Podcasts from the Edge

Is South Africa in a growth crisis or a debt crisis? Economists and experts wildly disagree. One important figure pressing the government to provide more social relief in the face of widening poverty and hardship is former investment banker Colin Coleman. Listen in to this edition of Podcasts from the Edge as Peter Bruce and Coleman, a strong supporter of President Cyril Ramaphosa, clamber over th...

If you’re on the Left, or trying to score quick political points, then President Cyril Ramaphosa is imposing a harsh period of fiscal austerity on South Africa. If you’re in the sensible middle, he is doing nothing of the sort. South Africa is already spending more than it earns, as our constant budget deficit proves. Listen as Peter Bruceasks his favourite economist, Thabi Leoko, why she responde...

Listen in as digital entrepreneur and former FNB CEO Michael Jordan joins Peter Bruce on Podcasts From the Edge to make an impassioned plea for Icasa, the telecommunications regulator, to stand up to local cellphone giants and retrieve extra digital spectrum loaned out at the start of the Covid pandemic. Telkom and MTN have gone to court to stop Icasa taking back the emergency spectrum it lent the...

The last election Jacob Zuma fought as leader of the ANC were the local government polls on 2016. The ANC vote collapsed to just over 54% nationally and set off a series of events that eventually saw him removed from office. Listen now as razor-sharp independent elections analyst Dawie Scholtz (@DawieScholtz on Twitter) tells Peter Bruce in this latest edition of Podcasts from the Edge that 54% at...

Former DA leader Tony Leon tells Peter Bruce on this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that the DA is not selling a value proposition in these current local government elections campaign. “Rather,” he says, “its transactional.” Vote DA and we’ll fix your problems. The two cover a lot of ground — why the DA doesn’t have a central economic policy, why President Cyril Ramaphosa has only spent two hou...

If you’re running a large workforce and the guy cleaning the entrance to the lift you ride to the top floor has nothing to fall back on when he’s sick, shame on you. Not every company can put the entire workforce on Discovery or Bonitas but in the edition of Podcasts from the Edge Peter Bruce talks to Dr Reinder Nauta, an entrepreneurial medical man who reckons he can get blue collar employees pri...

Former Umkonto We Sizwe commander, SanParks boss and Home Affairs director general, Mavuso Msimang is widely recognised as one of the most level-head people to emerge from the struggle against apartheid. Now retired, he has been corralled by President Cyril Ramaphosa to do an almost impossible job and to speed up the process by which someone with a so-called “critical-skill” can come and live and...

Arguably the most storied foreign correspondent still working in newspapers, the UK Sunday Times' chief foreign correspondent, Christina Lamb, talks to Peter Bruce in this exclusive interview from Kabul. Journalist and author, Lamb knows Afghanistan intimately, having covered the story for 33 years, from back when the Soviets occupied it. She describes how eerie the country she knows so well has s...

Ludovico Sanges is MD of Duferco, one of the biggest producers of galvanised and coated steel products in South Africa. The corrugated iron on your roof could easily have been milled at its plant in Saldanha. Durferco is also easily one of the biggest employers on the West Coast. But the company and its MD have been caught sup in the government increasingly erratic attempts to protect the single p...

Peter Bruce talks to former UN Special Representative in Afghanistan, Nicholas ‘Fink’ Haysom in this edition of Podcasts From the Edge. Is it worth the effort trying to build democracy in countries that have never experienced it? Haysom reminds us that for the Taliban, the power to govern comes from above, not below, but he remains convinced the effort is worthwhile. Now UN Special Representative...

With South Africa’s intelligence services found grotesquely wanting before and during the looting and destruction of July President Cyril Ramaphosa has removed the minister of intelligence and not replaced her at all. Instead, the agencies, domestic and foreign, will report into the presidency itself. That’s led some people to argue this is Cyril Ramaphosa empowering himself. But that may not be t...

If you’re about to buy a new car do you stay with petrol or do the environmentally right thing and go electric? On the face of it not the most complex of decisions, except that the electric car you’re buying now might be obsolete sooner than you think if proponents of hydrogen fuel cell power get their way. Hydrogen is so cool and the only by-product of of a 100 km drag race in a hydrogen powered...

