Podcasts from the Edge

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 hours in KwaZulu-Natal since the violence in July, how in SA you think you’re doing well in the polls until the past few days before the vote when the ANC machine gets going and why getting a new chief justice is going to be a good thing.

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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 private sector primary care for under R100 a month, per employee. Is that really possible? Nauta has signed up some 3 000 South African GPs reckons he can get your lift entrance cleaner into the same doctors rooms as the CEO with little more than a WhatsApp exchange. Back of an envelope, he reckons the potential market for his product could be 20m people. Put another way, 20m fewer people wasting time standing in queues at public hospitals…. listen in.

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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 work in South Africa. The problem is that there’s this list, and if your skill isn’t on it you can’t come and live here, no matter how good you may be at whatever it is that you do. The Critical Skills List is the produce of the Department of Higher Education, The Department of Employment and Labour, the department of trade, industry and competition, the Department of Home Affairs and the South African Qualifications Authority so you can imagine what a disaster it is. The latest draft of a new list wants you if you’re, among others, a farm manager or caravan park and camping ground manager. It wants you if you’re a policy and planning manager but not if you’re programme or project manager. Perhaps the list is merely a collection of the vacancies in the departments concerned. Mavuso Msimang has a few months to make the applications process faster. He tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the edge that its a tall ask.

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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 suddenly become. There are no women on the streets and the Taliban are everywhere, long-haired and some even wearing make-up. For her friends in Kabul it is another story. She knows a rapper who changes houses now all the time. One friend describes the arrival of the Taliban as being "like the television suddenly switching off in the middle of a show". The pair also talk about what Lamb is sure is an increasing use my militaries around the world of the rape of woman as a weapon of war. It it in fact a war crime, Lamb reminds us, but the people who negotiate the ends of wars are almost always men.

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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 primary steelmaker, Arcelor Mittal, from steel imports and one of the biggest users of scrap, Scaw Metals, from a shortage of scrap. So exports of scrap are to all intents and purposes impossible now. Two years ago they earned the country R6bn. Duferco’s response to the inevitable price increases that accompany import duties has been to opt out of the local market altogether. It means it can import duty free from wherever it wants (there’s plenty of steel around) and then export it. Sanges says it has saved his business, which one way or another feeds 1000 souls. Listen to him talk to Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. At the end he reveals he asked ITAC the department of trade, industry and competition’s trade regulator, a year ago if it would consider giving Duferco a rebate on the 10% duty it would have to pay to import and sell its product in the SA market — where it is highly rated and where it would introduce more price competition. He still has not had an answer. If he was allowed the rebate it would lower domestic prices and he could hire back the 50 people he let go last year and put 100 truck drivers back on the road. (The sound quality is not the best; apologies)

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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 in South Sudan, Haysom learns that failed states aren’t always the poorest. The poorer you are, the less there is to go wrong. The most complex your economy and your structures the more vulnerable you might be to state failure.He doesn’t say so but a nod, perhaps, to South Africa?

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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 the case. In this edition of Podcasts from the Edge former spy, diplomat and head of the South African Secret Service, Moe Shaik, tells Peter Bruce that Ramaphosa has returned to the original intent in 1994 when the intelligence services were run by a co-ordinator, Joe Nhlanhla. The idea was always that they reported to the presidency. Ramaphosa, reckons Shaik, is doing absolutely the right thing.

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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 car might be a litre of water — what comes out of the exhaust is H2O. Listen in to this edition of Podcasts from the Edge as Peter Bruce gets an education from auto industry writer and consultant Alexander Parker on with to do with his Toyota Hilux.

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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 insurrections of the past few weeks. Steenhusisen has lost his Chief Whip voice and, in the process, found his leader voice. It may be beginning to suit him. With the DAs normally accurate polling showing the ANC losing its national and metropolitan majorities, listen as he and Bruce walk through the possibilities opened up by a future of coalitions, pacts and deals.

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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 — walk away from Super Rugby to join the United Rugby Championship, where they will play team for Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Italy. Not from England! Not from France.! What on earth is going on? Will the Munster faithful fill a stadium to watch their team play the visiting Stormers? Unlikely, says Barnes. But there’s a bigger goal here perhaps. once you have the European Six Nations joined by South Africa, how long is it before New Zealand, Australia, Argentina and Japan join them for a continuous globals season of test rugby?

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