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 dream, founded on localisation, has just announced it is shutting down half its business. At the...

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 wishes Jardine well he was underwhelmed by the Change Starts Now (awful awful name) launch last...

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 Front Plus chief whip Corne Mulder tells Peter Bruce in this gripping edition of Podcasts From the...

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 collect 7% of the vote. And more if the rate of onboarding increases. Zibi says he isn’t joining the...

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 atrocities in Israel on October 7, there is a danger that Europe, and perhaps Paris in particular,...

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 attention. If reeds and other vegetation is damming flood waters near homes, and if municipalities...

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 is’t funny, says Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts From the Edge. If we are not careful, the...

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 edition of Podcasts from the Edge that expecting dictatorships, autocracies, tyrannies, monarchies...

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 five Brics which numbered three democracies, are now, following the expansion of the group to 11...

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. There’ll be no new currency to trip up the dollar. And how will the BRICS decide on new...

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 effort ahead of next year’s coalition was first announced in April. But the Gumede appointment...

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, because at some stage when you do business with the ANC, you end up in the mud with the real boss,...

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 apartheid-induced recession after 1994. Can it do it again now? Is the state strong enough? Are the...

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 of learners using her carefully-knitted support system of funders, and infrastructure providers,...

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s complaining press conference on Sunday about how much harder his job is than any other ANC head of state has Peter Bruce struggling to contain his despair. Sure, State Capture, but he was inside it. Yes, Covid was a surprise but nowhere near as big a surprise as Ramaphosa’s rough-hewed handling of it. The shock of the rioting two years ago this week was all the greater because, typically, Ramaphosa doesn’t have the right people doing the difficult jobs. So stop...

Either he doesn’t know what an economic mess we are in or he does and is hiding it really well, but President Cyril Ramaphosa has a spring in his step at the moment. It must be all the flying he has been doing in that 20 years old Boeing 737 Thabo Mbeki ordered way back. Warsaw, Kyiv and St Petersburg, back to meet the prime ministers of Denmark and the Netherlands and then back off to France for a roundtable with world leaders on the future of finance before flying back to Cape Town at the...

It is not only too early to tell whether or not President Cyril Ramaphosa’s peace mission was a success or not, there may be a case for not even trying to tell. He made a few points, his staff sadly made more than they should have and, all in all, a not very good time was had by all. Ramaphosa is surrounded by mediocre people, all chosen by his good self, so he is almost constantly badly advised, says Peter Bruce in this new episode of Podcasts From the Edge. Going to Russia and Ukraine would...

How long will the new “partnership” between the Government and business last? Once the election next May is past, will the government still need it? Right now business is helping lower load shedding and promises to get trains running and the judicial authorities working again. But these partnerships come and go depending on the pressure the State is under. In this Edition of Podcasts from the Edge, Peter Bruce doesn’t hold out much hope for a lasting affair. Ideally, the ANC will lose the...

A New Democratic Alliance policy document, possibly out this week, threatens to do the impossible and to make the party interesting as a place of progressive ideas again. Given the state the country is in, not a moment too soon. For years the official opposition has been selling “good management” as its chief political weapon but with the arrival of a new policy chief, Mat Cuthbert, come signs that the party appreciates the hunger in the electorate for something new. In this latest edition of...

South Africans are outraged to find themselves last in a prestigious survey of how well our fourth graders can read for meaning. And they should be angry. But the lack of education may not be, as so many people insist it is, the reason we cannot grow the economy. The reason we can’t grow is that we don’t have sufficient skills or we have discarded too early the people that do. In this episode of Podcasts from the Edge with Peter Bruce he revisits the argument for skills and the famous line...

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s peace mission to Russia and what the intelligence ministry in his office calls “the” Ukraine next month is headed for the rocks almost before it sets sail. It will make the Russians look good (that’s probably the intent) and the Ukranians couldn’t very well be seen saying No to a whole peace team from Africa. So a game will briefly be played. There’ll be pictures of talks and handshakes and drinks and then everyone will come home. Ramaphosa and the ANC are in it...

Apology or not from the US ambassador in SA, the governments slack handling of the visit of the Russian freighter, the Lady R, to the Simon’s Town naval base last year has become a huge deal from which there is no easy out. The American position continues to be that it strongly believes we have been selling weapons to Russia while it occupies, brutally, vast parts of Ukraine in a war that breaks everything we claim we stand against. Except we stand with Russia. Its commercial ships have...

The one lesson we can take out of the mess in the Johannesburg City Council is that leadership in local government doesn’t always come with a mayoral chain. The DA is stuck with the notion that because it's the biggest party it should also be the mayor. But that’s being in large. Leadership is something else. As the biggest party in so many vital situations the DA should understand its job as, first, to provide local government stability. It doesn’t matter who the mayor is. And it won’t...

Trade is the end of the process of dreaming, investing, creating jobs and making things other people want to buy. In South Africa though the obvious seldom has right of way. In this episode of Podcasts from the Edge, South Africa's leading trade consultant, Donald MacKay, head of XA Global Trade Advisors, explains to Peter Bruce just how much delays in making decisions about the imposition of duties or the granting of relief from them is costing local business. Out in rural Eastern Cape,...

Newly re-elected Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen went out on a very long limb at the end of the party’s Midrand congress on Sunday, putting his job on the line for an extremely short term objective — preventing the formation of a coalition government between the ANC and the EFF after the elections in May next year. That’s not a very long time away and Steenhuisen, declaring the EFF and its leader Julius Malema “political enemy number 1”, has, I think, put his political future and...