If there is a rational centre to South African politics, DA leader John Steenhuisen want his party to be in the middle of it. He sees our politics changing inevitably, as the ANC’s loss of coherence and unity becomes more clear. What he can’t be sure of, he tells Peter Bruce in this latest edition of Podcasts from the Edge, is what the end looks like, perhaps especially after the violence and insu...

In many ways, UK Sunday Times rugby writer Stuart Barnes tells Peter Bruce in this latest edition of his Podcasts from the Edge, “professional rugby is going to break apart the greatest rivalry in rugby history — South Africa and New Zealand.” Listen as Barnes, a former Bath, England and British & Irish Lions fly-half describes how four local franchises — the Bulls, Stormers, Sharks and Lions...

From South African Airways to Eskom’s transition from coal and private investment in South African harbours, the political noise surrounding any meaningful movement or reform in South Africa’s political economy can often drown out the facts, or at least that facts the reformers say they see. Listen in as Peter Bruce talks to Public Enterprises Minister and former Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan ab...

There’s no denying Johannesburg has seen better days. It is dirty and broken and now the centre of a Covid-19 firestorm as the Delta variant runs through South Africa’s financial hub. But don’t underestimate Johannesburg’s resilience and deep love for it that much of its population has. Listen here to Peter Bruce talking to Shawn Theunissen, freshly-appointed President of the Johannesburg Chamber...

How come China gets to be vastly corrupt and grow so strong at the same time? Why can’t we do that in South Africa? Is their corruption better than ours? Actually, it may be. Peter Bruce talks to leading economic historian Keith Breckenridge about a new book that studies the nature of corruption across 15 economies in an attempt to explain why corruption in China has not damaged growth the way it...

As Ebrahim Patel ploughs on, recasting South African industry in his own image, good news stories on the ground are hard to find and one of the minister of trade, industry and competition’s frequently used weapons in his drive to promote localisation and import substitution, the Industrial Development Corporation, reported losses of R3.8bn last year. That’s a big number and testament to the qualit...

Can South Africa compete in the global automotive industry as our economy stutters and stalls while our main car export destinations — Britain and the European Union — set their own markets tough new targets in emissions and carbon foot print (they’ll want to know how the electricity powering SA car manufacturing is generated).? There is no room here for being second best. We are either at the top...

Peter Bruce gets a history lesson from South Africa’s top economic historian, Prof Keith Breckenridge. Trying to draw parallels between South Africa now, an economic wasteland coming out of a devastating pandemic, and South Africa a hundred years ago, an economic wasteland devastated by the deprivations of war and the Spanish flu, Bruce finds some unpleasant truths — World War 1 might have been fo...

As the policy debate around localisation — or import substitution — as a formula for reindustrialising South Africa heats up, the lines are being drawn between fervent advocates of the government line on making imports as expensive as possible and trade liberals arguing for as few barriers to imports as possible, both Business Unity SA and Business Leadership SA have produced helpful research that...

If President Cyril Ramaphosa needed to take anything out of his two-day appearance at the Zondo Commission last week then he would have needed to put a lot more in than he did. Instead, he was allowed by his inquisitors to have his cake and eat it without ever being asked how even one example of grand corruption may actually have worked. Listen to former Cosatu leader and Gauteng Premier Mbhazima...

In this latest edition of Podcasts from the Edge Peter Bruce talks to Seriti Resources CEO Mike Teke about the choppy waters suddenly surrounding the agreement to take over the vast coal-mining resources of South32. Combined with the Anglo American coal business Seriti has already acquired, the South32 mines would make Mike Teke the biggest single coal-supplier to Eskom, SA’s debt-drunk power util...

Government has banned sales of alcohol for 19 weeks overall since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis in South Africa last year. New research, paid for by Distell but conducted independently of the company, says that not only has that cost the economy R2bn a week in growth and much more in excise taxes, but that it hasn’t has much effect at all on hospitals, which according to the government the...

Can South Africa’s cricket team, just ten years ago number one in the world, come back from what is clearly a major slump? Are Temba Bavuma and Dean Elgar, new captain’s of the men’s short and test forms of the game good enough to take us back to the top? Can anything be done about the administrations of the game and has the involvements of sports minister Nathi Mthetwa done more good than harm? I...