Podcasts from the Edge

South Africa had spent around R10bn developing the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor before abandoning the nuclear project when Jacob Zuma became President. He had a much bigger nuclear ambition cooked up with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Now, however, Andre Pienaar, a pioneering Afrikaner venture capitalist who lives his life between Washington and London has a surprise in store. He is invested in a US comp...

Donald MacKay, director of XA International Trade Advisers in Johannesburg is arguably the most knowledgeable outsider on the inner workings of South African Byzantine trade policy mechanisms — the matrix between the International Trade Administration Commission, the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, the National Treasury and the South African Revenue Service is pretty much impenetrab...

Sunday’s cracking headline in Rapport, “ANC falls below 40%” is the result of the ANC’s own polling, chair of the DA Federal Executive and former party leader Helen Zille reminds Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. Indeed, Rapport appears to have seen two polls, an internal ANC one warning of a “freefall” in electoral support ahead of the 2024 elections and a “confidential” poll...

The head of Investec’s corporate social investment programme, Setlogane Manchidi, sits atop a R90m-R100m budget each year to do some good out of the glare of analysts or the advertising department. And he does. He tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that at any one time he is in the lives of up to 4,000 young citizens at school, university and entering working life. His pro...

Veteran South African editor and commentator Tim du Plessis tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that he worries that ANC may not accept the result of a 2024 general election in which it loses badly. This is a party that knows only liberation struggle and state power, he says. Opposition is foreign territory. In fact, since it lost power in the Western Cape, its only real ex...

The Competition Commission is investigating three (yes, three, that’s all it takes) complaints that South Africa’s domestic airlines are overcharging since the collapse of Comair at the end of May. Air travel expert and consultant Linden Birns tell Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that he doubts the investigation will find much to complain about. The Russian invasion of Ukrain...

Change is coming to South African politics, former DA federal chairman and now Eastern Cape Provincial Chairman for ActionSA, Athol Trollip, tells Peter Bruce on this edition of Podcasts From the Edge. The thing is to get the ANC out of power. But Trollip is no starry-eyed idealist. Only coalitions can feasibly replace the ANC at the next election in 2024 and he knows probably better than anyone h...

"We need political stability to get to economic stability," Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber CEO Denise van Huyssteen tells Peter Bruce as they chart their way through Gqeberha's approaching water crisis. Yes while there is no water already in many City taps, and while some local dams have run dry due to years of drought, the fact is Gqeberha has a water management problem rather than...

People have been celebrating with some relief the publication of Songezo Zibi’s new book, Manifesto. It’s been a long time coming and with characteristic reticence, former Business Day Editor Zibi tells former Business Day Editor Peter Bruce in this episode of Podcasts from the Edge that he still isn’t quite ready to say quite what his new future will look like. Getting the book done was just the...

Whatever your politics, there’s no doubt that Eskom’s unreliable power supply, the worsening condition of its kit and the prospect of a complete Eskom system failure are the single biggest barriers to investment and growth in South Africa. Something radical has to be done and it has to be done now. And the amazing thing is it can easily be done. We just need leadership. Prof Mark Swilling, among m...

As business and the State lean towards gas as an intermediate fuel between our current dependence on coal and our future commitment to renewable energy, some voices are being raised about the futility of inventing, building and paying for an entirely new energy infrastructure to power South Africa, only for it to be abandoned for renewables by 2020. In other words, natural gas, by the time we are...

Peter Bruce asks South Africa’s busiest and arguably most influential agriculture and land advisor, Wandile Sihlobo, why the newly-released Agriculture and Agro-processing Masterplan is so complicated. Does he really expect this ANC government to be able to do any of the things the plan says the state will do? In this edition of Podcasts from the Edge Bruce and Sihlobo go back and talk about what...

Goldfield CEO Chris Griffith tells Peter Bruce in this episode of Podcasts from the Edge that he thinks South Africa is still investable but that the state makes too many plans that it doesn’t implement. On the cusp of switching on a 50MW renewable power project to help power close to 30 per cent of Goldfields' South Deep mine on the Witwatersrand, he reckons the goal would be enough renewable to...

