“Over 20 years,” writer, investor and campaigner Bill Browder tells Peter Bruce in this Special Edition of Podcasts from the Edge, “Vladimir Putin and his friends have stolen a trillion dollars from Russia.” He has to distract his people or they’d lynch him and It’s why he can’t stop his invasion of Ukraine. Russia today, Browder says, is a much more totalitarian state than apartheid South Africa ever was. In this wide ranging discussion the author of Red Notice and, more recently, Freezing Order, reveals his favourite country in the world is South Africa. He has a home in Cape Town but dare not visit for fear that Putin would ask the South Africans to arrest him and hand him over. And he worries that they would.

Business for South Africa chairman Martin Kingston tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that business would prefer the current Government of National Unity to stick together despite the current crisis over the DA’s decision not to support the budget. Business is deeply involved in Operation Vulindlela, the reform process inside the Presidency but, says Kingston, they’re not going to interfere in the politics.

"It’s much better in our view to stay the course,” he says. "We are deeply concerned that ... there is going to be either a minority government or a change in the composition of the GNU that undermines certainty and predictability, that undermines confidence, and confidence levels are now very thin, or where we can’t see the reforms that are taking place then of course we’re allow to express our opinion. What we’re not going to do is apply pressure, as has been suggested, to any of the parties. That would be wholly inapprpropriate. We work with the government of the day.”.

"What the investor community require is the certainty that key policies are going to be the subject of appropriate structural reform and that where decisions are taken they are subsequently implemented."

South Africa’s steel industry is in the crosshairs once again, and once again for all the wrong reasons. Itac, the department of trade, industry and competition’s trade regulator, has been instructed by minister Parks Tau to conduct arguably the widest tariff review in its history, of imported steel. This as Arcelor Mittal SA (AMSA), the country’s only integrated steelmaker, is being rescued by the State. The review threatens widespread price increases on imports — everything steel-related is included — from iron ore to wheelbarrows. The problem, as trade expert Donald MacKay tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, is that while literally hundreds of imported products will be reviewed, Itac normally takes 27 months to complete just one review. Parks Tau wants the review done by July!

“The unintended consequences can be existential to some companies,” says MacKay, “You can’t do all of this and expect some companies to not fail. So maybe its not Mittal but there’s no way everyone comes through this… I think this review is too big. It should have been broken up.”

Joel Pollak, probably the next US ambassador to South Africa, tells Peter Bruce in this revealing edition of Podcasts from the Edge, that President Cyril Ramaphosa and his senior officials got it hopelessly wrong when they responded to US President Donald Trump’s attacks on South Africa with personal criticism of him. ”When Trump commented on South Africa,” says Pollak, “you don’t accuse him of misinformation. People in the media can do what they want but the President of South Africa and senior officials and so forth — you just don’t accuse Trump of misinformation and you don’t say he was acting irrationally. That’s exactly the wrong thing to do. You try to understand where he’s coming from, you offer compromises and you get to a better place … But it was absolutely necessary for him to behave that way.”

If he were a young Afrikaner, former Gauging Premier Mbhazima Shilowa tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, he wouldn’t take up Donald Trump’s offer of refuge in the US, expropriation act or not. For a start, “as a young Afrikaner I would be educated enough to be able to read between the lines. Trump is offering refugee status; in reality if you look at the laws and the executive orders he has passed on refugees .., it is to stop everything. He will simply have many Afrikaners hyped up… in reality they have it better here." As for Trump and South Africa, rushing to Washington makes no sense. President Cyril Ramaphosa needs to wait until his ambassador in the US, Ebrahim Rasool, tells him he can sit him down with Trump. Otherwise you risk making a fool of yourself.

Industrial strategy consultant Jake Morris enters the hot topic of industrial policy and tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that localisation has its place in industrial growth strategies and shouldn’t be automatically written off as many of its critics do. But they are only a part of many bigger and older success stories. “We have no choice but to follow a manufacturing-led growth path and yet our manufacturing is in decline, not just in terms of output but more worryingly in terms of investment and especially in terms of investment in new as opposed to replacement capacity. We have to follow this path and we’re currently going the other way.”

In the space of a week DA leader John Steenhuisen has moved from threatening legal action against the Expropriation Act signed into law by President Cyril Ramaphosa to defending the Act following US President Donald Trump’s astonishing attack on the country. Can Steenhuisen survive his flip-flop? Can the GNU survive the obvious neglect of the DA’s interests and red lines. Former DA leader tell Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that something will have to give. "I think there only so much one way traffic that any self-respecting party or organisation can endure,” he says, "and unless there’s fundamental reset of the relationship and the bona fide concerns of the DA and their constituency are taken into account I don’t think that this GNU can survive in the medium term unless there are different terms of trade within it.”

Believe it or not, veteran political editor and Business Day Editor-at-Large Natasha Marrian tells Peter Bruce in tis edition of Podcasts from the Edge, President Cyril Ramaphosa is enjoying an all-too-rare personal and political purple patch right now and has found his happy place. Pushing through first the Bela Bill and now the new Expropriation Bill has done wonders for his position inside the ANC. Critics and doomsayers notwithstanding, the fact is that Ramaphosa has largely silenced his critics in the SACP and he has been able to brush aside deputy president Paul Mashatile’s people in Gauteng and opponents in the ANC’s KwaZulu structures. Sure, he is going to have to manage the DA in the GNU coalition but that’s more than doable.

Jamie Holley, CEO of Traxion, Africa’s largest private rail and rail services company, tell Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that the company is dead keen to participate in the long-promised concessioning of rail routes owned by Transnet to the private sector and now that Transport Minister has released an almost complete Network Statement the final preparations for the award of concessions are in place. But there’s a problem. Transnet's track and systems are old and broken, in “a critical state of disrepair” according to the statement. And Transnet, which moved 226m tonnes of bulk and freight in 2017/18 managed only 152m tonnes in 2023/24. So while train operators are lining up to run on the Transnet corridors, the track and the systems on them need eye-watering investment. If the government get the money flowing it could make a huge difference to our fortunes and Holley believes it will. And it wasn’t the truck that forced rail off the rails he reminds Bruce, “it was just maintenance"

Rise Mzansi leader and SCOPA chairperson in parliament, Songezo Zibi tells Peter Bruce in this first edition of the Podcasts from the Edge of 2025 that with the turn of Donald Trump to the White House and the removal of constraints from social media platforms like X (Twitter) and, now Facebook, he fears for where South Africans might go to look for the truth. Right now, he says, the truth can be whatever you’re able to make other people believe. A young democracy like South Africa, he warns, is vulnerable. "We need to make the truth more interesting,” he says. “We need to get the truth into the ring. What does bloodlust on behalf of the truth look like?"