Podcasts from the Edge

Former Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon has harsh words for the Independent Electoral Commission and praise for ANC leader Cyril Ramaphosa and ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula following last week’s tumultuous election results. As he heads off to join the DA’s post-election negotiating team he tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that the Constitution wasn’t designed...

Trade specialist and CEO of XA Global Trade Advisory Donald MacKay is unimpressed with the good press trade, industry and competition minister Ebrahim Patel has been getting (and giving himself) lately. At his lyrical best in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge he tells Peter Bruce that far from kick starting a re-industrialisation of SA, Patel's industry master plans have created a subsidised...

The sun will rise after the May 29 election, an ANC/EFF coalition is highly unlikely and there are real signs that some of President Cyril Ramaphosa's reforms are beginning to find traction, economist and analyst Peter Attard Montalto tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts From the Edge. A big problem on both sides of the election though is the continuing failure of industrial policy to eve...

They have an economic policy at last!! After years of chiding and goading the official opposition, in his newspaper columns, to produce an economic policy it has one at last, thanks to new policy chief Mat Cuthbert, Peter Bruce was so shocked he forgot to look at the time in this special edition of Podcasts from the Edge. It’s pro market rather than pro-business, says Cuthbert, but they’ll cut the...

In 2020 young Mbali Ntuli took on the might of the Democratic Alliance establishment and ran for the leadership of the party against John Steenhuisen. Not unexpectedly, she lost and not long afterwards branched out on her own — not, like many of the black leaders who left the DA after the last general election, to start her own party or to join another one but to start her own civil society organi...

The ANC will win the forthcoming elections, the DA will come second and the EFF third, former ANC exile intelligence leader Oyama Mabandla tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. “Even if the ANC misfires,” he says, “there is still no alternative to it. In South Africa black people vote for black parties.” Mabandla came home to a business career that has seen him make deputy C...

Peter Bruce talks about being a columnist in this latest edition of Podcasts from the Edge. He approves of the notion that while columnists are nominally journalists they are driven by their own opinions and a powerful drive to grab the attention of their audience. Citing London Times columnist Matthew Parr’s he describes writing a column for a living as “striking poses which will only convince ot...

Most of the import tariffs protecting South African companies in their home market have been in place for more than 20 years, trade expert Donald Mackay tells Peter Bruce in this episode of Podcasts from the Edge. That implies that in two decades the protected companies still have not become competitive enough to stand on their own two feet. It is given the trade instruments in the hands of trade,...

On July 1 2026, just more than 28 months from now, a vast swathe of South African industry — from manufacturers of car windscreens, beer bottles, industrial powders and even bakeries — will grind to a sudden stop unless the government rapidly intervenes to encourage the construction in Mozambique of a new liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal. Jaco Human, CEO of the Industrial Gas Users Association...

Opinion polls giving the ANC just 45% of the vote ahead of the coming general election are “good for the ANC”, veteran political writer and keen observer Sam Mkokeli tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. Just wait until the ruling party’s election machine gets going. At 45% percent (or 40% 0r 48% depending on the poll) given its performance in government the only way forward...

Largely hidden by the desperate public discourse over the future of Eskom and electricity in South Africa, Minerals and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe has been patiently building not only a case for supplanting coal with another fossil-fuel, LNG, but has now begun to lay down plans and actual tenders for an entire new cast powered infrastructure. It is all still a bit disjointed but in prospect is...

Peter Bruce talks to trade and industry expert Donald MacKay in this first edition of Podcasts from the Edge for 2024. Why are our grand master plans failing? Because we’re trying to pick winners, says Mackay, and where you make winners in a market economy, there’ll also be losers. Steelmaker Arcelor Mittal, just two years ago the centre-piece of ANC government’s promised new re-industrialisation...