You don't hear a lot (or enough) about South Africa's Presidential Climate Commission but it is at the very centre of what happens to us as an economy over the next two decades. Unless the highly unlikely occurs and President Cyril Ramaphosa is somehow removed from office, It is this Commission that will decide what energy we will use and who will run it. It promises to be a difficult and often na...

Ukraine Ambassador to South Africa, Liubov Abravitova tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that preparations for her President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to take a call from President Cyril Ramaphosa are afoot but, boy, is it hard getting the attention of senior figures around Ramaphosa. The sooner she gets to talk to senior members of the government and can build some context for...

Analysts and journalists who couldn’t function without Robin McGregor's fine Who Owns Whom were shocked rigid in 2008 when this giant figure was brutally stabbed to death in his new home in Tullbagh. He was 79 and full of life. A murderer was quickly found, tried and put in prison. But that wasn’t the end of the story for his daughter Elizabeth, who has just published her account of the murder and...

When the great and the good are lining up to manage South Africa’s transition from coal fired energy to renewable energy, you just know money is going to do most of the talking. Now that business has thrown its weight behind minerals and energy minister Gwede Mantashe’s favourite new fuel — gas — the transition to renewables just has to be under threat. How could it not be. Renewable energy — wind...

When Eskom plunges is into load shedding, it is often because it is diverting power to pump water uphill for its storage systems, or filling up the tanks at the 20 diesel generators it uses when its plant falls over. In other words, we may mot have enough storage. So why don’t we get more storage? Partly it is because the energy establishment is still wedded to always-on power — coal of gas or fos...

Climate change is now so severe that unless we speed up our adaptation now, by 2050 more than 250 000 people will die each year directly because of heat, undernutrition, malaria and diarrhoea. That’s according to a new report compiled by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Heat and drought will reduce the ability to work outdoors and lead to food price increases. If we d...

Gas is minerals and energy minister Gwede Mantashe’s New Big Thing. He can barely contain his irritation with the renewable energy lobby as it racks up legal successes against fossil fuel exploration offshore. We should, he told and energy symposium last week, avoid becoming “an island of angels” on the question of energy and fossil fuels. Listen though to senior UCT researcher Jesse Burton as she...

Valli Moosa, former environment minister and deputy chair of the Presidential Commission on Climate Change, tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts From The Edge that South Africa’s transition to green technology is inevitable. “Nobody wants to invest in fossil fuels,” he says. The Commission is charged with negotiating a “just transition” from our dependence on coal to a net zero carbon eco...

Former Eskom chief nuclear officer David Nicholls was once chief engineer on a nuclear submarine. So he isn’t scared of the technology. What does scare him is “renewable” energy technology. As he tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. “If you’re going to tell me renewables are the solution then why do you need a policy document/“ His point being that no-one wrote a policy doc...

President Cyril Ramaphosa's problem as he approaches ANC elections at the end of this year is which of the two horses he rides -- party unity and clean government -- does he get off? Listen as former Cosatu head and Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa colourfully educates Peter Bruce on the intricacies of the ANC's big election year. Quite frankly, Shilowa suggests, "we are better of leaving the...

Peter Bruce speaks to author and journalist Simon Mundy about his groundbreaking new book, Race For Tomorrow, gripping, real-time dispatches from the frontlines of the way climate change is reshaping our world. From Mongolia to California, Israel and Brazil to Ethiopia and Iceland, humans are suffering from events they cannot predict or control while others experiment with technologies to slow dow...

Peter Bruce talks exclusively to Wits vaccinologist and Dean of medicine Prof Shabir Madhi about our response to the Omicron Covid variant. And there is good news and bad (beyond that fact that Japan has entirely closed its borders, including to the economies that have shut SA out). First, early outbreaks with the variant appear to be relatively mild, at least among vaccinated people. Madhi reckon...