and all foreigners must leave South Africa. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova dig into what happens when the deadline hits, whether the security forces can hold it together, and what the Zulu king's extraordinary intervention ahead of June 30 actually means for how this plays out. They also get into Geordin Hill-Lewis removing John Steenhu...

Fifty years after the Soweto uprising, South Africa's schoolchildren are still being failed. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova mark June 16 with a retrospective that asks not what went wrong but what went right — and finds that racial harmony, against all the odds and against the global trend, is the unexpected success story of post-apartheid South Africa. Then they turn to the ledger of failure. Eig...

President Cyril Ramaphosa went on national television this week to say South Africans are not xenophobic. But the Human Sciences Research Council data tells a different story — those willing to welcome all immigrants dropped from 26% to 15% in four years, while the bloc that wants no immigrants at all grew from 30% to 42%, the highest hostility on record since 2003. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are...

A 61-year-old woman in church clothes just beat the ANC in a ward they have held since 1994. Eight votes. Maki Tshabalala, the DA's new Ward 28 councillor in Emfuleni in the Vaal Triangle, wiped the floor with a party that had 90% of that ward in 2011 and is now down to 31%. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova dig into what it means for the November local government elections, why communities always kn...

Zukile Majova and Rob Rose dig into a week of high political drama as President Cyril Ramaphosa files his affidavit arguing why the Phala Phala impeachment report should be set aside - and why the whole saga looks set to drag well past the November election. The ANC elders are breaking ranks, caretaker presidents are circling, and the succession whispers are getting louder. Then: Johannesburg. Afr...

South Africa increasingly resembles a mafia state, where it can cost as little as R2,000 to organise a hit. This week, Rob Rose and Zukile Majova dig into the case of taxi boss Joe "Ferrari" Sibanyoni, and the prosecutor who was too scared to show up in court. From cut-price hired hitmen to the brazen killing of AKA on Florida Road, they ask whether the rule of law has simply collapsed i...

The Constitutional Court ruled last week that Parliament failed in its duty when it buried the section 89 panel report on Phala Phala. An impeachment enquiry is now required. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova dig into everything you need to know about how $580,000 in cash ended up stuffed under a couch on Cyril Ramaphosa's game farm, why a Sudanese businessman left without his buffaloes, and why the...

A man was eaten by a crocodile in the Komati River this week. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova used it as the perfect metaphor for what is happening to ordinary South Africans right now. Paraffin is now R28 a litre at the regulated price and R40 by the time it reaches a village spaza shop. It is the fuel of the poorest South Africans heading into winter and nobody in government seems to care. Rob and Zu...

Xenophobia is spreading from Durban to Pretoria to Johannesburg. The March on March movement is shutting down CBDs, politicians from the ANC to ActionSA are fuelling it, and the police are taking selfies with the march leaders instead of stopping them. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova dig into why this lawlessness is possible and why the leadership vacuum in law enforcement is letting it happen. Then th...

A minor bumper bashing in Emmarentia this week ended with a man shot dead in front of his children, his wife wounded, and a country asking itself how it got here. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova dig into South Africa's road rage crisis and what the numbers actually say — 1,453 murders in a single quarter linked to road rage and provocation, SA ranked first in the world for aggressive driver behavio...