BizNews

Is Jacob Zuma the glue holding MK together, or has the party already outgrown him? In the first of his weekly conversations with Alec Hogg on BizNews, William Saunderson-Meyer, whose Jaundiced Eye column has run every week since 1993, said he didn't buy the common wisdom. He argued that MK had tapped a deep well of grievance against the ANC, that it stood to grow in the local elections, and that t...

Earlier in the week, the DA's Tertuis Simmers sat in the same BizNews studio and called the Patriotic Alliance a criminal enterprise dressed up as a party. Charles Cilliers, the PA co-founder and former newspaper editor who wrote Gayton McKenzie's life story, came back with his reply. He told Alec Hogg what he made of the vote-buying claims in George, why he believes the DA cannot lead a coalition...

The company once known as Net1 has just posted its first full-year profit and is telling the market to expect adjusted earnings to compound at more than 40% a year. Executive chairman Ali Mazanderani, who says he has helped build seven multibillion-dollar fintechs from Brazil to Europe, told Alec Hogg why he believes South Africa's big banks are structurally unable to win the township economy, and...

Nelson Mandela Bay has been through nine coalitions in ten years by Retief Odendaal's count, and the DA's mayoral candidate said he would not try to run a ten-party government again. Political scientist Professor Mcebisi Ndletyana, co-author of The Zuma Effect, explained why Jacob Zuma's comeback came as no surprise to him, and why he believes MK is as chaotic as the man who founded it. Lesaka exe...

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...