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Editorial note: This session was recorded at BNC#9 on Thursday 13 August 2026. In the days after this Q&A, the FSCA announced 20-year debarment orders against Warren Wheatley and two colleagues over share trading in Altvest Capital (Africa Bitcoin Corporation's predecessor) in September 2022, along with a combined R10 million in administrative penalties. Wheatley has resigned from the board; Staff...

Piet Viljoen doesn't read the news, doesn't watch the Fed, and thinks most of what the investment industry sells you is jargon designed to make simple things sound complicated. In his Q&A at BNC#9, he went after executive pay, looked at private equity's real return profile, explained why he avoids AI stocks entirely, and unpacked the regulations that let his fund own crash-prone stocks but cap it...

Cape Town created 418,000 jobs in five years while the rest of the country's economy shrank last quarter. Its new DA leader, Geordin Hill-Lewis, thinks that number is the party's best argument for why voters should hand it six or seven of South Africa's major metros on 4 November, from Johannesburg to Durban. He talks to Alec Hogg about the jobs data, the ANC's Gwede Mantashe getting caught on cam...

In this interview with Chris Steyn, business icon and author Sam Montsi, gives his take on revelations at the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry, as well as the worldwide impact of US President Donald Trump’s actions. On political and police capture by crime cartels, he says: “It's frightening what has happened in the leadership of some of the organs of State where people have infiltrated and tried to...

South Africa has already mined a quarter of all the gold ever pulled out of the ground, and it still has 48,000 tons sitting under the Witwatersrand. So why has annual output collapsed from 1,000 tons to 88? Dr Duarte da Silva, once South Africa's go-to tech guru and now a gold analyst, tells Alec Hogg why central banks are dumping dollars for gold, why he thinks the Witwatersrand's "death" has be...

A parliamentary watchdog says someone inside SAPS management is lying about missing vehicles, and the good cops are paying for it. A CEO who once got locked out of his own email explains how he turned around a company that had defaulted on its debt for sixteen straight months. A veteran gold fund manager weighs up whether Bitcoin can ever do what gold has done for centuries. An investor who bought...

Rhys Summerton bought into a company that had lost 99.5% of its market value and told the independent directors their pay was being halved on day one. At BNC#9, the Milkwood Capital founder and iOCO joint CEO laid out how a fund manager turned operator actually runs the acquisition game: why control of the cash flow matters more than a board seat, why he thinks South Africa's King Code has been "n...

Carl Neethling didn't set out to run Ascendis Health. A small, almost accidental shareholding tripped a JSE disclosure threshold, and not long after that he was locked out of his own email on the day he took the company over. What he found inside: nineteen accountants who, in his words, spent their days counting money that no longer existed, a head office costing more each year than the whole busi...

Old Mutual almost closed its gold fund in 2019. A ballot most clients ignore drew a 13% response, and that was enough to keep it alive. Six years later it has gone from R400 million to R4 billion, and the fund's manager, Meryl Pick, was at BNC#9 taking questions on everything that got her there. Speaking to delegates, she explained why Warren Buffett's scepticism on gold is a product of the era he...

In his latest interview with Chris Steyn, Ian Cameron, the Chairperson of Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Police, has a very direct message for Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia who - at the SAPS National Commemoration Day for fallen heroes - introduced him to the Free State MEC as “Chairperson Cameron, the one that always lambasts the police in the media” . Cameron says: “I thought to mys...

Ten years after Brett Redelinghuys was banned for trying to expose problems from the inside, World Aquatics has provisionally suspended Swimming SA's president and CEO over abuse of power allegations, vindicating his years-long fight. Elsewhere, IRR pollster Hermann Pretorius tells Chris Steyn why South African women, not men, are the ANC's real firewall against the DA. At BNC#9 in the Drakensberg...

Paul Hoffman has sued Jacob Zuma so many times that he calls him his "number one sponsor," because every case Zuma lost came with a costs order. At BNC#9, the Accountability Now advocate took questions on the private member's bill that could finally give South Africa an independent, Chapter 9 anti-corruption commission, why he thinks IDAC is structurally doomed and headed for a constitutional chal...

