Podcasts from the Edge

How did it all go wrong? Former South African Post Office CEO Mark Barnes tells Peter Bruce is this final episode of their three-part series of his stewardship of the Post Office how he tried to take on local courier companies and had been talking to the Chinese, hoping that with mogul Jack Ma’s Alibaba they could create a South African version of Amazon. But then, out of the blue, the Government announced it was going to spin the Post Bank out of the Post Officer. Barnes had no warning. President Cyril Ramaphosa ignored his letters so he tracked him down to his office in Cape Town. The Cabinet had decided, Ramaphosa told him, and that was that. He resigned a day later. An offer later to buy the Post Office for R5bn (its net asset value when he left) with the staff owning 10% and the government 40% was completely ignored and the Post Office, stripped of its bank, has continued to decline. And the Post Bank still doesn’t have a banking license. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com

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Former South African Post Office CEO Mark Barnes tell Peter Bruce, in the second episode of their three-part Podcasts From the Edge Special, what he found when he first walked into his office at Post Office headquarters in Pretoria in January 2016. An early and curt meeting with SAPO union leaders on Day1. “And they said, and we've got 10 demands. And they reamed off these things. We demand this and we demand that. And I said, but I tell you what, if you want to come back tomorrow and you want to have an adult discussion with me, which talks about our common interest and the people that work here, I'll order sandwiches and I'll pour the tea. And then we can cut a deal. And they came back the next day and we never, ever fought again.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com

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Listen in as banker, financier, entrepreneur and former Post Office CEO Mark Barnes tells Peter Bruce the story of his appointment as CEO of the South African Post Office in 2016, its recovery from constant State bail-outs and and his sudden exit in mid-2019 when President Cyril Ramaphosa, without warning, spun out the Post Bank and, with it, the SAPOs future as a viable business. In Part 1 Barnes recalls his recruitment and his plans for turning a desperate but vital State institution around. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com

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Business Day parliamentary reporter Tara Roos tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that, while DA leader Helen Zille may secure the most votes in Johannesburg in the upcoming local government elections, she is unlikely to become mayor. Roos, whose new book Where To From Here unpacks South Africa’s political landscape in the wake of the 2024 elections, argues that Zille won’t win an outright majority and will lack the numbers needed to form a coalition. The ANC, ActionSA and the Freedom Front Plus are all expected to oppose her. Could the Patriotic Alliance step in? Unlikely, says Roos: “The DA’s only possible coalition partner is going to be the ANC.” And in Gauteng, that remains a long shot. 

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Africa’s populations are exploding. By 2050 one in 10 children born in the world will be Nigerian. Right now 29 of the world’s top national fertility rates are African. But Africans need to find new power and position in the world. Widely-respected South African business leader Phuthuma Nhleko has just published a book, The Invisible People, to make the case for a new Pan-Africanism and tells Peter Bruce in this Edition of Podcasts from the Edge that the continent really can find its voice again. "I know the African Union has got many, many challenges (but) the structures are there. The European Union has done the same … before 1945 Europeans were killing each other … but post 1945, the EU was built block by block, and I struggle to understand why that would be a farfetched vision for Africa in the next 20 years.” 

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President Cyril Ramaphosa will tell delegates at the Sixth South African Investment Conference this Tuesday morning that he plans to raise R2 trillion in news fixed investment over the next three years. Or five years, depending on which articles you read on the Presidency website. Peter Bruce argues in this Podcast from the Edge monologue that Ramaphosa deliberately sets himself soft targets ,he knows he can reach. And R2 trillion doesn’t come close the to 25% of GDP in fixed investment per year the economy needs to grow fast enough to make a real dent in unemployment. So let’s not get too excited. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com

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The government is planning something quite audacious and it isn’t a high speed train from Tshwane to Durban. Instead it wants to create, out of the often dishevelled mass of land and property it owns through the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure, a national property company worth some R155bn … and it’ll be open to, indeed it’ll depend on, private investment. DPWI minister Dean Macpherson tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that “We have to find a mechanism to do something to protect the underlying value (of the State’s assets). If you wanted to put it on a graph, you'd have an inclining maintenance backlog and a declining property value. And those two are going to intersect at a point where if a decision isn't made quickly the damage may become irreversible. And government may have anything between a R30bn and R50bn hole on it balance sheet due to these collapsing buildings." Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com

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Incoming DA leader Geordin Hill Lewis says that to grow the party it is going to need the votes of people who have never voted for it before. DA members can do the math, he says. But is he comfortable that those new voters are going to have to be black? “Let me just say, specifically to all black South Africans” he tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, “that we are deeply interested, committed and passionate about their advancement and particularly those who still live in poverty and unemployment and who still have not seen the material benefits that political and democratic freedom has brought with it. I’m perfectly comfortable saying that from every platform and intend to say it often and frequently, all around the country. Getting people out of poverty is why we are in politics.”

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Songezo Zibi, leader of Rise Mzansi and chair of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts in Parliament, tells Peter Bruce in this wide-ranging edition of Podcasts from the Edge that the ANC and US President Donald Trump might have been made for each other. "I never expected the kind of disruption that we see from Donald Trump,” he says, "and this is an ANC problem (because) the ANC doesn't perceive the world in the way that the rest of the normal world perceives the world. … they're stuck in the eighties and nineties, fighting an old Cold War and they found the perfect adversary in Donald Trump because in some ways he takes them back. He validates their failure to kind of move forward and, and understand the word for what it is.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com

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