As former First Rand Chair Roger Jardine launches his new political party-cum-movement, Change Starts Now, quite how this is converted into him making a run for the Presidency in next year’s general election, as his funders hope, is about as clear as mud. Tony Leon, former Democratic Alliance leader, tells Peter Bruce in this entertaining final 2023 edition of Podcasts from the Edge that while he...

Can big business really parachute its own candidate into the coming 2024 election and get him elected president? That’s the ambition, it seems, behind a bid to find a political home for Roger Jardine as revealed in the Sunday Times last Sunday. There’s up to a billion rand to back a new horse but is the circle of possible funder being too picky? “Business needs to cross its own Rubicon,” Freedom F...

Rise Mzansi is the new kid on South Africa’s heaving political block. Its founder and leader, former Bus9ness Day editor Songezo Zibi, tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that the new party is “onboarding” 20 people a week — they’re not members but people promising electoral support. If he keeps that up until an election between mid-May and mid-August next year he could col...

The Springboks won an almost impossible rugby test match on Sunday, beating Rugby World Cup hosts France in what many commentators have called the greatest game of rugby ever played. But as Peter Bruce warns in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, there is a dark side to winning that cannot safely be ignored. As tempers flare and as war and death spreads in the Middle East following the Hamas a...

A gigantic flood smashed through the village of Stanford in the Western Cape last week, leaving Podcasts from the Edge presenter Peter Bruce in awe of the silent power of water. Fortunately no-one lost their life but there were some close calls. Its hard, and probably foolish to apportion blame for the rain but, he argues, management of the Klein River and possibly others in the province needs att...

The General Intelligence Laws Amendment Bill is an attempt to rewrite what South Africa’s national interest it. On a first read it turn out to be almost exactly the government interests as well. So opposing government policy, advocating for it to fail or funding legal challenges to literally anything the government wants to do could have to running into trouble with the intelligence agencies. It i...

President Cyril Ramaphosa told the country on television on Sunday night that the recent Brics summit in Johannesburg was all about creating “a fairer and more inclusive world order”. New World Orders are the stuff the Russian and Chinese leaders dream about. To hear them slip so easily from a potential new vassals lips must be satisfying. No more work involved! But Peter Bruce argues in this edit...

The Brics summit in Johannesburg last week has left a simmering argument among South Africans in its wake. Was it a good thing or bad. Who have we become involved with and does it even matter? For some the Brics summit represented an historic turning point but most proponents of that view are too young to have witnessed a turning point before so how do they know? What is clear is that the original...

The Brics summit in Johannesburg this week is a giant talk shop. Go back to the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement in the late 1950s and you’ll find much of today’s grand talk about a New World Order lying, word for word, under decades of dust. So why should things be different now? It is hard to find anything concrete, or even interesting, in any of the rhetoric in the lead-up to the summit. T...

Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen has pulled off something of a coup by getting author, commentator and scholar William Gumede to chair his Moonshot Pact gathering of opposition party leaders in Johannesburg next week. Well done him, says Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from The Edge. People, including Bruce, were sceptical when the idea to launch a multiparty coalition-type effo...

This time, business is not trying to fix, like, everything. This time it is just trying to fix three things. It is sort of a lesson learned in trying to tie up with government, but will greater focus — a new business partnership focusses only on electricity, logistics and crime — mean better, or any, outcomes? That remains to be seen, says Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, bec...

Eskom’s Energy Availability Factor a week ago was 56.3%, a long way from where Eskom and the government keep telling it is or jolly well should be. The cold plays havoc with good intentions and the result seems to be a spiralling diesel bill. Who is paying it?, asks Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. The bigger question is this: The democratic state bounced back from a deep apa...

For the past 10 years Nicola Harris has built up, under the radar, a stunningly successful NGO helping children in poor township schools transition from mother-tongue tuition to English. Using easily adapted computer software her NGO, Click Learning maintains some 18 000 tablets in 296 schools nationwide. In this edition of Podcasts from the Edge she tells Peter Bruce she aims to expand the number...