Afrimat's Andries van Heerden bought a struggling cement business for its quarries, not its cement, and is now watching a Chinese buyer take on the part he didn't want. In this Q&A from BNC#9, he tells Alec Hogg what actually scares him in a takeover, why Transnet's turnaround is the best he's seen in years, and why he still won't chase lithium at today's price. Along the way: fixing a Free State...

In this interview with Chris Steyn, Hermann Pretorius of the Institute for Race Relations (IRR) unpacks his polling results on South Africa’s women voters from 2021 to 2026, including the key finding that women voters are keeping the African National Congress (ANC) ahead of the Democratic Alliance (DA). “..all the years from 2021 till now, the ANC has an advantage among women voters.. if only men...

Brett Redelinghuys was banned for ten years by Swimming South Africa for trying to fix it from the inside. This week, the two men who banned him, president Alan Fritz and CEO Shaun Adriaanse, were provisionally suspended by World Aquatics itself, over allegations of abuse of power and fake documents. In between: a R111 million high-performance swimming centre in Franschhoek that has never held a s...

Three senior executives are gone from one of South Africa's flashiest bitcoin bets this week, and the company's new interim boss won't say how big the alleged share manipulation was. An intelligence analyst says the crime bosses everyone is fixated on are just middle management, answering to people we never hear about. Andrew Smith explains what it actually costs to hand your company over to outsi...

What really happens after the entrepreneurial dream comes true? Andrew Smith, co-founder of Yuppiechef, opens up about building a business from a side hustle into a retail powerhouse, taking venture capital, navigating rapid growth, surviving Covid, and ultimately selling the company. Drawing on years of handwritten journals, he shares candid lessons about ambition, control, investors, partnership...

In this edition of the NdB Sunday Show, Chris Steyn and intelligence Analyst Alwyn Swart of Fulcrum Analytics talk about the instrumentalisation of the intelligence apparatus by administrations across the ideological spectrum; as well as the links between high-ranking officials and external parties using South Africa as a proxy, not only for political influence but also to do business in the inter...

Three weeks after BNC#9 in the Drakensberg, Stafford Masie is back in the interview chair, this time as interim CEO of Africa Bitcoin Corporation. His predecessor Warren Wheatley, founder of Africa's first listed Bitcoin treasury company, along with his wife Tatum Keshwar-Wheatley and chief investment officer Akshay Karan, have just been handed 20-year debarments by the FSCA, longer than the ban h...

Sasol's oil hedges are built for a $50-a-barrel world, its Qatar plant has been switched on and off every three weeks by fighting near the Strait of Hormuz, and its biggest customer market just hit it with a 30% tariff. CEO Simon Baloyi sits down to unpack how a company this exposed to global chaos stays standing, what a $12 billion bet on Louisiana is actually returning, and why he thinks South A...

He's a businessman with eight companies and 400 staff who says politics was the last thing on his mind, until the DA picked him to take Overstrand's top job from its first black executive mayor. Clinton Lerm has already survived a Hawks investigation, a standing court interdict with a rival party leader, and a question about political stability he still calls "strange." In this conversation with A...

At BNC#9 in the Drakensberg, Public Works Minister Dean Macpherson sat down for a wide-ranging Q&A on why R100 billion in municipal infrastructure grants gets sent back to Treasury every year, unspent, and what he's doing to stop it. He unpacks the layered structure of the construction mafia, explains why his department is about to auction off nearly a thousand state properties, and lifts the lid...

In today's episode, Action Society discusses the dismissal of Major General Feroz Khan and ongoing police accountability issues. The IRR explores how a stable coalition could trigger a major turnaround for Johannesburg. We also hear about swift commission successes, while the DA lays criminal charges against South Africa's worst municipal managers. Finally, we cover Wall Street's tech-led rally am...

Municipal managers who bankrupt one town get quietly moved to run the next one. A council was shown proof that R100 million couldn't be accounted for, and chose to protect the man responsible rather than fire him. A docket has sat untouched for a year. And the official now suing DA parliamentary leader George Michalakis for speaking out is, by law, supposed to be politically neutral. Michalakis ta...

The sacking of Major General Feroz Khan - who was tipped to be the next chief of Crime Intelligence (CI) in South Africa - has come amid speculation about who the really big villains behind the Big Five might be. In her latest interview with Chris Steyn, Juanita du Preez, the national spokesperson of Action Society, says: “...there were other people pulling strings and giving funding and so on bec...